Dr. Ambedkar’s Contribution to Economic Reform

Public Health Finance

This paper explores actionable strategies to achieve inclusive growth in India as it transitions toward becoming a developed nation. By analyzing economic theories, policy frameworks and empirical data, the study identifies critical gaps in India’s current approach to addressing inequality and proposes targeted interventions to ensure equitable economic development. It emphasizes the need for transformative policies in education, healthcare, infrastructure and financial inclusion, aided by technology and participatory governance. The study discusses the imbalanced nature of India’s growth, comparing it with the more inclusive growth of other emerging economies like China, Brazil and Indonesia. It examines the structural barriers to equitable growth, including urban-rural disparities, gender inequality, caste-based discrimination and the challenges faced by the informal sector which employs a significant percentage of India’s workforce. This paper analyses global best practices to offer policy recommendations. These recommendations include vocational training, building social safety nets and leveraging digital technologies to reduce gaps in access as well as in opportunity. Relying on case studies from both India and abroad, this paper emphasises the importance of public-private-NGO partnerships in fostering inclusive growth, It concludes that inclusive growth is not achieved just through wealth redistribution. India needs to reduce or eradicate systemic issues through sustained political will, innovative financing and community-driven solutions. By addressing structural inequities, India can unlock its full economic potential and redefine what it means to be a developed nation in the 21st century.

This paper explores the indirect relationship between Chinese aid and public expenditure in human development sectors in African nations. This is achieved through analyzing the change of public expenditure in the education and health sectors of the top two African recipients of Chinese ODA—Ethiopia and Cote d’Ivoire, with an extended analysis to an additional five African nations. Through a comparative analysis, this paper investigates if a direct connection between public expenditure in the health and education and Chinese aid can be established, and explores its implications in the larger international aid system. The study discovers an overall pattern of increased public health and education expenditure in African nations after the influx of Chinese ODA; however, a connection between the two cannot be established. The study discovered that public health and education expenditure increased by larger percentages in nations with previously established ambitions and goals of poverty reduction and human development, indicating that the surge of Chinese aid may have contributed to increased fiscal autonomy in the African aid recipients, providing more freedom to increase expenditure in already prioritized sectors. The result of this analysis, hence, contravenes the narrative of Chinese aid hindering African human development.

In recent times not only have traditional areas of public economics such as taxation, public expenditure, public sector pricing, benefit cost analysis, and fiscal federalism thrown up new challenges but entirely new areas of research and inquiry have emerged. This second edition builds upon the strengths of the previous edition and incorporates results of research on new areas such as global public goods, environmental taxation and carbon permits trading and the complexities of corporate taxation in a rapidly globalizing world. The book is a modern and comprehensive exposition of public economics. It includes extended discussions on topics of particular interest to developing countries and covers subjects such as: taxation in an economy with a large informal sector the challenges of using VAT the use of randomized evaluation theory of public expenditure and public goods including global public goods incentive effects of taxation and tax incidence This book discusses the major traditional areas of taxation and public expenditure as well as emerging issues relating to public economics in the globalized world economy. It will be useful as a reference and update on the modern literature on public economics for professional economists and policymakers, as well as providing invaluable information as a basic text for undergraduate and graduate students in public economics.

Public expenditure on health care and the incidence of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in China from 2008 to 2018

During the last 30 years a large and wide-ranging literature has emerged on the economic analysis of politics or, as it is more commonly called, public choice. Mainstream public economics has to some extent taken heed of some of this development. Most public finance books now have an obligatory chapter on public choice. Public choice, however, has not subsumed the entire field of public economics; the lessons tend to be kept to one side. Yet at the very least the central propositions now receive some recognition. This has not been the case with the theoretical developments which have occurred in behavioral economics. One would search the public economics textbooks in vain for any reference to Simon’s Nobel Prize-winning work on behavioral economics. It is not altogether clear that neoclassical economists should be solely blamed for ignoring these developments. Little has been written on the intersection between behavioral economics and public economics. Aside from a few papers on the intersection between welfare economics and behavioral economics (Rosser, 1977; Steedman and Krause, 1986) and an appendix in Little’s (1957) critical book on welfare economics — in which he analyzes the Edgeworth box from the kind of standpoint that has found favor among behavioral economists — there is very little on which to work.

