Poverty in Bangladesh: Measurement,decomposition and intertemporal comparison

This article, using the methodology developed by Foster, Greer, and Thorbecke to measure and decompose poverty, provides estimates of the levels of poverty in rural and urban areas in Bangladesh. It investigates in the context of Bangladesh, the most powerful effect of poverty in terms of a shortfall in food for daily calorie intake by the poor. It provides intertemporal comparison of poverty and its decomposition among subgroups. It also makes comparisons between the results obtained in this study with those currently available. The results of the study show a significant improvement in poverty situations in rural areas from 1982 to 1986. The article also discusses the policy implications of its findings.     

Non-linearities in returns to participation in Grameen Bank programs

Abstract

This paper studies the benefits of participation in micro-finance programs, where benefits are measured in terms of the ability to smooth the effect of seasonal shocks that cause consumption fluctuations. It is shown that although membership in these programs is an effective instrument in combating inter-seasonal consumption differences, there is a threshold level of length of participation beyond which benefits begin to diminish. Returns from membership are modelled using an Euler equation approach. Fixed effects non-linear least squares estimation of parameters using data from 24 villages of the Grameen Bank suggests that returns to participation, as measured by the ability to smooth seasonal shocks, begin to decline after approximately two years of membership. This implies that membership alone no longer has a mitigating marginal effect on seasonal shocks to per capita consumption after four years of participation. Such patterns suggest that the ability to smooth consumption as a function of length of membership, need not accrue indefinitely in a linear fashion.     

The Alien Tort Statute: Blackstone and Criminal/Tort Law Hybridities

The importation of criminal law concepts into the area of civillaw is attracting increasing interest. The United States’Alien Tort Statute (ATS), though principally known for enablinginternational human rights suits to be filed in the domesticcourts of the United States, also imports criminal law notionsinto civil litigation. This article explores the hybrid natureof the ATS in the context of the development of internationallaw, and raises the question of whether ‘grandeur’is a principal reason for the ATS’ existence.     

Moral Rights in the Digital Age: New Possibilities for the Democratization of Culture

This paper is concerned with the impact of digital technology on the moral rights of authors. The ability to reproduce, modify and redistribute artworks through information technology has made it extremely difficult for authors to monitor the use of their works and, where problems arise, to assert their moral rights. In spite of these difficulties, however, this paper argues that moral rights are actually growing in importance because of new technologies. It is precisely when the capacity to manipulate works is greatest that concerns about artistic integrity and the preservation of cultural heritage become most pressing. This paper suggests that technological change calls for a new approach to moral rights: the focus in the future should be on cooperative efforts between authors and their public to protect culture. Technology has the effect of 'democratizing' the relationship between author and audience by allowing the audience to participate more directly in the creative process with the author. Despite the potential threat to artistic integrity, this transformation should nevertheless be embraced by authors and artists for its positive implications for cultural vitality in the longterm.     

Policy Agendas for South Korea's Broadband Convergence Network Infrastructure Project

Broadband holds a critical position in the progress of economic and social indicators by connecting consumers, businesses, and governments. South Korea has consistently been the global leader in broadband deployment since 1999. In the last 10 years, the Korean government has pursued several strategies for its broadband policy. The purpose of this article was to explore South Korea's implementation of its Broadband Convergence Network (BcN) project with special emphasis on its objectives of achieving media convergence, ubiquitous connectivity, and coordination among network stakeholders. The study uses the theoretical framework of institutionalism to identify factors that help explain how the policy agenda for the BcN was implemented. The BcN is Korea's most recent high‐speed Internet infrastructure project and is envisioned as a conduit through which broadband services, applications, and content will flow to reflect a robust high‐speed Internet infrastructure. This broadband infrastructure project began in 2004 as a consortium that includes the government and private sector firms. This infrastructure was launched as a three‐phase project. The first phase of the BcN extended from 2004 through 2005, the second phase extended from 2006 through 2007, and the third phase extended from 2008 through 2010.     

An Indian story on carbon emission,energy consumption,trade openness,and financial development

This paper empirically studies the impact of energy consumption, financial development, and trade openness on India's carbon emission for 1971 to 2014 and validates the environmental Kuznets curve hypothesis for India. The Autoregressive Distributed‐lagged model (ARDL) bound test is used to test the existence of cointegration among the key variables. The results exhibit a U‐shaped relationship between carbon emission and energy consumption in the long run. Through this study, we find out the maximum threshold value of energy consumption per capita to 757 kg of oil equivalent, which is above the current consumptions levels—indicating a rise in carbon emission shortly. Further, the long‐run results show that a 1% increase in trade openness will decrease carbon emission by 0.11%, which is a display of technological effect over scale effect and composition effect. Financial development does not exhibit a significant relation to carbon emission. The results are in line with the literature on climate change in emerging countries. This empirical work gives some insight into policy issues that have to be looked into further.     

Financial inclusion,banking the unbanked: Concepts,issues, and policies for India

We use the data from World Bank Global Findex for the year 2011 , 2014 and 2017 to understand financial inclusion in India, at the same time we compare India's situation with the other BRICS nations. We fathom the fact that financial inclusion is definitely the way forward for an economy to achieve inclusive growth. Financial inclusion is just not an economic concept rather it is termed as a socio‐economic concept, as it helps people have a security for future life through access to education and health facility, a secure future and better standard of living. In India we see the barriers to inclusion are predominately caused by voluntary exclusion, and though policies will help to reach out but the ultimate goal of financial inclusion could be only achieved through improving awareness and financial literacy in India. Thus financial inclusion should be backed by financial literacy to get the best results.     

Pliant and Compliant: Colonial Indian Art and Postcolonial Cinema

Walter Benjamin's signature hypothesis of 'dialectics at a standstill' rehearsed in his 'Theoretics of Knowledge, Theories of Progress' permits visual images to be elasticized from a then condition in history and culture to a now site of contemporary reality in order to be critiqued in their entirety. Putting this hypothesis to the test, Rajan juxtaposes two late eighteenth-century works of art by East India Company Painters with two late twentieth-century films by Mira Nair and Deepa Mehta to trace trajectories of orientalized desire and unspeakable pleasure as relayed along a woman's body. In all four instances, the central image of woman continues to be an insistent signifier that embodies social values, cultural prejudices and artistic ideals, which, in turn, provide critical, valuable insights into constructions of gendered, aestheticized and sexualized femininity. The image of woman , thus dialectically read, reveals that it is not simply the male colonizer who is always already the oppressor, as is the common assumption, but rather that woman as an abject signifier can be merchandised even by enlightened, postcolonial women. Such a ravaged image of woman remains, therefore, a fixed trope in the hands of male and female artists, traversing coloniality and postcoloniality, and crossing over from art to cinema, with little chance of emancipation. One strategy to grant woman full agency requires the contemporary, feminist viewer to take responsibility and couple aesthetics with an ethical tenor. According to Benjamin, ethics thus defined is a matter of personalized aesthetics. This means that each one of us is entrusted with the responsibility of demanding accountability in the creation of visual culture such that images that demean femininity, disembody female subjectivity, objectify female pleasure and delegitimize desire be judged inappropriate, as incorrect or unappealing visual images and as unavailable for appropriation.