Indian Economists Research Articles

The Social Effects Of The Economic Transformation In India (An Attempt At Measurement and Evaluation)

One of significant and, at the same time, challenging research problems in Economics is measuring the social effect of economic growth (development). Economic growth should never be treated a goal per se. It is rational provided that it brings effects such as, generally speaking, an improvement in the standard of living. However, this is not always the case. Social sciences, including Economics, have not developed any uniform methods of measuring and evaluating such effects yet. This paper constitutes an attempt to measure and evaluate the social effects of the reforms of the Indian economy and state launched in 1991. The analysis covers a period of over twenty years. As a result of the aforementioned reforms, at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, India ranked third in the world in terms of GDP (based on purchasing power parity), after the USA and China. So what are the social effects of such a dynamic economic growth? For the purposes of this paper, in order to quantify and evaluate the social effects of the economic growth in India and its dynamics in the analysed time period, the author experimentally adopts a popular socio-demographic index, i.e. the average further life expectancy (e0). This constitutes the so-called natural aggregate (a micro index) applied in social development analyses. It is quite commonly used by Indian economists and statisticians, albeit it is rarely applied in European Economics. The empirical analysis of the trends in the said index proves that the rapid economic growth in India after the year 1991 has brought about substantial increases in the life expectancy of the inhabitants of the country and a diminishing of disparities in this regard on a national scale (in different cross-sections: urban-rural, females-males, as well as in the regional perspective). In the mid-2010s India is almost on a par with the countries with a medium development rate in terms of the life expectancy of its inhabitants and in some states (e.g. Kerala). the value of this index is comparable to that in the highly developed countries.

Amartya Kumar Sen’s ethical interpretation of poverty

On the threshold of the 21st century, the problem of poverty remains unresolved. Many still suffer from hunger, and many more have no access to running water, or education. This raises a fundamental question that has bothered economy researchers for centuries: What determines the wealth of some countries, and the poverty of others? One of the contemporary researchers analysing the causes of poverty and development barriers is Indian economist Amartya Kumar Sen. Referring to the socio-economic theory of Sen, the author indicates that modernity implies the need for reflection on the definition of poverty. The author attempts to justify the thesis which focuses on the discord between the evaluation concepts of good and evil with objective economic factors defining poverty. The author suggests that the definition of poverty should be grounded in considerations concerning good and evil in a specific time, as well as cultural and historical context.

LIBERDADECOMODESENVOLVIMENTOEMAMARTYASEN

This scientific paper studies some of the main concepts of the Indian economist Amartya Sen’s work. His research surmises freedom’s development as a means to human and social effectiveness. His work advocates the concurrent relation between government intervention and the expansion of individual initiative as a fundamental link to improve democratic regimes. The aim of this paper is present what Amartya Sen meant by “instrumental freedoms” and how they are connected to the desired development idealized by the economist. We conclude that his research on welfare equality is important in the context of unequal countries like Brazil.

Wprowadzenie do problemu ubóstwa w ujęciu Amartyi Kumara Sena. Wymiar etyczny

On the threshold of the 21st century the problem of poverty has not been dealt with yet. The world constantly suffers hunger, and many people have no access to running water or education. This raises fundamental question, which have bothered economy researchers for centuries: What determines the wealth of some countries, and the poverty of others? One of the contemporary researchers analysing the causes of poverty and development barriers is Indian economist Amartya Sen. Referring to the socio-economic theory of Sen, the author indicates that modernity implies the need for reflection on the definition of poverty. The author attempts to justify the thesis which focuses on the dissonance between the evaluation concepts of good and evil with objective economic factors which define poverty. The author claims that the definition of poverty should be grounded in considerations concerning good and evil in a specific time, as well as cultural and historical context.

DESENVOLVIMENTO RURAL: AFINAL, SOBRE O QUE ESTAMOS FALANDO?

The development expression has been increasingly used and consolidated in the study of socioeconomic realities. However, there is still to limit the scope of the term as well as qualification. This article discusses the significance of rural development expression, bringing together authors and seeking foregrounding of the concepts involved in the expression. The main objective of this work is, from a literature review of the concept of rural development and a context of the Capability Approach, indicate how this approach can contribute to the construction of a rural development concept better suited to the diversity inherent in the environment under review. For this, a brief review was made of what has been discussed about the development process and how this process is associated with rural expression. The term development is analyzed from the construction of their interpretations of concepts and theoretical development. It was possible to recognize the main adjectives, as well as the evolution of these discussions over the last 30 years. Finally, it identified a concept associated with the Capability Approach, presented by the Indian economist Amartya Sen. The idea of rural development associated with the Capability Approach, leads to a design that identifies rural development as an increase in choice of individuals residing in environments made up of socio-economic, geographical and cultural relations that show through the landscape, use and (or) preservation of aspects related to nature whose reproduction is not entirely dependent and (or) conditioned by human action.

