Exiting impact analysis studies on the Self Help Group-Bank Linkage Programme (SBLP) of the National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) underline that the programme has done extremely well in rural India in terms of its outreach, generating income, reducing poverty levels and empowering people both economically and socially. This paper evaluates the impact of SBLP on Self Help Group (SHG) members at the household level from a gender perspective. The analysis of the study is based on a large sample of primary data covering 4791 SHG households and 900 SHGs collected from six states in India. Furthermore, the sample covers more than 60% of SHGs that consist of members belonging to below poverty line families. Overall, the performance analysis reveals that households whose member(s) belong to all-female SHGs perform better than households whose members belong to other types of SHGs. This is mainly because female SHGs are doing extremely well in terms of recovery of loans and per capita income and savings. A chunk of female SHG members in all the six sample states reported an improvement of their social empowerment after joining the SHG programme. Furthermore, the fall of poverty is more pronounced in cases of households whose members belong to female SHGs at 26.0 percentage points between pre-SHG period and post-SHG period. The policy implication is that the formation of female SHGs needs to be encouraged and all necessary services should be provided to them.

The terms 'informal' and 'formal' have shown remarkable resilience in the four decades since their introduction into the development literature. Despite (mainly valid) charges of analytical imprecision of usage, and indeed of their misuse in policy circles, they have survived and even thrived in the discourse. It seems impossible now to do without them-the only question is how best to use the concepts that underlie them, in marshalling the facts of development they serve to characterise, in order to design policies to address the problems they highlight.This article introduces a symposium on informality which pushes forward the research frontier by presenting new facts, and a range of ways of conceptualising and modelling informality, especially in its interaction with the rest of the economy-national and international. This section discusses what informality is and why it is important. Section 2 introduces the articles in the symposium. Section 3 sets out some open questions for research that emerge from the articles in the symposium and from the literature more generally.Broadly speaking, informal activities are those that are beyond the purview of the state. This was central in the conceptualisation of the originator of the concept, Keith Hart (1973). The precise meaning of this term has remained open to controversy even today. Looking back on his work, Hart comments as follows:Following Weber, I argued that the ability to stabilise economic activity within a bureaucratic form made returns more calculable and regular for the workers as well

Novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) enters its host cell through a surface spike protein. The viral spike protein has undergone several modifications/mutations at the genomic level, through which it modulated its structure−function and passed through several variants of concern. Recent advances in high-resolution structure determination and multiscale imaging techniques, cost-effective next-generation sequencing, and development of new computational methods (including information theory, statistical methods, machine learning, and many other artificial intelligence-based techniques) have hugely contributed to the characterization of sequence, structure, function of spike proteins, and its different variants to understand viral pathogenesis, evolutions, and transmission. Laying on the foundation of the sequence−structure−function paradigm, this review summarizes not only the important findings on structure/function but also the structural dynamics of different spike components, highlighting the effects of mutations on them. As dynamic fluctuations of three-dimensional spike structure often provide important clues for functional modulation, quantifying time-dependent fluctuations of mutational events over spike structure and its genetic/amino acidic sequence helps identify alarming functional transitions having implications for enhanced fusogenicity and pathogenicity of the virus. Although these dynamic events are more difficult to capture than quantifying a static, average property, this review encompasses those challenging aspects of characterizing the evolutionary dynamics of spike sequence and structure and their implications for functions.

People's quality of life depends on the social relationships of their everyday lives and the technological choices that affect them. These features are readily described within the framework of social accounting, provided that relevant categories of households, workers, and economic activities are used. The taxonomies can be devised in ways that reveal systematic differences in the roles of different social groups (for example, those in the informal or formal economy; women or men) and the associated economic and social outcomes. The techniques of structural economics can then be used to explore their implications for the roles and outcomes of women in particular of alternative scenarios about economic development.Structural Economics, Social Accounting, Informal Economy,

In a globalised world, recessions strike formal sectors more swiftly, which when adopting cost-cutting measures retrench regular workers with higher non-negotiable wages. An economywide computable general equilibrium (CGE) model with different labour market closures has been used to study the impact of such a recession on labour productivity. Results show that labour productivity is more adversely affected when regular wages are increasingly rigid. Because of such wage rigidity, many formal workers lose jobs and tend to join the informal labour force. As a result, formal workers are transformed into informal workers, thereby transforming to low-productivity wage earners. They earn less and create lower demand compared with the earlier situation and affect overall growth. A rise in the number of informal workers exerts downward pressure on casual wages, which fall on the average. The stylised model findings show that global slowdown causes casual wages to decline, increasing wage and productivity inequalities between the formal and informal labour markets.