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The purpose of this study is to evaluate the efficiency of the relative performances of Mother’s canteen across the regions of Tamil Nadu and find out the determinants of inefficiencies in the scheme.

An untargeted food security scheme called Amma (Mother's) canteen was started in Tamil Nadu, India, with an aim to provide the urban poor with hygienic and healthy food at an affordable price. Along with secondary data, interviews were conducted to understand the operational details of Mother's canteen. Data envelopment analysis (DEA) was used to find the relative efficiency of the scheme operated by nine corporations.

Based on the daily expenditure, number of meals served and revenue, seven of nine corporations were found to be inefficient. Further, sensitivity analyses found that among six procurement variables, procurement (quantity and price) of black gram and cooking oil were determinants of inefficiency.

As an untargeted scheme, the cost of delivering service-based evaluation was used for performance evaluation. Policymakers could use centralized procurement instead of open market procurement at the corporation level and standardized ingredients' usage (quantity) to further reduce the cost of the food security scheme.

The proposed DEA model may be used by policymakers to empirically evaluate the food security scheme's delivery effectiveness across various corporations in a region. Inefficient branches are identified here with empirical support for further performance improvement changes.

There are limited number of studies evaluating untargeted schemes. This paper presents the challenges of evaluating an untargeted scheme which allows self-selection of beneficiaries. The outcome of this study will help in identifying inefficient corporations, and further, improve the performance and cost of delivering untargeted food security scheme.

This article traces the experience of countries reforming their vocational education and training policies and summarizes the lessons learned. It is based on a recent joint World Bank‐ILO study focussing on the obstacles to implementing change in vocational education and training systems in response to changing labor markets and innovative approaches to overcoming these constraints in 19 countries worldwide. It tracks the demand‐side pressures and supply‐side responses and highlights some critical issues, constraints and innovations in the reform of these systems. The main messages from this study are: matching instrument to target group is as important as picking the best delivery mode; the government’s role in facilitating the provision of information about vocational education and training has been relatively neglected; a vigorous private response has refuted claims of the reluctance of private providers to enter the field; and political will, not institutional capacity, is the main obstacle to comprehensive reform.

The article assembles efficiency and equity arguments for and against targeting the long‐term unemployed in active labour market policies (ALMP), and refers to evidence from applications to date. The theory and practices of ALMP differ somewhat between low and high unemployment countries. The approach taken in Sweden in the 1960s to 1980s is used to discuss low unemployment countries, and OECD analysis in the 1990s to represent theory for the high unemployment countries. Targeting the long‐term unemployed is specifically a policy for high unemployment countries, and depends particularly on effects on wage pressure. The article concludes by urging that equity arguments be considered as well as efficiency and by drawing attention to the form which targeting takes. Comments are made about Britain’s New Deal in relation to the form of targeting.

Due to climate change and an increasing concentration of the world’s population in vulnerable areas, how to manage catastrophe risk efficiently and cover disaster losses fairly is still a universal dilemma.

This paper applies a law and economic approach.

China’s mechanism for managing catastrophic disaster risk is in many ways unique. It emphasizes government responsibilities and works well in many respects, especially in disaster emergency relief. Nonetheless, China’s mechanism which has the vestige of a centrally planned economy needs reform.

I propose a catastrophe insurance market-enhancing framework which marries the merits of both the market and government to manage catastrophe risks. There are three pillars of the framework: (i) sustaining a strong and capable government; (ii) government enhancement of the market, neither supplanting nor retarding it; (iii) legalizing the relationship between government and market to prevent government from undermining well-functioning market operations. A catastrophe insurance market-enhancing framework may provide insights for developing catastrophe insurance in China and other transitional nations.

First, this paper analyzes China’s mechanism for managing catastrophic disaster risks and China’s approach which emphasizes government responsibilities will shed light on solving how to manage catastrophe risk efficiently and cover disaster losses fairly. Second, this paper starts a broader discussion about government stimulation of developing catastrophe insurance and this framework can stimulate attention to solve the universal dilemma.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implementation of the targeted subsidies plan in the rural and agricultural sectors of Iran and its impact on the government’s sales income, operating cash flow (OCF) and receivables collection ratio.

