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Salma Ahmed
Dr Salma Ahmed holds M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from Monash University in Australia. She is currently based in Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Salma’s primary area of research is development economics. She has worked on a range of topics including child labour, child schooling, women's and child health, gender wage inequality, and gender-related policy. She has several publications including papers in World Development, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Biosocial Science, and Demographic Research
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Child health, fertility, and sex ratio: India vs. Bangladesh
Despite having lower per capita income, Bangladesh has superior performance over India on key welfare indicators. This article compares the experiences of India and Bangladesh on several key indicators during 1990-2015 using two different datasets. It finds better performance of Bangladesh on infant mortality rate with a lower boy-girl sex ratio at birth than India. While both countries record an impressive decline in fertility rates, this was accompanied by a worsening of the sex ratio in India but not in Bangladesh.
Quality of governance and welfare outcomes
As the MDGs gave way to the SDGs, considerable attention has been focussed on movements in key welfare indicators for women and children in the past decade. In this context, this column compares India with Bangladesh, and also looks at the relative performance of Indian states. Further, it provides evidence on the strength of association between the quality of governance and welfare outcomes in India.