As India progresses towards its ambitious goal of becoming a developed nation by 2047, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting has emerged as a critical enabler of sustainable and inclusive growth. This study examines the strategic contribution of ESG reporting in aligning corporate practices with the developmental pillars of Viksit Bharat 2047. Using a descriptive and analytical approach based on secondary data, the research evaluates BRSR and CSR disclosures of Indian listed companies, government reports, and national indices. The findings reveal that ESG-oriented initiatives significantly contribute to areas such as education, healthcare, gender equity, renewable energy, and rural development, thereby enhancing corporate reputation, investor confidence, and long-term value creation. However, the study also identifies challenges including the voluntary nature of ESG reporting, lack of standardization, risks of greenwashing, and low participation of MSMEs. The paper concludes that ESG reporting, if strengthened through standardized frameworks, mandatory compliance, and robust monitoring mechanisms, can become a transformative tool to achieve a socially just, environmentally responsible, and economically strong India by 2047. Research gap and contribution: While several studies have explored ESG reporting, very few have specifically linked it with India’s long‑term developmental vision of Viksit Bharat 2047. Existing literature mostly focuses on ESG impact on firm value, investor perception or CSR trends, but does not examine how ESG disclosure can become a strategic driver for national goals. This paper attempts to bridge this gap by: • Mapping ESG initiatives of Indian companies with the five pillars of Viksit Bharat 2047. • Highlighting challenges such as greenwashing, voluntary participation of SMEs, and lack of uniform standards. • Suggesting a policy-level roadmap to make ESG a tool for inclusive and sustainable growth.

The subject of needs is the centre of attention of Italian public finance scholars. The financial activity of the State is justified by the existence of collective or public needs to whose satisfaction collective or public goods and services are linked. Italian economists have studied the problems of public goods in a general context, taking into consideration concurrently both taxes and public expenditure and giving prominence to positive analysis. Italian theorists have always been far removed from the classical approach, which denies the productivity of public services, and have deemed it necessary to take into account the political context in which fiscal structures operate. Their models include the State as a major factor. Herein lies the main value of the Italian tradition in public finance, which puts in coercion into the market mechanism via State intervention.

