Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research,Reserve Bank of India

Firms in developing economies continue to invest heavily in backup generators despite substantial improve ments in electricity infrastructure. This suggests generator ownership may reflect not only current unreliability but also forward-looking expectations shaped by political instability. This paper asks whether political insta bility-as perceived by firm managers-independently drives generator ownership beyond observable service disruptions. Using data from over 200,000 firms across 163 countries (2006-2025), we find robust evidence that firms reporting political instability as an obstacle are 2.9 percentage points more likely to own generators, even after controlling for actual power outages and firm characteristics. Further exploring the mechanism, we find that firms perceiving political instability report significantly more severe electricity constraints, consistent with heightened uncertainty about future reliability. Institutional quality moderates this relationship: firms in countries with stronger corruption control, regulatory quality, and political stability are less likely to respond to political instability through generator ownership. Together, these findings show that firm-level energy poverty stems not only from infrastructure deficits but also from political uncertainty about expected future service re liability. Addressing energy poverty therefore requires combining infrastructure investment with governance reforms to reduce firms' reliance on costly, carbon-intensive self-provision.

The United States-initiated trade war has evolved, with the United States now imposing baseline tariffs on most countries and escalating tensions with China. Using a global CGE model, we find that while the United States-China tariff escalation could benefit India through higher domestic demand, India could secure even greater gains by cutting tariffs more deeply. A uniform 25% tariff cut across all partners would boost India's economy by 2.62%, double the gain of a no-action scenario (1.31%). Although an India-United States FTA could further accelerate growth, it also risks increasing Chinese imports by 14%, raising concerns over dumping-an issue already prevalent in India, where Chinese firms dominate dumping cases. To counter this, we recommend unilateral tariff liberalisation by India for all partners except China. This approach has minimal impact on India's welfare, but it significantly reduces imports from China, thereby lowering dumping risks. Importantly, key macroeconomic indicators such as GDP, sectoral output, aggregate exports and domestic demand remain stable under this policy, ensuring economic resilience while addressing probable dumping threats effectively.JEL Codes: F10, F13, F14, F15

Violence against women is a grave violation of their fundamental human rights, impacting a staggering one-third of women globally. This heinous crime takes on different forms, ranging from sexual violence and oppressive patriarchal beliefs to workplace harassment, marital rape, and cybercrime. The correlation between globalization and crimes against women remains inadequately explored; yet, the process of globalization has inevitably added new layers to this pressing issue. Against this backdrop, a two-sector competitive general equilibrium model has been developed with both male and female labor and foreign and domestic capital in the presence of skilled and unskilled wage disparity. We analyze the impact of globalization on violence against women. Interestingly, we find that globalization, in terms of foreign capital inflow, may accentuate crime against women, provided the capital-intensive sector is less discriminatory against women. Furthermore, we explore how variations in market-based discrimination can affect the incidence of violence.

We study cross-tier legislative incumbency spillovers in non-concurrent elections, a relatively understudied dimension of multi-level electoral politics in federal systems. Using a regression discontinuity design with comprehensive election data from India covering parliamentary elections (1999–2019) and state assembly elections (1994–2023), we find significant bidirectional negative spillovers. Having an incumbent member of parliament reduces the probability of that party’s candidate winning in subsequent state assembly elections by 7.2 percentage points (or by 17.6

We provide annual estimates of inequality in monthly per capita household earnings in India over the period 2017/18 to 2022/23 based on analysis of India's Periodic Labour Force Surveys. Over the six years, the estimate of inequality as measured by the Gini coefficient is in the range of 0.40 to 0.44 and, as measured by the Mean Log Deviation, between 0.28 and 0.34. We find that a 1 percentage point increase in the level of urbanization may increase the Mean Log Deviation by 0.5 to 0.7 per cent. Our analysis suggests that inequality will start declining only when India's urbanization rate is in the region of 63 to 74 per cent. Further, after accounting for variation in sectoral means and inequalities, we find that the development of the inequality-urbanization relationship at the sub-national level conforms to the Kuznets process.