Asia-Pacific Development Journal - Volume 23, Issue 1, 2017

This present paper captures the growth effects of public physical and human capital investment, which highlights the relative efficacy of these types of investments on sectoral and aggregate output, employment and private investment, and indicates which sector of the economy of Pakistan is benefiting the most from these investments. It uses the production function approach based on the Mankiw, Romer and Weil (1992) growth models and applied the Fully Modified Ordinary Least Square (FM-OLS) technique using data from the Pakistan economy during the period 1964-2013. The results show that human capital investment in the public sector has a positive significant effect in all models. The coefficient indicates that a 1 per cent change in human capital investment will increase the output of the manufacturing sector by 0.44 per cent; the output of the services sector by 0.15 per cent; the output of agriculture sector by 0.094 per cent; and the aggregate output by 0.027 per cent. The public physical investment has the highest impact on manufacturing sector output (0.084 per cent) followed by aggregate output (0.034 per cent). The estimated elasticities indicate that at the sectoral level, public human capital investment has a greater output effect than the public physical investment, while at the aggregate level, the public-physicalinvestment effect dominates.

Microfinancing institutions (MFIs) are likely to change their management policies and focus more on profitability and product diversification as they mature and expand in size because of a number of reasons, including among them, donor pressure and/or lack of funding to expand. The present study empirically tests whether such changes occur in MFIs over time and how these changes affect their performance with regard to alleviating poverty.

Structural change associated with rapid growth has not occurred in labour-intensive manufacturing in India. It is argued in the present paper that this is at least partly due to the rise in the relative cost of labour, which is the result of the rising cost of food stemming from rapid overall growth and sluggish growth in agricultural productivity. A theoretical model has been developed and the experience of India is used to illustrate the model and its implications.

Sustainable food security at the household level is a national concern in many countries. The reasons for household food insecurity include, among others, social, economic, political, and personal factors, as well as climatic changes and its outcomes. This research aims to determine the linkage of the factors of climatic changes, non-climatic factors and household resiliencies with the level of household food security among the poor and low income households in Malaysia. The present study is based on primary data that were collected in July and October 2012 through a questionnaire survey of 460 poor and low-income households from the Pahang, Kelantan, and Terengganu States of Malaysia. The sample was selected from E-Kasih poor household database based on a cluster random sampling technique. Initially the study measures household food security according to the United States Agency for International Development – Household Food Insecurity Access (USAIDHFIA) model, and has run ordinal regressions under the logit and probit models. This study finds that household food insecurity is not only linked with social and economic factors, but also significantly linked with the climatic factors. Therefore, food security programmes must be integrated with the programmes for climatic change adaptation.

The global population is more than seven billion and will likely reach nine billion by 2050. As India is home to 18 per cent of the world’s population, but has only 2.4 per cent of the land area, a great deal of pressure is being placed on all of the country’s natural resources. The increasing population has been trending towards an alarming situation; the United Nations has estimated that the country’s population will increase to 1.8 billion by the 2050 and, by 2028, it will overtake China as the world’s most populous country. The growing population and the environmental deterioration are becoming major impediments in the country’s drive to achieve sustained development in the country.

The present paper examines the administrative efficiency of implementing the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps) in the Philippines. Using data collected at a municipal level for four provinces in the Davao Region, administrative efficiency scores were computed, employing cost transfer ratios (CTR) and data envelopment analysis (DEA) for the individual municipal operations offices (MOOs) implementing the programme. CTR estimates showed that the greatest proportion of total expenditure in cash transfer programmes was direct cash transfers, which implied an efficient use of programme funding. The DEA results showed an average technical efficiency score of 0.905, which implied that there was significant potential to further improve the performance of delivery of 4Ps. The results revealed that relatively high technical efficiency scores of MOOs did not necessarily translate into a more cost-efficient implementation of the programme. Nevertheless, a positive correlation was found between CTR and the high technical efficiency scores of the MOOs implementing the programme.