Reverse Gender Gap in Schooling in Bangladesh: Insights from Urban and Rural Households

This paper documents a reverse gender gap in secondary schooling outcomes in Bangladesh drawing upon several rounds of nationally representative household survey data. In terms of enrolment status and years of schooling completed, boys are found to lag behind girls in the rural as well as in the urban area. Within the urban sample, the gender gap is widest in the non-metropolitan area. These findings are robust to extensive control for demand and supply-side determinants of schooling and remain unchanged even when we use a within household estimator. We consider one hypothesis, namely gender-differentiated response to a conditional cash transfer program to reconcile the findings of this reverse gender gap.     

Pakistan's informal sector

This study reviews the main features of Pakistan's informal sector. The data on the informal sector, compiled from censuses and sample surveys in one major city (Rawalpindi), suggest that both real wages and employment have grown in the informal sector. The seeming paradox of real wage growth in a labor surplus economy is explained by real wage growth in both agriculture and large‐scale manufacturing, both of which were made possible by Pakistan's growth performance during the 1960s. The differences in wages between the formal and informal sector, after adjusting for age and education, are quite small, a reflection of high labor mobility between the two sectors.     

Computer Usage and Labour Regulation in India's Retail Sector

Abstract

A recent survey of 1,948 retail stores in India conducted by the World Bank's Enterprise surveys shows that 19 per cent of all stores use computers. In the state of Kerala, the figure is as high as 40 per cent. Using this survey, we estimate the effect of computer usage on labour employment. Our findings show that this effect depends on the stringency of the underlying labour laws. Stricter labour laws magnify the labour displacing effect of computers significantly.     

Population Pressure,Horizontal Inequality and Political Violence: A Disaggregated Study of Indonesian Provinces, 1990–2003

All parts of a country are rarely equally affected by political violence. Yet statistical studies largely fail to address sub-national conflict dynamics. We address this gap studying variations in ‘routine’ and ‘episodic’ violence between Indonesian provinces from 1990 to 2003. Within a grievance framework, the article focuses on the violence potential of resource scarcity and population pressure, as well as inter-group dynamics related to polarisation and horizontal inequality. Demographic pressure and inequality seem to have little effect in isolation. However, in provinces where population growth is high, greater levels of inequality between religious groups appear to increase the violence risk.     

Tax Evasion and the Role of the State Actor(s) in Bangladesh

Little attention has been paid to tax evasion in developing countries due to a lack of data. This article addresses this lacuna by investigating the tax evasion practices and finds significant increases in tax evasion in Bangladesh. The study makes a major contribution to the literature in tax evasion, and indicates that the norms of state actor(s) (i.e. the National Board of Revenue–the sole tax authority in Bangladesh) lie in the interests of politicians and the continuation of corruption. The legitimacy of the state actors in this case means that they act as facilitators for increasing tax evasion practices. Therefore, the current system has endured remarkably robustly to date, and coercive isomorphism is indeed needed in the institutionalization process.     

Causes of the US Hostage Crisis in Iran: The Untold Account of the Communist Threat

This article provides a revisionist account of the occupation of the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, one of the most conspicuous manifestations of anti-Americanism in recent history. Drawing solely upon primary documents, largely from various Iranian communists and Islamists, it questions the conventional wisdom that the Islamists' takeover of the embassy was a grassroots reaction to American policies, particularly after President Carter admitted the ailing Shah. It also challenges the argument that the radical students stormed the embassy primarily to bring down the nationalist provisional government. Instead, I introduce a critical overlooked factor and argue that the Hostage Crisis can be better explained as a preemptive act by the Islamists to outbid the leftists' anti-American activities. I demonstrate that the United States and the Islamists were seeking to maintain normal relations during and even after the 1979 revolution. However, various communist organizations that surfaced after the revolution posed an existential threat to the new Islamist-nationalist government, quickly dominating universities, labor unions, and intellectual circles throughout the country and accusing the Islamists and their nationalist allies of collaborating with the United States. In this climate, the Islamists strategically adopted the Left's anti-imperialist language and eventually occupied the US embassy to establish their anti-American credibility.