334 research outputs found
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Spatial convergence and growth in Indian agriculture: 1967-2010
No full textInter-state diversity has been a perennial feature of Indian agriculture. The study probes if per capita income in Indian agriculture has converged across states in the last four and a half decades. It finds strong evidence in favour of beta convergence but not in favour of sigma convergence. Spatial econometric techniques used in the study aid in identifying the impact of spatial neighbours on the growth of a state. Results indicate significant spatial dependence among states. The study also identifies the drivers of growth agriculture in the last four and a half decades and results indicate that infrastructure like roads, irrigation, electricity aid in growth and so do quality of human capital. Hence, investments targeting higher quality of infrastructure, both physical and human and efficient water management will aid in agricultural growth in India
Reading the tea leaves on financial inclusion: The Case of rural labour households
No full textUnderstanding the extent of financial inclusion of rural labour households is important since in the intercensal period 2001-11, the proportion of agricultural labourers in the workforce increased by 3.5 percentage points. This paper examines progress in financial inclusion using information on indebtedness of rural labour households collected by NSSO as part survey of employment and unemployment conducted in 2004-05 and 2009-10. It is estimated that 22.3 million out of the nearly 66 million rural labour households report being in debt in 2009-10. The share of formal institutions in
outstanding debt of rural labour households increased from 29 percent to 37 percent while the share of money lender decreased from 44 percent to 33 percent during this period. There has been a near doubling of loans sourced from cooperative societies and a 77 percent increase in loans sourced from banks. In contrast, outstanding debt on account of borrowing from money lender increased by a meagre 1.7 percent. One does not have a ready explanation for the miniscule growth in outstanding loans from
money lenders. What is promising is that the reliance on institutional sources among rural labour households without cultivable land increased from 20.6 percent to 26 percent. The aggregate picture however masks large variations across the states of India and one does not observe any structural change in geographical distribution of flow of credit and share of outstanding advances to the landless
Revenue non-equivalence in multidimensional procurement auctions under asymmetry
No full textUsing an example we show that the Revenue Equivalence in the Scoring Auctions, as postulated by Che (1993), no longer holds when the suppliers are asymmetric in their costs of production
Short-term migration and consumption expenditure of households in rural India
No full textIn 2007-08, short-term migrants constituted 4.35 per cent of the rural workforce. A total of 9.25 million households in rural India had short-term migrants.Using a nationally representative data for rural India, this paper examines differences in consumption expenditure across households with and without a household member who is a short-migrant. We use an instrumental variable approach to control for the presence of a short-term migrant in a household. We find that households with a short-term migrant
have lower monthly per capita consumption expenditure and monthly per capita food expenditure compared to households without a short-term migrant. Short-term migrants are not unionised, they work in the unorganised sector, they do not have written job contracts and state governments are yet to ensure that the legislation protecting them are properly enforced. This could be one of the reasons why we do not observe higher levels of expenditure in households with such migrants
Extensive and intensive margins of India's exports: Comparison with China
No full textShould India's export promotion policies be targeted at accelerating export growth at the extensive(new trading relationships) or at the intensive margin (increase in trade of existing relationships)? To help answer this question, we undertake a comparative study of exports from India and China by analysing the role of extensive and intensive margins in the export market penetration of the two countries during 1995-2011. We further decompose intensive margin into quantity and price margins. As far as extensive
margin is concerned, our results show that the gap between the two countries is getting narrower as India is clearly catching up with China. By contrast, India lags significantly behind China in terms of intensive margin due to an abysmally low and stagnant quantity margin. Intensification, rather than diversification, has been the crucial driving force of China's export success. India's exports of capital-intensive products performed better compared to labour intensive products. The lacklustre performance in labour-intensive exports is entirely due to a lack of depth in India's market presence even
as it expanded the range of its products and markets. Our analysis suggests that India can reap rich dividends by adopting policies aimed at accelerating export growth at the intensive margin. Contrary to the general perception, there exist a great potential for India to expand and intensify its export relationships with the traditional developed country partners
Student politics: A Game-theoretic exploration