Reviewed by: Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic by Ariel Ron Kyle G. Volk (bio) Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic. By Ariel Ron. (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2020. Pp. 308. Cloth, $59.95.) Why did Republicans create the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and land-grant college system in the middle of the Civil War? Historian Ariel Ron's deeply researched and densely packed monograph provides comprehensive answers by exhuming the political and economic world of northern farmers in the decades before the Civil War. In the process, he complements the bevy of recent scholarship on slavery and capitalism by providing powerful new ways to think about northern political economy in the age of sectional crisis. Turning our attention from northern industrialization, Ron shows how the formidable forces of scientific agricultural reform championed policies that threatened slaveholders and fueled the Republican Party and its construction of the national developmental state. Written for scholars and puzzlingly priced not to sell, Grassroots Leviathan should nevertheless be required reading for historians of agriculture, nineteenth-century politics, capitalism, and statecraft, as well as the coming of the Civil War. Ron's taproot is that, long before the Civil War, forward-looking northern farmers used political means to secure government aid for agricultural improvement. Part 1 of his study lays this foundation and implicitly joins political historians in exploring the plurality of political practices in the nineteenth century. After describing elite farmers' stillborn attempts at top-down reform in the early days of the republic, Ron reveals how agricultural reform followed the familiar deference-to-democracy trajectory, blossoming into a more popular affair after the 1820s. Essential to its democratization was the explosion of the agricultural press, local and state agricultural societies, and agricultural fairs, which attracted thousands. By the 1840s and 1850s, this "state-building social movement" sought [End Page 115] state-government support through annual appropriations for societies, the creation of boards of agriculture, and printing subventions for and subsidized circulation of agricultural reports (61). As Ron demonstrates, agricultural reform was not another aspect of Whig developmentalism; it transcended the partisan divide, as northern farmers deployed a mode of advocacy that worked outside the party system and appeared nationalistic and majoritarian, yet apolitical. Subsequent sections in the book add essential layers to this compelling political portrait, guiding readers to comprehend farmers' embrace of and influence on the Republican Party and its developmental policies. Turning to ideas, part 2 unpacks the nationalist (yet northern) vision of political economy that promoted domestic exchange and reconciled the interests of farmers and manufacturers. This occurred first through the "home market thesis" (87), which rationalized tariff protections for industry by emphasizing their ability to grow urban markets for farm goods. Confluences between agricultural and industrial interests continued in the emergent "Republican developmental synthesis" (97), which Ron unearths by situating the influential economic thought of Henry Carey in the ascendant concerns of scientific agriculture, especially fertilizers. Faith in industrial technology's ability to advance agriculture and emancipate farmers from drudgery boosted the significance of science and education, informing calls for the USDA and land-grant colleges. Alongside well-known commitments to free labor, it also became a cornerstone of the Republican antislavery political economy. Highlighting the causal power of scientific agriculture, part 3 details parallel developments in the mid-nineteenth century that more explicitly drove demands for developmental state building. First, the commercialization of fertilizers and other agricultural technologies birthed a crisis of expertise. How were farmers to know which newfangled products actually worked? To businessmen and others, authoritative government bodies—first at the state level and eventually the federal USDA—needed to conduct research, regulate the market, and stamp out frauds. Second, scientific agriculture brought demands for specialized educational institutions. When private institutions and state governments proved unable to provide reliable resources, reformers looked to the federal government to fund state agricultural colleges. In sum, Ron exposes a broad-based and scientifically driven northern agricultural capitalism that craved not laissez-faire but state partnership and intervention. Making farmers' project a reality required the obstructionist, export-oriented slaveholding South to step aside. Part...

Austerity: The New Normal - A Renewed Washington Consensus 2010-24

Climate change debates have helped frame vegetarianism as a conscientious choice across the globe and also projected India as a shining example of vegetarianism. Before this Euro-American vegetarians had long romanticized India as an ideal vegetarian society, and have assumed it to be based on progressive ethics. This article challenges such assumptions and complicates the Euro-American association of vegetarian dietary preferences with the ethical concerns of virtue, animal welfare, and sustainability. We contend that neither is India a vegetarian society nor is mainstream vegetarianism in contemporary India based on progressive ethics. We use in-depth interviews and extensive news reports to show that vegetarianism in India is a majoritarian political ideology associated with caste-based discrimination and violence, making it inimical to notions of non-violence, equality, and freedom. Majoritarian vegetarianism in contemporary India aims to conserve the caste system and its attendant inequalities. This study traces the ideological and repressive state apparatuses through which the fantasy and norms of vegetarianism are propped up in contemporary India. We argue that an uncritical acceptance of mainstream vegetarianism in contemporary India as a benevolent cultural preference whitewashes its discriminatory and violent nature, helps the caste system persist, and can undermine the well-being and nutritional outcomes of a majority of the Indian population especially those from non-elite social groups that have historically been omnivorous.

