BUDDHADEB GHOSH

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The conventional wisdom regarding long term linkage between technological development, population growth and sustainable development stretches the efficacy of technology too far. There were many phases in recorded history, where contemporary technological development, which temporarily served the cause of economic growth, went against natural balance. The problem is not with technology but with its judicious use. In a Cobb-Douglas framework, land requirement is very often normalized to be one for functional convenience. Our argument is not against that simplification as such. One of the main objectives of this enquiry is to see whether any major changes occur in the conclusions drawn under conventional specification, if land requirement for urbanization, agriculture and forestry is introduced into the system separately. Introduction of land may substantially change some of the conclusions derived from an over-simplified framework. The conclusions from present investigation may not be in disharmony with the history of technology, population dynamics and sustainable economic progress, given cross-country heterogeneity across the world particularly between the developed and developing world. Therefore, land requirement for other purposes particularly for agriculture, forest and environmental balance must be incorporated into the models of development by all governments in the developing countries.

The paper tries to find out the role played by economic and social infrastructure facilities in economic development across Indian states over the last quarter century. Infrastructure services have been indexed with the help of principal component analysis. Both parametric and ...

... which we are concerned here, was to enhance productivity and efficiency in Indian industries by ... There was a decline in virtually all macro-economic aggregates in the crisis year of ... majorindustry groups, whose order of ranks is as follows: (i) chemical, (ii) textile, (iii) processed ...

The current literatiure on regional conivergence has centred on the empirical relationship between initial income and its long run growth rate found anlotng the regions in the developed countries. The fundamental basis of the 'converging' outcome is the neo-classical ...

Concerned primarily with all possible infrastructure facilities across the countries of the world as well as Indian states over a period of time. This database also includes possible usual economic variables for India as a whole and the Indian state.

This paper examines the Workers’ Level Schedule data from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA, 2005) evaluation study, India. The data help us draw insights on the efficacy of implementation of the Act in 12 states of India on the basis of responses of rural unskilled workers. The empirical evidence provides in-depth insights on high variations in market and MGNREGA wages, food grains consumption and farm yield among different States even after 15 years of implementation. In addition to various statistical measures, the study also incorporates logistic regression models to investigate the factors affecting an affirmative response of workers when asked about the increment in three indicators in the post-MGNREGA intervention. We conclude unless location-based regional parameters are included in the Act, such a Pan-India policy is impossible to reach the door of rural poor in an extremely heterogeneous country like India.

In literature, the impact of public investment and physical infrastructure on both private investment behaviour and regional economic development has been found to be highly significant and positive. The latter hypothesis is tested here on Indian states over the Plan period using ...

Asia-Pacific Development Journal Vol. 12, No. 1, June 2005 EFFECTS OF INFRASTRUCTURE ON REGIONAL INCOME IN THE ERA OF GLOBALIZATION: NEW EVIDENCE FROM SOUTH ASIA Prabir De'and Buddhadeb Ghosh" The South Asian Association for Regional ...

Obsession with poverty per se in post-independent India particularly from late 1960s has been responsible for the derivative status of the factors responsible for overall social and economic development across diverse regions of the country. Planning in the true sense of the term got increasingly less priority compared to short run disaster management type policy during these decades. Consequently, poverty, inequality & purchasing power were treated as one dimensional phenomenon isolated from and independent of physical infrastructure facilities, social development parameters and the expanding external sector. There were adequate signals even from official information that development in any sense of the term had been strictly concentrated in selective pockets of the country. And people with higher merits and better skills have been overcrowding these pockets at the utter neglect of the vast geographies with enough of natural resources and potentially skilled people remaining unutilized and no possibilities of man made resource creation. Empirical researches done during the last decade have amply shown that Indian states have over last 30 years behaved against the neo-classical prediction of convergence among the states. In layman’s language, this means that states with higher levels of development 30 years ago have grown at faster rates and vice versa thereby widening inter-state disparities in all spheres of social and economic life. This is all too known and of late recognized by the Central authorities. But there is tremendous dearth of studies dealing with intense and rising disparities in all spheres of development at the sub-state level. Note that there are 29 states, which contain about 600 districts. Considerable details of socio-economic information are available at present for 582 districts particularly from Census, NSSO and Crime Bureau. When people talk about inter-state disparities, the frequent conclusion in India is: India contains many nations within. In a sense, this is tantamount to taking pride in our glorious “Unity in Diversity”. But if one crosses the border of the states, and probe deeper into the districts except Kerala, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and partially Gujarat (omitting, of course, Delhi and Goa just for their small size), it would not be easy to control the temptation that there are many nations within many states.
This book attempts to examine sub-state level disparities and divergences reached within most states after 50 years of so-called planning through socialistic pattern of society under democratic governance system. The parameters used are overall social development indices and its constituents such as work participation indices, health & housing indices, human capital indices, technology & communication indices derived from Census 1991 and 2001 as well as poverty, inequality and purchasing power estimated from household concumption expenditure as given by unit level data of NSSO. In addition to estimating tentative size of what is called the middle class, the best and worst districts are identified in terms of social development indices and poverty and placed in India’s district-wise map. These secondary data sets are supplemented by a “Perception Survey” addressed to rural poor, rural non-poor, urban poor and urban non-poor across the major states of India. Both sets of results are significant enough to warrant urgent involvement by the national government at the sub-state level. The unanimous implementation of the MGNREGA in rural India was the perfect choice in a country where textbook monetary and fiscal policies miserably failed after almost sixty years of independence way back in 2005-06. This book will be supplemented by another inquiry to explore the fate of the employment guarantee scheme to reach the doors of the excluded people.