Anticolonial Climates: Physiology, Ecology, and Global Population, 1920s–1950s

Historiography on tropical medicine and determinist ideas about climate and racial difference rightly focuses on links with nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial rule. Occasionally and counterintuitively, however, these ideas have been redeployed as anticolonial argument. This article looks at one such instance; the racial physiology of Indian economist, ecologist, and anticolonial nationalist Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968). It argues that the explanatory context was mid-twentieth-century discussion of global population growth, which raised questions of density and belonging to land. Ecology offered a new language and scientific system within which people and place were conceptually integrated, in this instance to anticolonial ends.

Romesh Chunder Dutt’s Indian-English epics and epochs

At the turn of the last century, the Indian poet, novelist, economist, historian, and civil servant Romesh Chunder Dutt published two English-language “condensations” and translations of the authoritative Sanskrit tellings of the ancient epics: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. This essay argues that, for Dutt, the epics document the past, its social mores and its artefacts, while simultaneously serving as historical artefacts of, as well as living organisms from, that past. The epics are excavated treasures that embody not the dead weight of a now inanimate object but a living, breathing, speaking voice. In transposing the Sanskrit sloka into the English trochaic octametre in his translations, Dutt measures out “India” in verse, transposing the material, metrical, and spoken form of the once-known to the once-again nation. Thus, his translations of the ancient epics simultaneously establish and blur the epochal time of a supposedly historically and geographically stable and singular entity known as “India” and in so doing illustrate the fraught category of “Modern Indian Literature” and the modern Indian nation, which depends on recovering an “authentic” pre-colonial identity to inaugurate its modernity under British colonial rule.

A Discursive Dominance Theory of Economic Reform Sustainability: The Case of India

This article hypothesizes that economic reforms become sustainable when the discursive conditions prevailing in society tip against the existing paradigm under exceptional circumstances. Thus, unless the pro-liberalization constituencies dominate the development discourse, economic reforms, initiated under the exigencies of crisis and conditionalities, or carried out by a convinced executive with or without the stimulus of a crisis, will be reversed. The discursive conditions are determined based on eight factors: the dominant view of international intellectuals, illustrative country cases, executive orientations, political will, the degree and the perceived causes of economic crisis, attitudes on the part of donor agencies, and the perceived outcomes of economic reforms. The paper seeks to prove this “discursive dominance” hypothesis for the Indian case through a cross-temporal, comparative review of the evolution of economic policy in India over six different phases.

Manage India - The Strategic Management of Corporate and Social Sector

Amazingly, the economists, corporate players who used to make predictions about the economy or the growth of the corporate sector even for 2025, 2050…. were not able to foresee the monster of recession even few months in advance. Before the recession, economists, corporate players were talking about the requirement of the manpower paucity in future for matching the economical growth. Amazingly, professionals made liberal predictions of economy and manpower requirement in 2015, 2020, 2030, 2050….but there was no serious prediction about the millions of people losing the jobs in next few months. Till the start of 2008, when overall world economy was doing better and corporate sector was growing by leaps and bounds, nobody predicted that in just few months, the economy would be crippled and a country like USA would be sucked in the black hole of recession. Interestingly, decision makers, and economists are considered experts in giving direction to the overall economical growth, but on many occasions, and this time around also, they failed miserably in steering the economy on the slippery road of recession. The monster of deflation came out of its old grave and caught these so called future economic/business predictors unaware about this new development. The recent economic crisis has put a big question mark on the worthiness of the existing economical models/concepts and also on the vision and the capabilities of so called economists and the decision makers of both government and corporate sector. India is so vast and diverse that the impact of difficult times varied from state to state, city to city, town to town, village to village. The Indian corporate sector, people, economists and government were far more worried about the impact of the global recession than of the unfortunate Mumbai and Pune attacks. The severe effects of the slowdown did not harm much as more than 60 percent of the population in India is engaged directly or indirectly with the agriculture sector, which is intensively and extensively labor oriented and highly socialized. More than 80 percent of Indian families depending on agriculture are in rural areas with moderate exposure to the products manufactured and marketed by the corporate sector. Being part of the bottom of the pyramid, this segment has been explored till now by few corporate organizations only. These organizations are satisfying hardly few needs of this low income segment through their products (normally low price with optimum quality) which is unevenly spread geographically throughout the country. In fact, the products of cottage industry and unorganized local traditional industry have penetrated the Indian rural market deeply.