No full textStudents in institutes of higher education often engage in campus-politics. Typically there are student-parties who electorally compete with each other to gain control of the union which is usually the apex student body dealing directly with the higher authorities on student-related and other academic issues. Often however, campus politics act as fertile breeding grounds for future politicians of the country. As a result there is often direct intervention by larger political parties into student affairs. In fact, the student parties on campus are essentially student wings of larger national parties, which command huge amounts of resources that are used during elections, often instigating conflict and violence on-campus. This paper game-theoretically models the interplay of such `extra-electoral' investments and electoral outcomes in an otherwise standard probabilistic voting model. We find that the political party who is likely to be more popular is also more likely to expend greater resources towards `extra-electoral' elements, in turn spawning greater violence on-campus, even when such investments are disliked by student-voters. We also look at some plausible extensions of the benchmark model where this basic conclusion still holds true. The essential flavor and predictions of the model are borne out by several historical and contemporary instances of student politics in some countries like India, Burma, and Latin America
Counting the poor: Measurement and other issues
No full textIn June 2012, the Government of India appointed an Expert Group (C. Rangarajan as Chairman) to take a fresh look at the methodology for the measurement of poverty. The Committee submitted its report towards the end of June 2014. The purpose of this article is to briefly explain the approach taken by this Expert Group (Rangarajan) and also to clarify some of the issues raised by few researchers and others on the report recently. This paper first presents approach of Expert Group (Rangarajan). The clarifications are given under the following heads: (1) what is new in the approach for poverty line; (2) Use of calories; (3) Multi-dimensional poverty; (4) High urban poverty in many states; (5) NAS-NSS consumption differences; (6) poverty measure in other countries; (7) public expenditure and poverty; (8) poverty ratio under eligibility under programmes. As the most of the researchers commented on multi-dimensional poverty, this note elaborates on the reasons for not undertaking this measure in the report
The 'Poorest might catch up': Convergence vs. Pseudo-convergence
No full textPublic welfare policies in developing countries have a Rawlsian perspective; they seek to uplift the poor, the poorest of the poor in particular. Policies to enable the poor to catch up with the rich are generally two-fold, viz., inclusive growth, and redistributive (transfer) programmes. This paper proposes twin concepts and measures of convergence (κ*) and pseudo-convergence (pseudo-κ*) to characterize such outcomes. Unlike the conventional measures of convergence, they can contra-distinguish outcomes during economic growth as against decay. Illustrations based on estimates of per capita GDP and consumption across countries in the world show divergence and pseudo-divergence between 1993 and 2011
Is India ready for flexible Inflation-targeting?
No full textIn this paper we analyze whether the current macroeconomic environment in India is suitable for implementation of inflation targeting as a monetary policy strategy, in light of the recommendation of the Urjit Patel Committee Report. Our results indicate that historically the Reserve Bank of India has given more importance to inflation compared to output growth and exchange rate changes in its monetary policy conduct and that in recent times there has been an increased emphasis on monetary independence thereby comfortably placing the RBI on a path to move towards flexible inflation
targeting. However we also find factors, which are traditionally outside the control of monetary policy do exert a strong impact on aggregate prices in India thereby making the choice of nominal anchor a tricky one. Furthermore, the success of monetary policy in containing inflation is found to be crucially contingent on an appropriate fiscal policy as well
Budget 2014: Marginal realignment of tactics to strategy
No full textThe paper examines the restructuring of expenditure in the first budget of the new government, and its feasibility. It compares the increase in budget allocations for key macroeconomic aggregates and sectoral plan outlays for the BJP and UPAII interim budget, and the change from the interim budget. Although overall tactics are aligned to the strategy articulated, the alignment is only marginal as yet, because the various strands are not well integrated to tell a coherent story of how they work together,
and changes are not quantitatively significant. This is unfortunate because the macroeconomic changes are aimed at raising growth and jobs. There are also small beginnings in better systems, incentives, composition of public spending and public services. Apart from contributing to growth these help improve equality through capacity creation so the economy does not hit sectoral bottlenecks, as happened with the past excessive share of consumption-inducing government expenditures. A performance in relation to a promise based index ranking of post reform governments shows that
although the UPAII was worst, the first congress government was the best, with the BJP led NDA coming in third. So the BJP has to do better this time if it wants to improve its ranking