Levels of child malnutrition in India have fallen only slowly during the 1990s, despite significant economic growth and considerable expenditure on the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) programme, of which the major component is supplementary feeding for malnourished children. To begin to unravel this puzzle, this article assesses the programme's placement and its outcomes, using NFHS data from 1992 and 1998. The authors find that programme placement is clearly regressive across states. The states with the greatest need for the programme — the poor Northern states which account for nearly half of India's population and which suffer from high levels of child malnutrition — have the lowest programme coverage and the lowest budgetary allocations from the central government. Programme placement within states is more progressive: poorer and larger villages have a higher probability of having an ICDS centre, as do those with other development programmes or community associations. In terms of outcomes, the authors find little evidence of programme impact on child nutrition status in villages with ICDS centres.

Before the global financial crisis, Tajikistan was a major labour exporting and the world’s most remittances-dependent country. Remittances had contributed to a remarkable reduction in poverty. This paper exploits a new panel data set spanning the years 2007 to 2009 in order to investigate the effect of the financial crisis on migration and remittances patterns. Expectedly, the economic recession in the main destination country Russia affected Tajikistan through declining remittances. Owing to low diversification in pre-crisis migration patterns, the dependency on sending migrants to Russia and the migration stock there grew. In combination with increased migration risk this suggests that migrants bear part of the cost of the crisis.

Levels of child malnutrition in India fell only slowly during the 1990s, despite significant economic growth and substantial public spending on the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) program, of which the major component is supplementary feeding for malnourished children. To begin to unravel this puzzle, we assess the program's placement and its outcomes, using NFHS data from 1992 and 1998. We find that program placement is clearly regressive across states. The states with the greatest need for the program ⎯ the poor Northern states with high levels of child malnutrition and nearly half India's population ⎯ have the lowest program coverage, and the lowest budgetary allocations from the central government. Program placement within a state is more progressive: poorer and larger villages have a higher probability of having an ICDS centre, as do those with other development programs or community associations. We also find little evidence of program impact on child nutrition status in villages with ICDS centers.1.

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