This paper examines the determinants of private saving in the process of economic development, in the light of the Indian experience during the period 1954-1998. The methodology involves the estimation of a saving rate function derived within the life cycle framework while paying attention to the structural characteristics of a developing economy. It is found that the saving rate rises with both the level and the rate of growth of disposable income and the magnitude of the impact of the former is smaller than that of the latter. The real interest rate on bank deposits has a significant positive impact, but the magnitude of the impact is modest. Public saving seems to crowd out private saving, but less than proportionately, suggesting that public policy can influence the national saving rate. Among the other variables considered, the spread of banking facilities in the economy and the rate of inflation seem to have a positive impact and changes in the external terms of trade and migrant remittances a negative impact on private saving.

This paper analyzes the determinants of rural poverty in India, contrasting the situation of scheduled caste (SC) and scheduled tribe (ST) households with the non-scheduled population. The incidence of poverty in SC and ST households is much higher than among non-scheduled households. By combining regression estimates for the ratio of per capita expenditure to the poverty line and an Oaxaca-type decomposition analysis, we study how these differences in the incidence of poverty arise. We find that for SC households, differences in characteristics explain the gaps in poverty incidence more than differences in transformed regression coefficients. In contrast, for ST households, differences in the transformed regression coefficients play the more important role.

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Abstract. There is increasing realization that state capacity is a fundamental ingredient for effective governance, and is a crucial element of long-run economic development. This paper offers an overview of the strengths and limitations in current empirical research on the measurement of state capacity. The paper also surveys the fast emerging literature on the determinants and effects of state capacity. We argue that existing measures on governance quality used in cross-national research can be usefully exploited to capture different aspects of state capacity, and show that post the end of the Cold War, developing economies have experienced improvements in legal, administrative and bureaucratic capacity, but the gap with advanced economies is still wide. Future research should address the short temporal coverage of available measures of state capacity, as well as providing a systematic quantitative assessment of the determinants of capacity and of its effects on development outcomes, such as health and education, which have not received sufficient scrutiny.

We examine the Kuznets postulate that structural transformation leads to higher inequality using comparable panel data for a large number of developing and developed countries for 1960-2012. Countries are in different stages of structural transformation, being either structurally underdeveloped, structurally developing or structurally developed. In contrast to the Kuznets hypothesis, we find that the movement of workers to manufacturing unambiguously decreases income inequality, irrespective of the stage of structural transformation that a particular country is in. We also find that the movement of workers into services has a positive impact on inequality across our set of countries at an early stage of structural transformation and a negative effect at a later stage, suggesting that the Kuznets postulate may apply more for services-driven structural transformation than manufacturing-driven structural transformation. Overall, our findings confirm the positive development effects that structural transformation relating to manufacturing may have in developing countries, not merely through higher growth but by reducing inequality as well. However, for many low-income countries, where the realistic possibility of structural transformation may be the movement of workers from agriculture to services, our findings suggest that inequality may increase with further structural transformation.