Shankar Acharya and Rakesh Mohan (eds.) India’s Economy—Performance and Challenges: Essays in Honour of Montek Singh Ahluwalia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2010. xv+465 pages.

This volume comprises a compilation of essays written by distinguished Indian economists, and international economists and observers on India, in honour of Montek Singh Ahluwalia, an eminent economist and currently Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, widely recognised as one of the main architects and drivers of the economic reform process. In a very well-written Introduction to this festschrift, capturing the essence of the contributions to the volume and weaving them into an excellent overview, Shankar Acharya and Rakesh Mohan state, “Indeed the story of India’s economic policies over the past three decades could easily be woven around Montek’s career as the pre-eminent government economist through most of this time”. This role is earlier acknowledged in the foreword to the volume by the current Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, the initiator of the overall reform process as Finance Minister from 1991-96, when Montek (as he is popularly known) worked under him in important positions. This recognition also finds strong support amongst the authors, who were close associates of Montek in policy-making, as they recount the role he played in both shaping and driving the economic policy reform agenda. How a small but well-knit team of economists, most of whom had earlier worked in the World Bank or the IMF, could actually achieve this in a country as large and complex as India would baffle any observer. While the book provides no explicit answer, the reform process appears to have initially found favour in response to the economic crisis in 1991. The process then gained momentum as the reforms showed measurable success, and this helped win over the trust and confidence of the political ruling élite.

<em>Robert Knight: Reforming Editor in Victorian India</em>, by Edwin Hirschmann

Reviewed by: Robert Knight: Reforming Editor in Victorian India Jennifer Regan-Lefebvre (bio) Robert Knight: Reforming Editor in Victorian India, by Edwin Hirschmann; pp. xi + 272. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008, £21.99, $50.00. The history of the imperial press is enjoying a healthy popularity, and thus a biography of Robert Knight, the English-born newspaper editor in Victorian India, is timely and welcome. Robert Knight: Reforming Editor in Victorian India is not, however, a rushed attempt to respond to that trend. Edwin Hirschmann explains in the preface that his biography is one forty years in the making, and this is evident in the strong empirical research: the bibliography boasts a generous list of primary sources consulted, both published and archival, on three continents. Rather unfortunately, it also reveals the relatively slim range of recent secondary sources with which Hirschmann has engaged. This is a shame, as this author has undoubtedly witnessed such broad developments in historiography over the past four decades that it would have been interesting to have his reflections on how his subject should be located in the recent historical scholarship on India, the British Empire, press history, and biography more generally. The book is chronologically structured into five chapters which reflect Hirschmann's view of Knight as progressing from reformer to editor, dissident, imperial critic, and finally to "statesman elder" (193). Hirschmann introduces political events and debates, then gives detailed reports of Knight's writings and pronouncements on the Raj. Often quoting Knight's newspaper editorials at length, Hirschmann offers a service to scholars to whom Knight's newspapers are not available. Hirschmann provides historical background that students will welcome for its clarity and accessibility; its particularly strong description of economic, demographic, and technological changes reflects Knight's interest in these topics. Knight is entirely deserving of a biography as the English editor in India who established several major Indian newspapers, including the Times of India and the Statesman, and emerged as a persistent and vocal critic of British policy in India. Of humble London origins, he arrived in Bombay in 1847, married into an Anglo-Indian family, but struggled financially in several commercial positions in trade and brokerage. In 1857, he was offered, on the strength of several articles he had written on Indian [End Page 305] economics, the acting editorship of the Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce. The beginning of his tenure was marked by the so-called Indian Mutiny, and Knight adopted an unusual editiorial position, arguing that the Mutiny revealed the poverty of the Indian people and their exploitation by the Raj. It is regrettable that more source material is not available for Knight's early life; Hirschmann is forced to extrapolate based on what is known about the mores of the London community into which Knight was born to build a picture of him as imbued with the reformist spirit of Chartism. But in terms of his first decade in India, tantalising questions are left unanswered about how Knight went from being a bankrupted Englishman of modest origins and connections to being invited by Indian businessmen to replace the permanent editor of the Bombay Times, with all the cross-cultural negotiations and politics that must have involved. As editor of the Bombay Times (which became the Times of India in 1861), Knight called for Indian land reform, the fair and equal distribution of justice, and fiscal caution. He believed that Christian conversion would be necessary for social reform in India, but he argued for separation of church and state. His tenure as editor ended in 1869 following a dispute with his business partner, Mathias Mull, after which he founded the Indian Economist. A brief spell in official employment analysing economic data for the Bengal government conflicted with Knight's critical editorial output and ended badly. A London edition of the Statesman was short-lived, as Knight was sued for libel and suffered poor health. Back in Calcutta, the Statesman moved forward and gave its support to the young Indian National Congress but faced another expensive libel trial. Knight died in 1890, having consistently scrutinised imperial rule over thirty years, whilst maintaining a belief that imperial government...

