Social media as a destination marketing tool: its use by national tourism organisations

India's protected areas (PAs), especially those designated tiger reserves, are popular tourist destinations, experiencing considerable and growing visitor numbers, but the principles of ecotourism are not well implemented. This paper analyses tourism practice in a sample of popular tiger reserves in India according to four principles of responsible ecotourism: minimisation of environmental impacts, generation of funds for conservation, benefits to local communities, and education of visitors. Evidence demonstrates that few criteria of ecotourism are met in most PAs: tourism imposes significant detrimental impacts, little of the generated revenue is captured, local communities get mostly menial jobs, and visitor education is virtually non-existent with tourism geared mainly towards thrill-seeking. The Indian Forest Service, which manages the PAs, is on the whole unprepared and ill-equipped to plan and implement proper ecotourism practices and faces constant pressure from other actors to increase tourism revenue. Periyar National Park stands out as an exception where innovative approaches involving local communities have brought about a significant positive change. Policy recommendations are offered based on limited, low-impact activities with high participation of local communities which is essential to build local support for conservation that has been historically lacking.     

Caste discrimination in the Indian urban labour market

This, the pioneering quantitative analysis of caste in the Indian urban labour market, examines the age-old problem of caste in the light of discrimination theory and government policy. Using a survey of workers in Delhi, the gross wage difference between ‘scheduled’ (untouchable) and ‘non-scheduled’ caste is decomposed into its ‘explained’ and ‘discrimination’ components and, from a model of occupation choice, into wage- and job-discrimination. Discrimination is found to exist, and to operate at least in part through the traditional mechanism, viz. assignment to jobs, with the scheduled castes entering poorly-paid ‘dead-end’ jobs. It is assisted by methods of recruitment based on contacts, prevalent in the manual occupation, which also cause past discrimination to carry over to the present. Its practice serves the economic interests of those who exercise a taste for discrimination.     

Optimal patent licensing—Two or three-part tariff

We look into technology transfer by an insider patentee in a spatial duopoly model under three types of licensing contracts—(i) two-part tariff with fixed fee and per-unit royalty, (ii) two-part tariff with fixed fee and ad-valorem royalty and (iii) general three-part tariff with fixed fee, per-unit and ad-valorem royalties. Under two-part tariff contracts, the licenser is better off with the per-unit royalty contract but the general contract does better than the other contracts. In contrast to the existing literature, all three licensing contracts may make the consumers worse-off compared to no licensing, with the lowest consumer surplus achieved under the general licensing contract. Welfare under the general licensing contract is equal to the welfare under two-part tariff with ad-valorem royalty and it is higher than the welfare under no licensing but lower than the welfare under two-part tariff with per-unit royalty. Hence, the general three-part licensing contract is privately optimal but not socially optimal. Similar conclusions hold also under a nonspatial linear demand model with differentiated products.     

Top Indian Incomes, 1922-2000

This article presents data on the evolution of top incomes andwages for 1922–2000 in India using individual tax returndata. The data show that the shares of the top 0.01 percent,0.1 percent, and 1 percent in total income shrank substantiallyfrom the 1950s to the early to mid-1980s but then rose again,so that today these shares are only slightly below what theywere in the 1920s and 1930s. This U-shaped pattern is broadlyconsistent with the evolution of economic policy in India: Fromthe 1950s to the early to mid-1980s was a period of "socialist"policies in India, whereas the subsequent period, starting withthe rise of Rajiv Gandhi, saw a gradual shift toward more probusinesspolicies. Although the initial share of the top income groupwas small, the fact that the rich were getting richer had anontrivial impact on the overall income distribution. Althoughthe impact is not large enough to fully explain the gap observedduring the 1990s between average consumption growth shown inNational Sample Survey–based data and the national accounts–baseddata, it is sufficiently large to explain a nonnegligible partof it (20–40 percent).     

Information, the Dual Economy, and Development

We examine the interactions between different institutional arrangements in a general equilibrium model of a modernizing economy. There is a modern sector, where productivity is high but information asymmetries are large, and a traditional sector where productivity is low but information asymmetries are small. Consequently, agency costs in the modern sector make consumption lending difficult, while such lending is readily done in the traditional sector. The resulting trade-off between credit availability and productivity implies that not everyone will move to the modern sector. In fact, the laissez-faire level of modernization may fail to maximize net social surplus.
This situation may also hold in the long run: in a dynamic version of the model, a "trickle-down" effect links the process of modernization with reduction in modern sector agency costs. This effect may be too weak and the economy may get stuck in a trap and never fully modernize. The two-sector structure also yields a natural theoretical testing ground for the Kuznets inverted-U hypothesis: we show that even within the "sectoral shifting" class of models, this phenomenon is not robust to small changes in model specification.     

Investing in irrigation development in North West Queensland,Australia

This study uses a dynamic multi‐regional Computable General Equilibrium model of the Australian economy to examine the impacts of developing irrigated agriculture in remote North West Queensland. A potential investment and operational scenario is implemented using three alternative forecast baselines. In the first run using a business‐as‐usual baseline, there is a welfare loss from irrigation development, even with an optimistic shift in farm productivity and factor endowments in North West Queensland. In the second run, baseline demand for Australia's exports is assumed to grow at a faster rate and there is a small welfare gain. Simulating climate change impacts on crop yields, the forecast baseline of the third run includes a gradual reduction in farmland productivity in southern Australia. The simulations show the impacts of both supply and demand shifts on the welfare outcome, but on balance, clear welfare gains do not arise from the potential irrigation development.