Book Reviews 125© Max Weber Studies 2019. or a party machine driven process of party competition with popular election of the President as in the USA, is a matter of historical chance, and the opportunities for occasional and professional politicians are different in all of these political systems.6 But toward the end of the same work Weber employs his typology of legitimate ‘Herrschaft’ to predict with complete certainty that all revolutions will end up in the ‘spiritual proletarianisation [of the following] in order to achieve “discipline”’.7 Weber rhetorically plays both registers , contingency and possibility and quasi deterministic outcomes, depending on the political judgments he is seeking to draw and the positions he is seeking to discredit. Curiously, Palonen often follows a similar polemical strategy when arguing with opponents of parliamentary politics, as in his dispute with Arendt, though he claims to be merely invoking the contingent aspects of Weberian politics. This is not to say that Palonen’s ‘one-sided’ approach of focusing on ‘chance’ does not yield great interpretive insight across breadth of Weber’s political thinking. It most certainly does. It is merely to say, that given the sprawling nature of Weber’s work, we all face the danger that our ‘one–sided’ interpretations of his many concepts, categories, and developmental tendencies, may turn out to be too one-sided. Peter Breiner University at Albany, State University of New York Max Weber, Finanzwissenschaft. Vorlesungen 1894–1897, edited by Martin Heilmann, with Cornelia Meyer-Stoll (Max Weber Gesamtausgabe III/3; Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2017), xiii + 443pp. (hbk). ISBN 978-3-16-153076-0. €194.00. In the autumn of 1894 Max Weber moved from Berlin to Freiburg, following his appointment as a Professor of ‘Economics and Financial Science’ in the state of Baden. The title was no mere formality: during the winter semester of 1894–95 he lectured four times a week on ‘general and theoretical economics’, and four times a week on ‘financial science’, what we would today call ‘public economics’. He 6. Max Weber, ‘The Profession and Vocation of Politics’, in Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 336-52. 7. Ibid., p. 365. 126 Max Weber Studies© Max Weber Studies 2019. only began reading and preparing for these lectures in late July 1894; the manuscript upon which these lectures is based has all the signs of work under pressure, prepared from lecture to lecture, without time for even a properly organised expository framework. The state of Baden required those civil servants working in financial administration to have taken university courses in mathematics, agriculture, manufacturing, economics, and public finance, in addition to the core law subjects, and the university was obliged to run a public finance course every semester. However, while Weber had 24 students in the autumn of 1894, only one of them was on the public administration pathway; the remainder were law students. Other members of the faculty also taught the course; Weber only did so once more before he left for Heidelberg in 1897, and he never taught the subject again. By contrast, before he broke off his last complete course in theoretical economics in the early summer of 1898 he had taught this course five times. From this comparison, and the sometimes scrappy nature of his lecture notes on public finance, we could easily presume that he ended up teaching this subject simply because it went with the appointment. Why, however, was he able he teach the subject at all, let alone four times a week for weeks on end? Weber had lived in his parents’ Berlin house since 1886, working as an unpaid court clerk, preparing a doctoral dissertation supervised by Levin Goldschmidt, Professor of Commercial Law, and then in 1890 passing the second state law examination which formally qualified him for legal practice. But he then embarked on a second dissertation that would qualify him to teach law, eventually publishing this as a book on Roman agrarian history in October 1891, and gaining the right to teach in February 1892. From the spring of 1892 he lectured in the Law Faculty, substituting for his former supervisor , but was not even made...

The African continent has experienced sustained growth since 2000, which has led to the "emergence of Africa". However, the continent also ranked second in the world in terms of income inequality, after Latin America. This has raised concerns about the inclusiveness of African growth. The inclusiveness of growth is receiving increased attention in both academic and decision-making circles, with several definitions and means of measurement being proposed, which will tend to reveal a lack of unanimity. This work is made up of two parts. The first assesses the measurement of inclusive growth and the second assesses the relationship and the role of trade in promoting inclusive growth.
 For this paper, the degree of inclusiveness of African growth was calculated using the unified method of measuring inclusive growth based on 33 African countries over a period of 2000-2018. The findings show a slightly inclusive growth as a result of a rise in economic growth and a slight fall in inequality. The inquiry concerning the function of trade as one of the fundamental supporters of growth presents two ways that commercial exchange can impact inclusive development. 1) An indirect but significant route through GDP. 2) The direct benefits of trade on every social class, without the intervention of GDP growth. The linear regression reports non-significant results, indicating the indirect relationship between GDP growth and inclusive growth. The results imply that in addition to trade, as an important contributor to inclusive growth, there are other parameters like economic policies and development interventions.

