Examining Sustainability of Federal Finances in India: An Application of Non-Stationary Panel Methods

This paper examines the fiscal sustainability of Indian States during the 1990s on the basis of their budgetary data. Sustainability has been discussed using the inter-temporal budget constraint framework and has been tested by applying the panel co-integration technique. The panel analysis reveals that revenue receipts and revenue expenditures are co-integrated across the States. Further, the insensitivity of the results to the choice of the period of analysis attests robustness to the result that the State finances in India may not be unsustainable.

     

Is Peasantry Dead? Neoliberal Reforms,the State and Agrarian Change in Bangladesh

This paper focuses on three decades of agrarian reform policies and the resulting peculiarity of the development trajectory in Bangladesh. I interrogate the ways in which the reforms have led to a paradoxical situation consisting of partial protelarianization in attempting to promote a market‐based economy. I contend that the particular positioning of the state is central to understanding this dialectic between proletarianization and the persistence of small peasants amid a huge rush towards the formation of a capitalist market economy. I conclude that the partial nature of agrarian transformation that we now experience in Bangladesh may not be resolved in favour of a complete proletarianization of small peasants in the foreseeable future.     

Perceptions of Indian business organizations toward formal marketing research

The results reported in this article are based on a mail survey of 219 firms in India. The major purpose of the study is to examine the marketing research experiences of Indian business firms and their perceptions about conducting formal marketing research. Results indicate that 45 percent of Indian firms have had some experience with formal marketing research and have positive perceptions concerning marketing research as an important decision making tool. Size and type of firm were found to influence whether formal marketing research is conducted. Research methodologies used in India are presented along with problems encountered by these practitioners.     

The effects of MFA quota elimination on Indian fibre markets

This article examines the effects of multi-fibre arrangement (MFA) quota elimination on Indian fibre market. The partial equilibrium Indian fibre model was developed using a theoretically consistent framework and incorporated regional supply response, substitutability between cotton and man-made fibres, and appropriate linkage between cotton and textile sectors. Baseline projections were developed for supply, demand and prices of cotton, man-made fibres and textiles under a set of exogenous assumptions. The effects of MFA textile quota eliminations were introduced into the model by conducting three scenarios, i.e. increasing textile exports by 10, 20 and 30% from the baseline level. The results suggest that on an average, cotton imports rise by 4–8% annually, while the man-made fibre exports from India decline with the opening of textile markets in the developed countries. The higher domestic cotton prices encourage acreage expansion in cotton in all the three regions in India, but not enough to meet rising mill demand under the scenarios of higher textile exports. The rise in cotton imports from India has little effect on world cotton prices.     

Are Indian States Converging in the Post-Reform Period?: An Empirical Inquiry

This paper studies the convergence phenomenon for 23 states of India for the period 1981 to 2001. The decades of the 1980s and the 1990s has been studied separately to comment on the convergence behaviour in the pre reform and post reform period. In addition to that of per capita SDP, convergence of per capita output emanating from the agriculture, industry and the services sector has been analysed to get a deeper insight. Both sigma (σ) convergence and beta (β) convergence have been examined. The study finds absence of sigma (σ) convergence and unconditional beta (β) convergence of per capita NSDP both in the 1980s and 1990s. However, conditional beta (β) convergence estimates reveal that the poorer states are catching up with their richer counterparts in the 1990s. The panel GMM estimates reveal that Indian states converged to their steady state output at a higher rate in the 1990s compared to the 1980s. At the sectoral level, Industry had a higher speed of convergence than agriculture in both decades. Further, divergence rather than convergence is observed for the services sector in both decades.

     

Countercyclical pricing: A consumer heterogeneity explanation

We show that a seasonal good could be priced countercyclically due to the heterogeneous seasonal shifts in consumer valuations. We provide empirical support for our explanation based on two product categories (canned soup and tuna) studied in the literature.