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Summary: This paper contributes to the impact evaluation of GIs by carrying out a case study of Basmati rice in India. Although Basmati rice is not yet an official GI, its long standing reputation for quality and GI-like protection by major importing countries except the United States (US) has rendered it a mirror image of a GI good. The analysis is based on a survey of 299 Basmati and nonBasmati rice farmers in Uttarakhand, one of the Northern states [1] India, officially Republic of India is a republic comprised of 28 constituent states and seven Union territories. These states and union territories are partially self-governing states or regions united by a central (federal) government. In India, this self-governing status of the component states is typically constitutionally entrenched and may not be altered by a unilateral decision of the central government. 1 of India. The empirical strategy of the paper is three-pronged. First, a net income analysis has been carried out to elicit the net benefits of Basmati rice as opposed to nonBasmati rice and another competing crop in that region such as sugarcane. The findings show that Basmati rice is more profitable than the nonBasmati varieties but less so than sugarcane. In the second stage, the endogeneity-corrected Heckman selection model reveals that Basmati adoption has increased welfare of the households. Finally, a Tobit model is estimated to investigate the determining factors of Basmati adoption among the farmer households. The determining factors are found to be access to extension training facilities, a credible hedge against risk, and the availability of household labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary Risks due to the occurrence of climatic aberrations pose an impediment to the economic growth of the households in vulnerable regions. The frequency of these events is projected to increase in the foreseeable future, with developing countries being the worst sufferers. Dealing with this appears to be an additional burden on the resources of such countries, a large part of which is already devoted to providing better living standards for its inhabitants. Does this imply that developmental interventions should be discontinued? Is there a link between these programs and adaptation to environmental shocks? In an effort to answer such questions, the paper examines the impact of the developmental schemes on the livelihood of the households in Western Odisha, India and investigates whether they augment post disaster coping and adaptation as well. The results indicate that overall the programs have made an impact concerning their intended goals but the diffusion of benefits across beneficiary groups is heterogeneous. Additionally, the programs have contributed in post disaster coping, but only in the regions where either they performed well or their penetration was extensive. Activities promoting livelihood diversification, food security, and poverty reduction also tacitly facilitate improvements in the resilience of the individuals and communities thereby enhancing their capacity to deal with climatic risks. Policy implication advocates the continuation of developmental interventions. However, realigning their framework to incorporate actions intended toward disaster risk reduction and management would result in more inclusive impacts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tenure security systems—which determine who lives where and under what terms and conditions—are processes of governance that make and effect the relationship between those who confer tenure security and those on who tenure security is conferred. Yet, in dominant analyses of land and housing tenure security, and in policy recommendations for property rights and legal tenure security in developing countries, governance implications are overlooked in favour of analyses of the relative merits of different tenure systems mainly in terms of security, livelihood and economic impact. Using interview data and observations from a resettlement scheme in Ahmedabad, India, this paper empirically examines citizen-state relations in the context of a major shift from de facto (in practice) to legal tenure security and asks how do citizens who have recently come to live under legal tenure security encounter the state and make sense of it. I find a bureaucracy of tenure security that exerts control over low income citizens largely through fear. However, such control is incomplete and acts of resistance suggest an emerging ‘paralegal’ space to renegotiate tenure rules. I conclude by examining the findings through a conceptual framework that explains the relationship between state power and legal tenure security. I also discuss the need for greater scrutiny of the political effects of urban land and housing tenure systems on poor people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: Unlike migration, scant attention has been paid to the phenomenon of commuting by workers in developing countries. This paper fills this gap by using a nationally representative data set from India to analyze factors that affect the decision of workers to commute across rural and urban areas daily. Our results suggest that regions with large peripheral urban areas or concentration of secondary sector jobs are more likely to have commuting workers. Regional rural and urban unemployment rates and rural–urban wage differentials are important push and pull factors in the decision to commute. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sustainable intensification (SI) of agriculture combines the dual goals of increasing productivity while staying within safe limits of resource use. In practice, how can thresholds which operate at resource scale guide intensification driven by social, economic and biophysical factors at the farm scale? In this paper, we present the case of agricultural intensification in the shallow hard-rock aquifer region of western India to illustrate how cross-scale feedback effects are crucial determinants of not only the resource sustainability and farm productivity but also of social dimensions of SI such as equity and justice. Supported by private investment in plastic-lined farm-ponds, the increasing shift to horticulture in the study area raises questions about the sustainability of the practice. We use a socio-hydrological lens and develop a system dynamics model to analyze how the growing technology-mediated intensification may lead to SI. We find that from a static farm-level view, the plastic-lined farm-pond is beneficial in shielding farmers from droughts and in enhancing productivity. However, when within and across scale socio-hydrological dynamics are considered, the practice is found to instead aggravate the drought impact on the community. This happens when intensification level accelerates, driven by aspiration and vulnerability induced feedbacks, resulting in groundwater demand exceeding the system threshold. In practice, SI is complicated by the fact that this threshold for safe groundwater use is dynamic. In drought years the carrying capacity falls significantly, so that even a low level of intensification may tip the system resulting in a tragedy of the commons. Therefore, achieving SI requires seasonally agile intensification which retains the adaptive capacity of farmers instead of locking them into fixed annual irrigation requirement in a highly uncertain and resource-scarce environment. We thus conclude that the recognition and translation of resource level thresholds to an actionable level is key to practicing SI. • Sustainable intensification requires recognition of local resource thresholds. • Socio-hydrological feedbacks are important to determine sustainability of practice. • Plastic-lined ground-water filled farm-ponds drive intensification to horticulture. • They support dry season irrigation but increase groundwater risk for community. • Adaptive cropping pattern can respond to dynamically changing resource threshold. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The main objective of this paper is to explore the impact of financial sector reforms, financial deepening, and intellectual property protection on the accumulation of knowledge for one of the world’s largest developing countries. The findings indicate that increased intellectual property rights protection is associated with higher knowledge accumulation. While financial deepening facilitates the accumulation of ideas, the implementation of a series of financial liberalization policies is found to have a non-linear effect. The results show that financial liberalization will exert a beneficial impact on technological deepening only if the financial system is sufficiently liberalized. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The paper explores the impact of insect-resistant Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton on costs and returns over the first two seasons of its commercial release in three sub-regions of Maharashtra State, India. It is the first such research conducted in India based on farmers’ own practices rather than trial plots. Data were collected for a total of 7793 cotton plots in 2002 and 1577 plots in 2003. Results suggest that while the cost of cotton seed was much higher for farmers growing Bt cotton relative to those growing non-Bt cotton, the costs of bollworm spray were much lower. While Bt plots had greater costs (seed plus insecticide) than non-Bt plots, the yields and revenue from Bt plots were much higher than those of non-Bt plots (some 39% and 63% higher in 2002 and 2003, respectively). Overall, the gross margins of Bt plots were some 43% (2002) and 73% (2003) higher than those of non-Bt plots, although there was some variation between the three sub-regions of the state. The results suggest that Bt cotton has provided substantial benefits for farmers in India over the 2 years, but there are questions as to whether these benefits are sustainable. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]