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This study involved an analysis of how the character of a state inadvertently defines the trajectory of financial development of the state and its resultant impact/causality on economic growth. The guiding theme here is that the finance growth theory (Schumpeter 1911, Goldsmith 1969) has its fundamental root in the demographics of western economies with proven functional and stable political and social institutions. The direct applicability of this theory to the explanation of financial and macroeconomic phenomena in developing economies with a unique set of distinct characters may prove erroneous. To analyse this assertion, a developing economy (Nigeria) which had experienced decades of autocratic military governance was studied using a mixed method research design to gather and analyse data. Under this approach, triangulation of three data sources was achieved to augment for the problem of reliability of data sources. A historical case review was conducted using secondary data. This was followed by an econometric analysis to determine the direction of causality of financial development on economic growth applying the vector co-integration analysis and the Granger Causality test using time series data relating to Real GDP Per Capita, Size, Activity and Efficiency of Financial Intermediaries and the Stock Market in Nigeria and dummy variables to represent socio-political characters identified from the historical analysis. Finally, primary data was generated by questionnaire and group interview as a means of validating the findings from the historical case review and the econometric analysis as well as completing the triangulation of data sources. The historical review revealed three major characters represented by ethnicity in which prebendalism was strongly inherent, social unrest culminating in a three year long civil war and persistence of autocratic military governance and civilian democracies tutored by military dictators while the econometric analysis revealed the presence of macroeconomic structures identifying at least one co-integrating vector but the causality test showed no indication of causality between financial development and economic growth irrespective of steadily rising annual figures for Real GDP Per Capita and indicators of positive financial development. It was concluded that the character of a state in developing economies whose characters form a unique parabola of activities that are not prevalent in western democracies where this theory finds its origin is an endogenous variable in determining the impact of financial development on economic growth.

Sustainable development has been a subject of global interest when people shift the focus from the economy and productivity only to the economy with consideration of the environment and resources on the earth. Manufacturing industry is one of the most crucial sectors that people focused on to make it more sustainable. However, the sustainability for current existing products are not enough to satisfy the requirement of sustainable development within the modern society. Therefore, an approach to design and to optimise product considering ecological impact is to be developed by this research. After review and comparison of popular LCIA methods and tools, the three-tier sustainable design approach considering human labour ecological impact is developed. Design optimisation with eco-constraints using genetic algorithm is followed. Moreover, from a product life cycle point of view, production may not be the least sustainable section. Use and disposal also play important roles in the whole product life cycle. In this case, Ontology is proposed in the research. It is a powerful tool to collect and exchange data of products and manage the relationships among different parts, properties of products, and suppliers in one specific area such as a factory or an industrial estate. Afterwards, The approach is validated by case study. Finally, the sustainable design approach underpinned with life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) and ontology is developed.

This thesis presents three papers that contribute to the measurement and understanding of the process of economic development. In particular, I deal with issues of significant importance in the current literature in development economics: the provision and regulatory institutions of infrastructure, firms and industries' behaviour and performance, and the process of human capital accumulation and its link to gender issues. In Chapter 2 I investigate the effect of electricity provision on industrialization using a panel of Indian states from 1965-1984. To address the endogeneity of investment in electrification, I use the introduction of a new agricultural technology intensive in irrigation (the Green Revolution) as a natural experiment. As electric pumpsets are used to provide farmers with cheap irrigation water, I use the uneven availability of groundwater to predict divergence in the expansion of the electricity network and, ultimately, to quantify the effect of electrification on industrial outcomes. I present a series of tests to rule out alternative explanations that could link groundwater availability to industrialization directly or through other means than electrification. Overall, the uneven expansion of the electricity network explains between 10 and 15 percentage points of the difference in manufacturing output across states in India. In Chapter 3 I explore how firms in India cope with the erratic and expensive provision of electricity. In a model that combines upstream regulation with downstream heterogeneous firms in a monopolistic competition firework, I investigate the role of the electricity regulator's preferences and the economic environment (i.e. regulation and openness) in determining the decision to adopt a captive generator of electricity and industries' aggregate productivity. I show that a firm's productivity, the electricity regulator's disregard for the well-being of industrial producers consuming electricity and greater industry protection from competition are associated with greater adoption of captive power. The mechanisms I propose are present for a representative repeated cross-section sample of Indian firms in the 1990s, with heterogeneous effects along dimensions such as location. In Chapter 4 I investigate the effect of the Green Revolution on rural literacy and rural women's employment and literacy levels, using a panel of 254 districts for census years, before and after the introduction of the high yield variety (HYV) seeds. Even though the new technology has been shown to increase returns to education, aggregate effects on literacy are ambiguous a priori, if claims are correct that the process excluded most poor farmers and that mechanization replaced women labour and their effects are strong. I find robust evidence that the increase in adoption of the new seeds is associated with increases of around 2 percentage points in literacy levels. The effects are only present for treated cohorts. Additionally, I find no evidence of a Green Revolution related increase in the gender gap: even though results indicate that the percentages of working and literate women in rural India fall over time, a greater intensity in HYV is shown to mitigate this trend.