Using the panel data approach, the authors examine their hypotheses on a sample of six provinces of Iran, including Khorasan Razavi, Khorasan Jonoubi, Kerman, Semnan, Kermanshah and Kurdistan, during 2009-2013.

The findings indicate that the implementation of the targeted subsidies plan leads to increased actual electricity sales in the rural sector. Further, while the coefficient on OCF in the estimated model suggests a significant and positive relationship between the OCF and the implementation of the targeted subsidies plan, the coefficient on receivables collection ratio demonstrates a significant but negative association. Contrary to the government’s primary expectations, the results do not provide any support for the reduction of electricity consumption.

The current study is apparently the first study which conducted on the subject under study.

Despite the large interest in urban food markets, there are, however still relatively few good studies that have empirically documented the functioning of retail markets in developing countries, especially in Africa. The purpose of this paper is to look in particular at the case of Addis Ababa, a city of more than four million people and the capital of Ethiopia, one of the most populous countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. To better understand urban food retail, the authors rely on a large primary survey.

To better understand urban food retail, the authors rely on a large primary survey. Based on a stratified sampling scheme representative for the city as a whole, 1,226 urban food retail outlets were interviewed in March and April 2012.

The authors find increasing differentiation in food retail markets in recent years. Despite the prohibition of foreign direct investment in food retail, a domestic modern private retail sector is quickly emerging. However, its share is still very small and, in contrast to roll-outs of modern retail in other countries, it has not yet entered the cereal sector, which remains in the hands of local flour mills, cereal shops, and cooperative retail outlets. The importance of cooperative retail is growing even more rapidly. It is especially important for those products where supply chains are controlled by the government. On the high-end, domestic private modern retail outlets deliver high-quality products at significantly higher prices, ceteris paribus. At the other side, the authors see cooperative retail that delivers food at significantly lower – and subsidized – prices. However, the latter shops are characterized by typical price control problems, reflected in regular lack of supplies and queuing.

The study is limited to the city of Addis Ababa and it seems useful if similar studies could be conducted in other cities in Africa.

Despite the large interest in urban food markets, there are still relatively few good studies that have empirically documented the functioning of retail markets in developing countries, especially in Africa. The paper therefore contributes to fill this lacuna by studying urban food retail markets using new and unique data for Africa.

This paper aims to evaluate the social safety nets in Tunisia using targeting performance indicators which consider the divergence observed between the beneficiary selection process at the regional level and the official identification of poor.

In the first part of this research, the author intend to quantify the degree of association between social programs coverage and poverty incidence, with special emphasis on the contribution of the center's targeting of regions and on the efforts of the regions themselves to reach their poor households. Next, the author measure four targeting errors: inclusion and exclusion errors, by eligibility and by poverty. These targeting errors help policymakers to understand how well a program is performing in terms of its specific eligibility criteria and knowing whether a social transfer is reaching poor people at the regional level.

The author’s empirical findings show there is a positive targeting differential which rejects the nullity of independence between poverty incidence and coverage of the program in Tunisia. The author then found that the overall targeting differential is accounted for by the intra-region component. After estimating the eligibility thresholds at the regional level, the author found that the targeting performance differs from one region to another, while some recorded gains that others did not.

To the best of our knowledge, no research has addressed the distinction between eligibility and poverty in the measurement of targeting errors. Thus, this paper contains research to fill this gap. It differs from previous studies in two important ways. First, the targeting errors will be estimated on the basis of the official eligibility criteria used at the regional level. Second, we estimate the eligibility thresholds by considering the programs coverage rate variations between regions based on quotas allocated to each governorate by the Ministry of Social Affairs (MSA).

The paper investigates the scale of relocations generated by property‐led regeneration schemes and identifies the perceived benefits accruing to occupiers of relocating to such developments. In so doing the implications for the local property market of such moves, in respect of the performance of new and existing developments, are revealed.

The purpose of this paper is to understand customers’ preferences for housing attributes in India.

The study highlights the attributes important to the customer when purchasing residential property. The Kano model has been used to understand these preferences of consumers. The data are collected across Delhi and the National Capital Region and have been analyzed using the cross-tabulation approach.

Demographics of the consumers play an important role in deciding purchase of residential real estate. Because of their income level, Indian consumers prefer low-rise residential complexes.

The study helps to understand the diverse behavior of Indian consumers when they invest in the real estate sector, especially residential.