This article examines the determinants of fertility, child mortality, and female disadvantage in child survival in India, using a district-level panel data set linking 1981 and 1991 censuses. The results question the dominant view that variables directly related to women's agency (specifically, the female literacy rate and the female labor force participation rate) have played the crucial roles here. Instead, variables reflecting the general level of development and modernization are shown to have had the greatest effect in reducing fertility and child mortality during the period of the study. Both economic development and women's agency are seen to have had significant effects in reducing the female disadvantage in child survival. The results suggest, however, that with continued economic development, the two women's agency variables lose their significance in influencing this disadvantage. The policy implications of these findings are considered. Copyright 2006 The Population Council, Inc..

"This paper provides a review of the theoretical literature on rural-urban migration in contemporary LDCs [less developed countries]. The paper begins with a brief discussion of the Lewis model before going on to discuss the Todaro and the Harris-Todaro models and the large literature which these models have spawned. The question of job search in the context of migration and the role of family members in migration decisions are considered next. The paper then takes a closer look at the Informal sector and also sets out alternative migration functions to the ones usually employed in the literature."

This paper examines the role of caste, tribe, and religion in determining energy inequality in India. We provide evidence by using the National Sample Survey Organisation data from the 68th round (2011-12) of 87,753 households. We estimate the inequalities in access to Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) and electricity usage by the households belonging to the three major disadvantaged groups in India, viz., the scheduled castes, the scheduled tribes, and the Muslims. The results of our empirical analysis suggest that, after controlling for the determinants which impinge on the households' microeconomic demand and regional supply characteristics, the households belonging to the scheduled tribe and scheduled caste communities do have significantly poorer access to LPG and electricity usage as compared to the upper caste households. The decomposition analysis of average differences in the predicted outcomes shows that it is the scheduled caste and scheduled tribe households who would appear to face most discrimination. The Muslim households too face significant inequality in accessing LPG. Policy implications of the findings are considered.

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This paper addresses -with the help of numerical simulation -some of the issues relating to income distribution in the context of development of an economy with an informal sector and migration of both low and high skilled workers from the rural to the urban area. A major aim has been to see under what conditions we do or do not get an inverted U-shaped curve of income distribution. The paper finds that the tendency always is for the Gini coefficient to rise and then decline. However, once it starts declining, it need not continuously decline; it may rise, then decline, then rise again and indeed rise above the previous peak before starting to decline again and may well end at the end of the simulation at a higher value than at the start. Any case for the redistribution of income is seen to be much stronger at later stages of development that at earlier stages, even though at later stages, Gini coefficient may be lower than at earlier stages. The policy implications of the findings are briefly considered.