Changing India-West Cultural Dialectics

The changing profiles of the India-West cultural dialogue are pursued over the last sixty years. After discussing French anthropologist Louis Dumont’s mid-twentieth century “binary opposition” between India and the West as the starting anthropological point of departure, I turn to Wilhelm Halbfass, a German comparative philosopher, for a better differentiated treatment of the changing India-West cultural dialogues and dialectics. During the last decade, the topic has received a distinctly conceptually open and inclusive treatment at the hands of two Noble Laureates: Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet, thinker and diplomat, and Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and social philosopher. Both demonstrate convincingly how India-West cultural dialectics has long been historically and culturally significant, especially once it is viewed interdependently from both directions in relation to the ongoing major global historical-cultural-political changes. Lately, this has included, for example, the growing technological-cultural interdependence between “globalizing India,” unifying Europe (as the European Union), and the post 9/11 U.S.

Science Policy for India

After retiring as chairman and research director of an Indian oil company in the mid1990s, the distinguished scientist Pranab Kumar Mukhopadhyay became a technical consultant for the Indian Institute of Petroleum (IIP). The IIP, one of India's premier national laboratories, is situated at the foothills of the Himalayas, bordering the Rajaji National Park in Dehra Dun. On his visits to IIP, Mukhopadhyay would unfailingly begin his day with a morning walk through the Institute's tea gardens and the neighboring villages. By the wayside of a route that he frequented, was a small furnace that a farmer used to make jaggery from sugarcane. Mukhopadhyay, who holds a doctorate in the sciences and spent the bulk of his professional life researching hydrocarbon fuels, combustion, and energy, intuitively felt that the furnace design and efficiency could be improved. Fueled by bagasse, waste generated after sugarcane had been squeezed of its juice, the furnace had been designed and built by the farmer himself. The inquisitive and thoughtful Mukhopadhyay soon befriended the farmer and persuaded him to let IIP engineers examine the furnace. Mukhopadhyay also convinced his good friend, the director of IIP, to assign the project of examining the furnace and improving its design to a staff combustion engineer. Combustion scientists and engineers from the IIP were able to improve efficiency and design such that jaggery production went up by 20%. Almost a decade later, the improved furnace design to make jaggery and its consequent benefits to local farmers is an achievement that IIP leadership never fails to highlight in presentations to visiting politicians and administrators. This story highlights the potential for scientific research and development (R&D) in developing countries like India and vindicates the belief that India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964), had in science and its transformative capabilities. Even so, the example also depicts the failure of Indian science to show relevance to Indian needs. After all, it took a visiting technical consultant to spur IIP to address a technical need in its neighboring community of thirty years. The pursuit of science for its own sake is noble and certainly worth encouraging. At the same time, a portion of scientific and technological research must address economic and social problems, particularly so for the developing world where there are competing demands for scarce resources. Leading Indian scientific agencies are acutely aware of this and one of them, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), has begun a systemic analysis of this issue through an expert committee chaired by the renowned Indian economist and policy maker, Vijay Kelkar. In the fall of 2003, the authors were invited by the Kelkar Committee to author a background paper on this subject to highlight key issues. This contribution is based on that background paper. Background: The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research The CSIR was established in the early 1940s to provide the scientific and technological underpinnings of an industrializing nation. The CSIR is India's largest scientific establishment and probably the world's largest chain of publicly funded research laboratories (Rajagopal et al., 1991). Through its network of thirty-eight research laboratories and institutes and eighty field stations and extension centers, CSIR is almost ubiquitous in India. Covering a wide spectrum of science and technology, CSIR's research laboratories are classified as discipline- and business sector-specific. The National Chemical Laboratory (Pune) and the National Physical Laboratory (New Delhi) are examples of discipline-specific laboratories, while the IPP (Dehra Dun) the Central Leather Research Institute (Chennai) and the Central Drug Research Institute (Lucknow) are examples of business sector-specific laboratories. With almost 21,000 employees, an elaborate management structure dominates CSIR, which, although federally funded, is structured as an autonomous and independent organization. …

