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South Asian economies has witnessed very slow growth over the years and the gap has widened manifold between other nations of Asia particularly East Asian nations and South Asian nations. This paper examines co-integration between the economic growth and reach of higher education in South Asian nations explaining this disparity. The research employed an econometric panel co-integration investigation to analyse the long run relationship of higher education and economic growth among these nations. The research confirmed positive long run causality between the economic growth of the South Asian nations and gross enrolment ratio of higher education. So, if the South Asian nations continue with their existing pattern of paying less attention to higher education by allocating low share of investment on it, poor human capital formation would result in growing further economic disparity between developed and South Asian nations where rich nations would remain richer and poor nations would remain poor with the gap remaining unabridged. This research will serve as an aid to policy makers, educators and financers of South Asian nations to bridge the gap between high- and low-income nations. The focus on the quantum of spending on higher education by the government will help improve the reach of tertiary education and build economic prosperity in these nations.

The primary purpose of this paper is to review and evaluate the causes of educational poverty in less developed countries. The basic intent in carrying out such a study is to define and derive the role of governing agencies in deliberately creating educational poverty in the country, so that the private interest of the rich and powerful ruling class can be fully safeguarded. This study is of crucial interest to the common man because majority of the people living in less developed countries are poor in spite of the fact, that almost all these countries own ample human and material resources. However, the common man in these countries is continuously suffering, generation after generation, and has been denied access to basic amenities of life. The rich and powerful ruling class, in majority of the less developed countries, has intentionally denied basic education facilities to its people for keeping them ignorant and unaware of their fundamental rights to share national resources and to gain competence for comfortable living in the society. The paper advocates a complete reversal in economic growth policies of the less developed countries so that top priority is given to those projects and programs that directly benefit the common man in the society. In this respect, the author calls for awareness among the people to exercise their economic and social rights so that people of all the strata can share equally the fruits of growth and prosperity.

Developing nations including Bangladesh are significantly lagging behind the millennium development target due to the lack of science, technology and engineering education. Bangladesh as a least developing country has only 44 engineers per million people. Its technological education and gross domestic product growth are not collinear. Although limited progress was made in humanities, basic sciences, agriculture and medical sciences, a vast gap is left in technical and engineering education. This paper describes the present condition of engineering education in the country and explores ways to improve engineering education in order to meet the national as well as global skills demand. (Contains 3 tables and 7 figures.)

Abstract: This paper empirically examined the causality between electricity consumption and economic growth in two densely populated countries in South Asia, India and Pakistan. The causality analysis was estimated at aggregated and disaggregated level where the focus of the analysis was on the agricultural sector. The disaggregated causality analysis indicated a bi-directional causality between the agricultural electricity consumption and the agricultural GDP in India, while in Pakistan the causality was found to run from agricultural GDP to agricultural electricity consumption. At the aggregated level, India confirmed conservation hypothesis while Pakistan confirmed feedback hypothesis. From the public policy point of view, it can be inferred that, at the macro level, any electricity conservation measures in India will not have an affect on India's increasing economic growth prospects and hence a policy-favourite supply-enhancement strategy in the form of increasing electricity generation needs to be balanced with a demand-management strategy. In case of Pakistan any such policy recommendation is difficult given the bidirectional nature of causality. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Advocates of growth diagnostics have shown it to be a preferable alternative to other methods of formulating a growth strategy such as cross-country regressions, growth accounting or international benchmarking using cross country surveys. We show that growth diagnostics also suffers from problems and demands a high level of economic sophistication from its practitioners. We suggest a simpler prelude before launching into rigorous analysis and apply this method to address the puzzle of Pakistan's lagging per capita GDP relative to India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To discover defense-growth nexus, this study has used Feder type model to capture the supply-side impacts for Pakistan and India. In Feder-type model, this study has used four sectors to find out total effects of defense spending on growth by using OLS technique. The findings of the study show that there is positive association between the total effect of defense and growth in all the sectors for both the countries. In augmented Feder-type model, the total effects along with externality effects and productivity differential have been re-estimated. The sign of the total effects of defense sector remain the same for both the countries whereas externality effects of defense sector have been observed negative for both the countries except in four-sector for Pakistan. The results of productivity differential of defense sector appear with negative sign throughout the analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]