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Iran-Afghanistan Relations: A dangerous balancing act
No full textHow far is Tehran willing and able to play either a constructive or destructive role in the stabilisation and reconciliation process in Afghanistan
Burma / Myanmar Bibliographic Project: Articles in periodicals, Festschriften or other multi-author publications
No full textIn 1974, the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg (SAI) was able to buy the Burma Collection of Professor Frank N. Trager, New York. Many of the items in this collection are listed in his own bibliography on Burma. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft sponsored the acquisition of this collection on condition that it be catalogued in order to make it available to the scientific community and for foreign loan. Over the years the catalogue of the Trager collection grew into a complete bibliography on Burma/Myanmar
The Christians of Pakistan: A historical Overview and an Assessment of their current Position
No full textThe paper deals with the history and current developments of Christianity as well as the current situation of the Christians in Pakistan
The Spatial Development of India
No full textIn the last two decades the Indian economy has been growing unabatedly, with memories of the Hindu rate of growth rapidly fading. But this unprecedented growth has also resulted in widening spatial disparities. While cities such as Hyderabad have emerged as major clusters of high development, many rural areas have been left behind with little development benefits accruing to them. India's mega-cities have continued to grow. This situation raises a number of important policy questions. Should India aim to spread development more equally across space? Are India's cities becoming too large? Should the government invest in infrastructure in the large cities to reduce congestion or in medium-sized locations to facilitate the emergence of new economic clusters? What are the tradeoffs between agglomeration economies and congestion costs? How different is India s experience compared with China and USA
Making Up People: The Effect of Identity on Preferences and Performance in a Modernizing Society
No full textIt is typically assumed that being hard-working or clever is a trait of the person, in the sense that it is always there, in a fixed manner. However, in an experiment with almost 600 boys in India, cues to one's place in the traditional caste order turn out to influence the expression of these traits. The experiment assigned students to different treatments with respect to the salience of caste and had them solve mazes under incentives. It turned out that making caste salient can reduce output by about 25 percent, which is equivalent to twice the effect on output of being one year younger. The channels through which this occurs differ by caste status. For the upper castes, the decline in performance under piece rates can only be explained by a shift in preferences regarding the provision of effort. When the ascriptive caste order is cued, upper-caste individuals may think, "I don't need to excel." In contrast, for the lower castes, which were traditionally "untouchables," publicly revealing caste identity impairs the ability to learn and may lead individuals to think, "I can't (or don't dare to) excel." This paper provides a measure of the impact that ascriptive, hierarchized identities can have on preferences and performance after a society -- in its public pronouncements and legislation -- has adopted norms of equality in a formal sense. The findings are important because they suggest that when contexts cue identities founded on the superseded rules of a hierarchical institution, the effects on human capital formation and development can be first-order. Contexts that make traditional identities salient are an underemphasized source of impediments to institutional change
Toward an Innovation Policy for Pakistan
No full textThis policy paper aims to assist policy makers, as they develop the Pakistan Innovation Policy, with an independent assessment of where Pakistan stands now, an international perspective on policy priorities, a review of policy options and some implementation and institutional perspectives. The paper begins with a review of the key lessons of international experience together with a study of key international benchmarks. It takes a look at the ecosystem approach which maps the effectiveness of all the various players in innovation and also reviews progress against 12 triple helix critical success factors. The possible policy options are then enumerated and evaluated for relevance. Finally, some perspectives are provided on how to move the innovation agenda forward
Understanding the Business Environment in South Asia
No full textThis paper examines the relationship between firm performance and growth and the business environment in the countries of the South Asia Region -- Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka -- using firm-level data from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys. The analysis uses an approach in which the responses of firms to questions about the quality of the business environment can be interpreted as shadow prices: estimations by managers of the cost imposed on the firm by inadequacies of an aspect of the business environment -- public inputs such as regulation, physical infrastructure, availability of skilled labor, macroeconomic conditions, rule of law, etc. -- for the growth of their firm. The analysis finds, in line with this approach, that higher-productivity and better-performing firms in the region, and in particular firms that recently expanded their employment and created jobs, report significantly higher constraints in terms of the supply of public inputs. The authors discuss the differences across countries in the importance of various industries, how they relate to various firm characteristics, how informal and rural sector firms are constrained by public inputs, and how firms in the South Asia Region countries compare with firms in the rest of the world
Geography and Exporting Behavior: Evidence from India
No full textThis paper examines locational factors that increase the odds of a firm's entry into export markets and affect the intensity of its participation. It differentiates between two different sources of spillovers: clustering of general economic activity and that of export-oriented activity. It also focuses on the effect of the business environment and that of institutions at the spatial unit of districts in India. The study disentangles the within-industry effect from the within-firm effect. A simple logit specification is used to model the probability of entry. The analysis is based on a panel of manufacturing firms in India, which allows for the introduction of firm-specific controls and a battery of fixed effects. The findings suggest that exporter-specific clustering, general economic agglomeration, and institutional factors affect firms' export behavior
Who Benefits Most from Rural Electrification? Evidence in India
No full textThis paper applies an econometric analysis to estimate the average and distribution benefits of rural electrification using rich household survey data from India. The results support that rural electrification helps to reduce time allocated to fuelwood collection by household members and increases time allocated to studying by boys and girls. Rural electrification also increases the labor supply of men and women, schooling of boys and girls, and household per capita income and expenditure. Electrification also helps reduce poverty. But the larger share of benefits accrues to wealthier rural households, with poorer ones having more limited use of electricity. The analysis also shows that restricted supply of electricity, due to frequent power outages, negatively affects both household electricity connection and its consumption, thereby reducing the expected benefits of rural electrification
Punjab Province, Pakistan Student Assessment: SABER Country Report 2012
No full textIn 2012, Punjab Province, Pakistan joined the Russia Education Aid for Development (READ) trust fund program, the goal of which is to help countries improve their capacity to design, carry out, analyze, and use assessments for improved student learning. As part of the READ trust fund program, and in order to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of its existing assessment system, The province participated in a formal exercise to benchmark its student assessment system under The World Bank's Systems Approach for Better Education Results (SABER) program. SABER is an evidence-based program to help countries systematically examine and strengthen the performance of different aspects of their education systems. SABER-student assessment is a component of the SABER program that focuses specifically on benchmarking student assessment policies and systems. The goal of SABER-student assessment is to promote stronger assessment systems that contribute to improved education quality and learning for all. The importance of assessment is linked to its role in: providing information on levels of student learning and achievement in the system; monitoring trends in education quality over time; supporting educators and students with real-time information to improve teaching and learning; and holding stakeholders accountable for results. The SABER-student assessment framework is built on the available evidence base for what an effective assessment system looks like. The framework provides guidance on how countries can build more effective student assessment systems. The framework is structured around two main dimensions of assessment systems: the types/purposes of assessment activities and the quality of those activities. Assessment systems tend to be comprised of three main types of assessment activities, each of which serves a different purpose and addresses different information needs. These three main types are: classroom assessment, examinations, and large scale, system level assessments. This report focuses specifically on policies in the area of student assessment