The Right to Development: Sir Arthur Lewis Memorial Lecture

Previous speakers in this series addressed the celebrated contribution of Sir Arthur Lewis to intellectual and public life in the Caribbean: as scholar, teacher, administrator, and role model to a remarkably creative generation of West Indian economists. In his inaugural address, Rex Nettleford, reminded us that this eminent economist and Nobel Laureate was, in the final analysis, a great educator and guru to his people both in the Caribbean and the Third World who perceived their future and any hope of redemption to rest firmly on the exercise of their intellect and their imagination. I thank the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank for the opportunity to join Norman Girvan, Alistair McIntyre, and Lloyd Best in paying my respects to the memory of Sir Arthur Lewis-illustrious son of the Caribbean, public intellectual and development economist supreme.

Conversations with Indian Economists by V. N. Balasubramanyam

Conversations with Indian Economists by V. N. Balasubramanyam

“The tribe of pundits called economists” and economic debate in post‐independence India

The rise of an economics profession in post‐Independence India is outlined, and something of the contribution of that profession to economic debate in India considered. The roots of the economics profession and of economic debate after 1947 are traced to the colonial era, and the institutions and the institution‐builders essential to its emergence after 1947 discussed. Five “generations” of Indian economists, active both before and after 1947, are identified. Attention is drawn to the high quality of debates on the Indian economy, the high level of theoretical discourse and the quality of political economy traditions. Particular attention is paid to the remarkable contribution of the Economic Weekly/Economic and Political Weekly, and there is treatment of the relationship between the academy, on the one hand, and the state and its representatives on the other.

Essays on the Commercialization of Indian Agriculture. Edited by K. N. Raj, Neeladri Bhattacharya, Sumit Guha, and Sakti Padhi. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985. xxii, 354 pp. $19.95.

Of the dozen essays that comprise this volume, three are by prominent Indian economists: K.N. Raj's piece introduces the subject; Krishna Bharadwaj's theoretcial essay summarizes what has been learnt on the process of commercialization; and Amit Bhaduri offers a challenging interpretation of the differences between agricultural commercialization in the eastern and western parts of Uttar Pradesh. Other important contributors include Pradipta Chaudhuri, Sumit Guha, and Chiranjib Sen.

Recent Developments in Open Economy Macroeconomics

The convening of this conference is a welcome sign that Indian economists, like their peers in other countries, are becoming increasingly conscious of the benefits that a country can gain by integrating itself into the global economy. These benefits are primarily microeconomic: they permit an economy to achieve output of greater value from a given set of inputs. They may also permit the inputs to grow more rapidly, if export-led growth overcomes the foreign exchange constraint. On the other hand, integration into the world economy does make an economy more exposed to global shocks, and coping with these accentuates the challenge to macroeconomic plicymakers.

IX. Industrialisation in India and Indonesia

About ten years ago Deepak Nayyar, an Indian economist, lamented on the sluggishness of industrial growth in India, which at the time had persisted for more than ten years, since the rate of industrial growth dropped sharply from an average annual rate of 7.7% during the period 1951–1965 to an average rate of only 3.6% during the decade 1965–1975. Seven years later, at a conference on industrialisation in East and Southeast Asia held at the Australian National University, Canberra, Professor Deepak Lai, a distinguished Indian economist teaching at University College, London, and a consultant to the World Bank, expressed a similar disappointment, describing the absolute level of industrialisation in India as well its contribution to per capita growth as disappointing, even dismal compared with the rapid industrial growth of the four East Asian newly-industrialising countries (NICs), namely South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore.

Poverty and public policy

The problem of poverty is particularly acute in India. With 14% of the world’s population, we have the misfortune of having almost twice as large a share of the world’s poor. Indeed, as I shall presently underline, the question of poverty and its amelioration has been at the center of our concerns from the beginning of our planning efforts almost four decades ago. Little therefore can be said on it that some distinguished Indian economist has not already said. In some ways, therefore, to talk on the design of public policy for poverty to an Indian audience is to carry coal to Newcastle or. as the old saying goes, to teach your grandmother how to suck eggs. Nonetheless, I hope to provide a fresh perspective by putting the problem into an explicit analytical framework that permits alternative policy designs to be sharply defined and contrasted. I also intend to draw on international experience to put our efforts and problems into both historical and comparative perspectives.