This paper has visualized how agricultural scenario would evolve in the near future and what policies and strategies would be appropriate to adjust to the emerging changes and to harness the new opportunities. The major challenges for agriculture in the region are: raising and sustaining agricultural growth; ensuring food and nutritional security; facing impact of climate change; adjusting to c...

This paper proposes a tractable model to study the equilibrium diversity of technological progress and shows that equilibrium technological progress may exhibit too little diversity (too much conformity), in particular, foregoing socially bene…cial investments in “alternative”technologies that will be used at some point in the future. The presence of future innovations that will replace current...

Gender differences in the STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines are widespread in most OECD countries and mathematics is the only subject where typically girls tend to underperform with respect to boys. This paper describes the gender gap in math test scores in Italy, which is one of the countries displaying the largest differential between boys and girls according t...

BACKGROUND The impact of macroeconomic conditions on health has been extensively explored, as well as the relationship between individual unemployment and health. There are, however, few studies taking both aspects into account and even fewer studies looking at the relationship in a life course perspective. In this study the aim was to assess the role of macroeconomic conditions, such as nation...

Micro-enterprise credit programs are coming to be seen as an important innovation in economic development both in developing countries and, more recently, in the United States. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh has been operating a decentralized village credit program since 1976 which has achieved impressive results making non-collateralized loans to the rural poor. Currently, a handful of organiz...

BACKGROUND A group of researchers has argued that sexual stature dimorphism (SSD) can serve as an indicator of living standards. This argument is based on evidence that boys' physical growth is more sensitive to environmental conditions than girls' physical growth. Because Korea's economic growth in the second half of the 20th century was unprecedentedly rapid, according to their logic, it is l...