Persistent and Emerging Challenges to Development

Development economics covers a wide range of obstacles to starting and sustaining economic growth, and this volume examines many of them. Its contents fall into four parts: foreign trade, structural change and the environment; health and standard of living; education, human capital and the evolving quality of employment in India; and banking, including access, efficiency and stability.

The contributors include established economists alongside younger scholars. Many chapters return to long-standing questions with newer econometric tools and sharper focus, aiming to produce findings that can shape future theory and policy. Topics include the geographic concentration of poor infant and child health outcomes, trade liberalisation and export quality, intergenerational shifts in occupation, multidimensional poverty in rural India, and the robustness of the banking sector.

The studies draw on methods such as machine learning, spatial econometrics, system GMM, quantile regression and counterfactual decomposition (QRCD), among others. The book is intended for researchers and policymakers, as well as practitioners working in various development sectors.