This research examines the prospects of rural level development according to the ASEAN Framework by proposing the concept of inclusive green villages to tackle challenges such as poverty and environmental degradation. We use Tanjung Lanjut Village in Muaro Jambi as our main case study in highlighting the importance of active community participation in both the planning and implementation of development projects. Furthermore, sustainable investment plays a critical role in achieving significant progress. This study uses qualitative research methodology with data collected through interviews, focus group discussions (FGDs) involving community representatives, and surveys. The analysis is conducted with NVivo software. The findings further reveal that limited access to finance, technological adoption, and weak local institutional capacity are major barriers in achieving inclusive and green rural development. Proposed strategies to address these challenges include improving communication and coordination among stakeholders, strengthening infrastructure, providing capacity-building training for the local community, and facilitating access to sustainable financing. This study emphasize the importance of collaborative efforts among stakeholders, such as governments, communities, and investors to achieve inclusive and environmentally friendly development of rural areas which is in line with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) within the ASEAN regional context. The conclusion of this study indicates that rural development, particularly in the ASEAN region, holds significant potential to contribute to the SDGs. By adopting the concept of green, inclusive villages, and focusing on sustainable investment, active community participation, and capacity building, rural areas can achieve inclusive economic growth while addressing environmental challenges. However, the success of such development is dependent on effective resource management, improved living standards, and strong governance practices.

Edited by a leading scholar in the field, this is a new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Economics. It is a four-volume collection of historical and contemporary work in the flourishing field of feminist economics, an innovative and dynamic area of scholarship that broadens the scope of economic inquiry and allows a richer and more complex view of the ways in which economies function. The first two volumes of the collection consist of work done before the founding of the International Association for Feminist Economics in 1991 and are organized historically. The final two volumes consist of cutting-edge contemporary work in feminist economics and are organized thematically. This new Routledge title, edited by two leading scholars, is a four-volume collection of canonical and the very best cutting-edge work in feminist economics, an innovative and dynamic area of scholarship that has broadened the scope of economic inquiry and has allowed a richer and more complex understanding of the ways in which economies function. Volume I (‘Early Conversations, 1800–1960’) gathers foundational work produced before the professionalization and specialization of the social sciences by writers who were variously categorized as journalists, reformers, and—occasionally—as economists. Their writing provides important historical background on subjects such as household production, women’s participations in paid labour, and gender equality, subjects that remain central to feminist economics today. Volume II (‘Households, Labour, and Paid Work’) brings together the best work by professional economists examining various aspects of women’s labour both within and outside the domestic sphere. Topics include reproductive labour, caring labour, women’s labour force participation, the gender wage gap, occupational segregation, and the economics of the family. Volume III (‘Engendering Development and Economic Well-Being’) assembles work with a specifically international or global perspective. Among the topics covered are: women and development; the gendered effects of structural adjustment; property rights; economic transformation; and measures of economic well-being. The final volume in the collection (‘Epistemological and Methodological Considerations’) focuses on a feminist rethinking of economics. Volume IV collects the best scholarship on methodology, the history of economics, and postmodern and postcolonial critiques of both feminist and conventional economics. Fully indexed and with a comprehensive introduction to each volume newly written by the editors, and an invited introduction to the final volume written by Gillian Hewitson, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Feminist Economics is an essential reference work. It is destined to be valued by scholars and students of economics—as well as those working in allied disciplines such as women’s and gender studies—as a vital research resource.