SERVICES INDUSTRIES IN THE BUSINESS SECTOR OF THE CANADIAN ECONOMY

The focus of this paper is an examination of concepts and statistics necessary to support the measurement of real output of services industries. Although applied to the business sector of the Canadian economy, the issues raised may in fact be relevant for many other countries. The Canadian practice is judged with reference to the international guidelines and recommendations. General methodological issues of deflation are examined, particularly double deflation, extrapolation and rebasing. The perennial problems such as the deflation of imputed banking services, insurance, trade margins, etc. are analysed with a view to provide some tentative solutions thereof. Quality assessment of statistics and the criteria used for such an assessment are indicated to share our concern with the international colleagues facing similar problems.     

On material balances when there are capacity limitations

A method for the computation of a consistent set of material balances is proposed when there are capacity limitations in domestic production and exports, and it is related to certain planning practices in East European countries as reported by Montias. Although the computational procedure solves a linear programming problem, it has nothing to do with standard linear programming algorithms. Instead it is a direct generalization of the input-output type of balancing method.     

Discipline and authority: Some notes on future histories and epistemologies of India

Though the preceding 100 years have been marked by unprecedented bloodshed, it is indisputably clear, as the century draws to a close, that domination will increasingly be exercised through the categories enshrined by modern knowledge systems. Notwithstanding the advent of subaltern studies, feminism, and cultural studies, the Indian academy shows every sign of remaining colonized. The contestation and defiance of formal academic disciplines, which are the principal vehicles through which the hegemony of the Western intellectual apparatus is exercised, is imperative if India is to have a future where its own spirit, culture, and intellectual traditions are not to be compromised. As a prolegomenon to what future histories and epistemologies of India might look like, it is suggested that Indian intellectuals think ‘more of the rest’, and ‘less of the west’, just as they must find a less oppressive West with which they can cohabit.