-The Indian Express Bihar’s female literacy rate, at 53.33 per cent as per the 2011 Census, is the second lowest after Rajasthan’s 52.66 per cent. Did women help win this election for the Nitish Kumar-led Grand Alliance? While that awaits an analysis, the fact is more women cast their votes in this assembly election than ever before in Bihar’s history. And this, despite the state’s dismal record when it comes to...

-The Indian Express My mother does not work”. In country after country, this expression is heard each time someone describes a woman not engaged in paid employment. A recent study by McKinsey, titled “The Power of Parity: How equality for women could drive $ 2 trillion in global growth”, has evidence that every “stay-at-home” woman directly damages a country’s GDP by billions. Its message is that every woman should “work”; India’s...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-Livemint.com/ Bloomberg To join the global middle class, India must do much better Max Roser is at it again. The Oxford professor and master of economic data visualization has a new set of maps and charts showing how global income and inequality have changed during the last couple of centuries. The upshot is that while the world has gotten steadily richer that entire time, something very special and very good has...

-The Hindu Agricultural experts say small farmers are working under severe economic constraints — their earnings are very low and they are indebted — and hence many are compelled to leave farming. Punjab’s farming sector is in crisis and showing signs of sickness as it suffers from falling productivity and shrinking returns. Farmers are reeling under debt, and owing to low profitability, small farmers, in particular, are quitting farming. In the past...