<abstract> <p>Limited access to financial services is considered as a vital bottleneck for curbing poverty in Bangladesh. Digital technology such as mobile banking can contribute to accelerate people's access to finance but did not receive proper attention before COVID-19. This study intends to explore the use of mobile banking services to accelerate people's financial access in Bangladesh due to the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic by using secondary data. Mainly documentation techniques and descriptive statistical methods are used to collect and analyze the data. The study reveals that the number of registered mobile banking customers has escalated during the COVID-19 era. Mainly government policies regarding different mobile banking transactions such as cash in, cash out, person to person (P2P) transaction, salary and utility bill payments etc., have significantly contributed to rise the people's digital financial access during this pandemic. People's changing habit towards digital transactions has also contributed to increasing their financial access. The government should provide a convenient financial access platform to create a cashless society in the country.</p> </abstract>

This paper provides evidence concerning political participation (turnout, awareness, attendance at meetings, campaign involvement, voting) and its relation to local governance in a developing country, based on a rural household survey in West Bengal, India. With the exception of education and immigrant status, we find that reported participation rates varied remarkably little with socioeconomic status. Within villages, benefits disbursed by local governments displayed no relation to wealth, caste, education, gender or political affiliations. In contrast, allocation of benefits across villages by higher-level governments displayed bias against poor and low caste groups; these biases were larger in villages with more unequal landownership and lower participation rates in village meetings. Political support among voters for the dominant Left party was positively correlated with receipt of recurring benefits and help provided by local governments in times of personal need, but not long-term one-time benefits or local public goods provided.

This paper examines allocation of benefits under local government programs in West Bengal, India to isolate patterns consistent with political clientelism. Using household survey data, we find that voters respond positively to private welfare benefits but not to local public good programs, while reporting having benefited from both. Consistent with the voting patterns, shocks to electoral competition induced by exogenous redistricting of villages resulted in upper-tier governments manipulating allocations across local governments only for welfare programs. Through the lens of a hierarchical budgeting model, we argue that these results provide credible evidence of the presence of clientelism rather than programmatic politics, and how this distorts the allocation of government programs both within and across villages.

This study examines how production environment characteristics affect total factor productivity (TFP) and technical efficiency (TE) in aquaculture farms. Enhancing productivity is important for increasing resource use efficiency, especially in developing countries where improvements in the aquaculture sector can enhance food security for low‐ and middle‐income people and improve farmer livelihood. In the present study, 580 aquaculture farms from different areas of Bangladesh were sampled using stratified random sampling techniques. A Fisher quantity index and data envelopment analysis were used to analyze TFP and TE, respectively. In addition, a rank‐sum test was used to investigate how production environment characteristics affect TFP and TE. The results show that farmers could significantly reduce input while maintaining the same level of output. Furthermore, they demonstrate that the TFP and TE of a farm are significantly affected by environmental characteristics, varying with geographical variation in water availability, color, and plants; feed types; and culture systems. Dissemination of the results through training programs and extension services provided by public or private stakeholders could help extensive pond farmers in developing countries improve productivity and efficiency and thereby help provide food and improve livelihood conditions in developing countries.

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