The purpose of this thesis is to develop and test a framework on the role and dynamic interaction of group life (community) and societal rules (society) as one of the factors shaping patterns of economic growth and adaptation. Cross-country regression analysis is undertaken to determine the significance of the relationships between community and society (individually and jointly) and various institutional factors. Following this, two pairs of comparative city-region case studies explore how these dynamics play out in specific geographical and institutional contexts. The findings confirm the importance of the interaction between community and society in shaping individual incentives and territorial responses to change. In general, 'bridging' forms of community and strong societal rules facilitate positive outcomes, whilst 'bonding' forms of community have broadly negative impacts on growth and adaptation. Critically, the significance and impact of community appears to be dependent on the societal environment in which it operates. Community matters most when society is weakest, but community is not simply a substitute for rules; indeed community and society appear to potentiate positive outcomes in important cases, for example near the technology frontier. Diversity - of sectors, groups, and institutions - appears to be particularly important in facilitating positive forms of community and society interaction, and in promoting adaptive economies. Overall, there is strong recursivity in the relationships, suggesting path dependency (lock-in or evolution) may be the norm. The study contributes to understanding the 'black box' of institutions, particularly within the context of regional economies, and underlines the importance of the role of community- level forces and political economy in processes of economic growth and adjustment. It suggests there is value in pursuing the role of institutions still further, and exploring in more detail the agenda of an evolutionary economic geography.

This dissertation examines Western views on the relations between the West and the rest of the world in order to discover explanations for the origins of the economic inequalities between nations as manifested in the contemporary division between the developed and the underdeveloped countries. This research is focussed on three distinct chronological and intellectual phases: 1) "perception of differences" (from classical Antiquity to the 18th century); 2) Eurocentrism and the anti-imperialist reaction (19th century and up to World War II); and 3) capitalist "developmentalism" and the Marxist general theory of economic imperialism (after WWII), The first two phases trace the sources and the evolution of the concepts underlying the theories analysed in the third part, which is the principal and most extensive of the three. The third phase also includes an investigation of the most recent reactions within the developmentalist and the Marxist camps against, respectively, the so-called orthodoxy of development economics and dependency theory. It synthesizes contemporary research on the development of West European capitalism insofar as it sheds light on long-term influences on the appearance of underdevelopment. Aside from the systematic discussion and criticism of the theories themselves, the research yields a "unified field" approach to the problems and issues of underdevelopment, and it further allows a summatory evaluation of the general question of the possibilities of over-all Third World economic development.

This thesis examines the importance of property rights in the process of economic development of poor countries. The first chapter examines the impact of female property inheritance rights on human capital investment of women. Using plausibly exogenous variation created by amendments to the female inheritance law in India, I find that exposure to improved female inheritance rights increased the mean educational attainment of women. I also provide some suggestive evidence that the mechanism behind such an effect may be explained by the complementarity between female inheritance rights and education in the context of household property management rather than by a relaxation in the household budget constraint following reduction in dowry payments at the time of marriage. The second chapter looks at the intergenerational impact of improving mothers' property inheritance rights on their children's education. Using the same legal amendment to female inheritance laws as in chapter 1, I find that stronger inheritance rights of mothers had a positive impact on the mean education level of their daughters, but had little effect on that of sons. The chapter also provides suggestive evidence that the underlying mechanism of this effect appears to be an improvement in mothers' intra-household bargaining power rather than their increased access to credit as a result of improvement in inheritance rights following the reform. The third chapter (joint with Maitreesh Ghatak) examines the impact of land reform legislation, aimed at strengthening property rights, on agricultural productivity in India. We find heterogeneous treatment effects of land reform on productivity, both across types of land reform as well as across states of India. We argue that a plausible explanation for such observed inter-state heterogeneity in land reform experience may be found in the differential emphasis laid by states on different components of land reform, in particular ceiling versus tenancy laws.