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This paper tries to offer a comprehensive measure for empowerment where empowerment is viewed as capability enhancement. A critique of the idea of considering autonomy as the sole indicator of empowerment has been presented, and an attempt has been made to supplement autonomy with other dimensions like health and knowledge in shaping empowerment. This paper tries to offer a quantitative measure for empowerment constituted of capability scores on all these three dimensions. A particular form of structural equation modeling called Multiple Indicator Multiple Cause model has been used to estimate capabilities, and the empowerment index (EI) has been constructed as a weighted average of the scores of Health, Knowledge, and Autonomy. The method has been applied on some primary survey data collected from adult women of two districts of West Bengal, and the results demonstrated the fact that high autonomy along with high attainment in other capabilities definitely improves the EI, but considerable empowerment attainment may be observed even with low autonomy but with higher achievements in other capabilities and vice versa.

This paper puts forward the application of Theil's second measure in order to investigate international per capita water availability disparities. This index permits disparities to be disintegrated within and between groups of countries in a reliable way. An analysis of 188 countries for the period of 1990-2012 demonstrated three observations: first, decline in per capita water availability disparities is characterized by both within-group and betweengroup inequality elements; second, between-group inequalities are at present the key contributors of the entire inequality scenario; and third, a comprehensive investigation on within-group inequalities divulges the noteworthy explanatory role played by Middle East countries toward increase in inequalities and countries pertaining to North America and Asia and Oceania toward decline in inequalities.

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