Daily Quiz: UPSC Prelims Marathon – July 31, 2018

Recently, World Bank has released Ease of Doing Business report for 2018, which placed India at 100th rank out of 190 countries. India had ranked poorly on this ranking for past few years. In the previous rankings for 2017, it ranked at 130th position. Country is one of the top 10 improvers in this year’s assessment.

The Union Cabinet has approved for setting up the India Post Payments Bank (IPPB) as a Public Limited Company under the Department of Posts (which is under Ministry of Information and Broadcasting), with 100% Government of India (GOI) equity. The India Post Payments Bank will leverage the Department‘s network, reach, and resources to make simple, low-cost, quality financial services easily accessible to customers all over the country. A Payments Bank can hold a maximum balance of Rs 1 lakh per customer; can an issue ATM/debit cards but not credit cards; offer payments and remittance services; deal in simple financial products like mutual fund units and insurance products. They, however, cannot undertake lending service.

Launched in 2015 at Panipat, Haryana to address the declining Child Sex Ratio (CSR) and related issues of women empowerment over a life-cycle continuum. It is a tri-ministerial effort of Ministries of Women and Child Development, Health & Family Welfare and Human Resource Development. The scheme has no provision for individual cash transfer component or Direct Benefit Transfer scheme.

It is the largest organization conducting socio-economic surveys in India. Its nation-wide surveys on various socio-economic aspects include follow-up enterprise surveys of Economic Census, field work relating to Annual Survey of Industries (ASI), supervision of area enumeration and crop estimation surveys conducted by state agencies under the Improvement of Crop Statistics scheme, Urban Frame Survey with a view to prepare a frame of compact units of urban areas as the first stage sampling units (FSUs), organizing methodological studies and pilot surveys on important subjects and collection of price data from rural and urban sectors.

The organisation functions under the overall direction of a Governing Council with requisite independence and autonomy in the matter of collection, processing and publication of National Sample Survey (NSS) data.

Human labour and land contribute to production. Capital goods are machines which are used to produce other goods. Consumer goods are finished products. They are not factors of production, but products

The World Bank has been publishing poverty line since 1990 World Development Report (WDR) on Poverty.  It has anchored its international poverty lines to the national poverty lines used in the poorest countries. In 2008, the World Bank came out with a figure (revised largely due to inflation) of $1.25 at 2005 purchasing-power parity (PPP). The common international poverty line has in the past been roughly $1 a day. In 2015 World Bank updated international poverty line to US $1.90 a day. Determining the poverty line is usually done by finding the total cost of all the essential resources that an average human adult consumes in one year.

Crowding out effect: A situation when increased interest rates lead to a reduction in private investment spending such that it dampens the initial increase of total investment spending is called crowding out effect.Sometimes, government adopts an expansionary fiscal policy stance and increases its spending to boost the economic activity. This leads to an increase in interest rates. Increased interest rates affect private investment decisions. A high magnitude of the crowding out effect may even lead to lesser income in the economy.Fiscal deficit means Government need to borrow from the market which leads to crowding-out of funding for private players.