Millennial Asia

Women’s advancement and consequential gender equality have significant implications for human capital formation, increase in labour productivity, employment creation, poverty reduction, and overall socio-economic and human development. So, inclusive growth and sustainable development would not be possible without women’s empowerment and gender equality. Thus, targeting women’s empowerment is extensively relevant for Asian countries. In this context, this article explored the impact of the gender factors on the economic growth of 30 Asian economies over the period from 1997 to 2015 by using panel autoregressive distributive lag (ARDL) model. It provides the evidence of an overall positive impact of the gender parity index of health, education, employment and democratic representation on the economic growth of Asia in the long run. Therefore, gender equality is an important determinant of economic growth in Asian countries, and hence, should be on board while planning for the empowerment of women.

Financial burden from health expenditure is a serious cause of concern for low-income and developing countries. Studies have shown that low public investment in health, lack of adequate safety net mechanisms and poor quality of public health system in these countries are few basic grounds for placing high financial burden on people. In order to make both ends meet during illness, poor people resort to various alternative means. One of the popular strategies adopted is to reduce or reallocate the consumption bundle, so as to meet the medical expenditure. The impact of out of pocket (OOP) health expenditure on the consumer expenditure has immediate and direct impact especially among the poor sections of the society. This article aims to study the impact of out of pocket health expenditure on the constituents of consumer expenditure and how the composition of consumer expenditure differs with the levels of out of pocket expenditure among different consumption quintiles. The study uses IHDS household level survey data for the year 2011–2012. A mean comparison test is carried out to check whether significant difference exists in the consumption bundles of households with and without medical expenditure. A system of Engel curves is estimated with seemingly unrelated regression equation (SURE) to study the impact of out of pocket medical expenses on the consumption bundle. The results show that there exists significant difference in the share of different consumption items in the consumption bundles of households with and without out of pocket expenditure. Despite having larger share for food expenditure, poor households tend to protect the consumption of food share in the bundle. Compensation for rise in medical expenses is reflected in the reduced share of non-food expenditure items like fuel, education, entertainment, clothing and footwear. With high share of out of pocket expenditure, poor households in the states with high public health expenditure mainly reduced their education expenditure whereas consumption of most of the non-food items were reduced by poor households in low public health expenditure states.

The present study investigates the sustainability of microenterprises using primary data on 222 microenterprises in the informal small business segment of India. We identified relevant factors inducing entrepreneurs to sustain their business despite facing challenges emerging in the business world from time to time. The findings indicate that microenterprises with higher initial capital investment and those run by more experienced entrepreneurs have more chances for their long-run survival. The findings further indicate that the attainment of higher education is unrelated to long-term survival in the microbusiness world, perhaps because it opens more options of livelihood leading to exploration and experimentation of other areas of work engagement. The probability of long-run survival is higher in manufacturing microenterprises as compared to trading and services, likely because manufacturing experiences less volatility in this penurious context. Finally, microenterprises managed by males have better chances of long-run sustainability than female-operated microbusinesses.

Child malnutrition is an important low-and middle-income country (LMIC) issue influenced by biological and socio-economic factors. The solution is dependent on the stakeholders and interactions between them. The multidimensionality and context-dependency of causative factors make system thinking-based approach, namely network analysis, an effective tool to map the decision-making on countering child malnutrition. The study used Palghar district, India, as a case study to perform the stakeholder network analysis for identifying the various stakeholders who were targeted by actions and initiatives of district administration. The network analysis was performed for three temporal phases, namely Phase I (pre-2014), Phase II (years 2014–2017) and Phase III (2017 onwards). The study found that both network density of the system and child nutrition status have increased temporally. The study found an increase in network density due to an increase in the number of stakeholder groups targeted, implementation of new actions/initiatives and expansion of existing actions/initiatives to other stakeholders. A significant increase in focus towards the stakeholders influencing the socio-economic environment of the child is found in Phase III as compared to Phase II. Further, the study found that family and elite group have started featuring as prominent stakeholder targets for various actions. The study concludes that a greater incorporation of system-thinking approach in decision-making could help in effectively addressing child malnutrition and similar healthcare issues.

The social innovation inclines to an emphasis on ‘systems and processes of change in social relations’ and ‘innovation is a new idea, product or process that addresses social and environmental challenges and their needs’. It is newly growing up as a field of practice that is done by people. It has occurred from the broader field of innovation studies. In this article, the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) has been taken as a case of social innovation, which helps to increase the productivity of rice and enhance the income of the farmers. The literature related to SRI suggested that the technique is sustainable and innovative because of the less use of inputs and changes in some set of principles (i.e., planting, fertilizer, water and seeds) whereas increasing output in terms of production and productivity of the crop. In this sense, aim of the article is to evaluate the impact of the SRI technique within the framework of social innovation in Patna district, Bihar, India. In a wider context, the question is not about whether it is intensifying or not, rather emphasis should be on how farmers deal with changing environmental and socio-economic factors. Moreover, there is a need to delve deeper into implantation strategies in the local context and evaluate their impact in terms of opportunities and constraints during adaptation. In addition to this, an exploratory research design was followed to study SRI. Criterion and expert sampling were employed to select the farmers, and data were collected by a personal interview method with the help of a structured schedule. However, the data indicate the production and productivity of paddy are increased through SRI, but variation exists among different blocks of the district. It is clearly evident from the data that nearly 42 per cent of farmers from all blocks have witnessed an increase in food sufficiency. In the case of income due to the sale of excess produce is 57 per cent.

Gyanendra Mani, P. K. Joshi, and M. V. Ashok (Eds.). 2017. Financing Agriculture Value Chains in India: Challenges and Opportunities. Springer, 268 pp., €89.99. ISBN: 978-981-10-5956-8.

Varinder Sharma. 2019. Agricultural Development in Punjab and Haryana. New Delhi, India: LG Publishers Distributors, pp. 200, ₹595 (hardback), ISBN: 978-93-83723-52-2.