Given the objective of the present study, we would like to deal mainly with an inter-industry framework. In essence, therefore, by performance under the present globalization era during last 15 years we mean productivity and technological change which will form part of our study. The details of the data and industrial classification along with corresponding names of industries are given in Appendices I, II (India) and III (Japan). Here we consider only 2-digit
manufacturing classification. We will eventually show that even 2-digit level of disaggregation may not be adequate for understanding the technological and productivity
behaviour of industries in actual reality during such a period of growing national specialization across the world.

Abstract — There is wide consensus that states in India have been diverting in terms of economic development. Nothing is known about district level performance. Constitutional provision of states as basic unit of analysis does not attract district level study. This is the motivation to organize common districts of India over last two Census years, 1991 and 2001 and also NSSO 2004-05 by harnessing common socio-economic indicators. Purpose is to unearth district level divergence and factors responsible for rural purchasing power across districts. Parametric and non-parametric tests have yielded significant results in terms of social and economic factors during postreform period. JEL Classification: O18, O53. Index Terms — Social Development Index, Purchasing Power, Regional Disparity, Convergence, Developing Countries, India.

Statistics may be simplified as a combination of information-analytics –observation, which helps the policy makers to harness natural resources for the development of humanity. Till very recently, environment did not get any legitimate entry into academic research. Here we begin from contemporary prophesy of economists, and travel down memory lane of 20,000 years. There is a long lasting debate on whether technology destroys environment, or they go hand in hand with it. There is no doubt that futuristic prediction has hardly ever stood valid in recent history. But the disorders in nature as revealed in last few decades across the world can hardly be the story of suspect. Now the question is: Will human ingenuity and technological breakthrough be able to save life on Earth beyond 2070? The paper explores in the form of 2 'stylized history' whether imprudent use of (1) non-food needs and savings, (2) recorded language and accumulated knowledge, and (3) privacy has made the hum...

... http://sae.sagepub.com/content/7/2/301 The online version of this article can be found at: DOI: 10.1177/139156140600700207 2006 7: 301 South Asia Economic Journal Buddhadeb Ghosh India's Intellectual Past through Amartya Sen's Lenses ... BUDDHADEB GHOSH ...

Abstract: This paper attempts to explore the relationship between productivity, efficiency and technological change in Indian ports. By employing a comparative static framework, we have shown that Indian ports have witnessed a significant technological metamorphosis in ...

One of the important sources of growth of an economy is the efficient and productive use of existing resources. The Indian industries after three decades of protected industrial culture has produced an inefficient regime. This is supposed to be corrected by the on-going economic ...

CSIRD Discussion Papers intend to disseminate preliminary findings of the research carried out at the institute to attract comments. The feedback and comments may be directed to the author(s). CSIRD ... Discussion Papers are available at www.csird.org.in

This paper is concerned with the economics of Indian ports as one important phenomenon in Indian economic geography, and its relationship with regional development under the free market economy. A port performance index derived with the help of principal component ...

This paper explores the role played by infrastructure in determining the level of economic development across the states over different time spans during the past quarter century. A comparative static framework is developed in order to test the movement of the development trajectory of the ...

The conventional wisdom regarding long term linkage between technological development, population growth and sustainable development stretches the efficacy of technology too far. There were many phases in recorded history, where contemporary technological development, which temporarily served the cause of economic growth, went against natural balance. The problem is not with technology but with its judicious use. In a Cobb-Douglas framework, land requirement is very often normalized to be one for functional convenience. Our argument is not against that simplification as such. One of the main objectives of this enquiry is to see whether any major changes occur in the conclusions drawn under conventional specification, if land requirement for urbanization, agriculture and forestry is introduced into the system separately. Introduction of land may substantially change some of the conclusions derived from an over-simplified framework. The conclusions from present investigation may not be in disharmony with the history of technology, population dynamics and sustainable economic progress, given cross-country heterogeneity across the world particularly between the developed and developing world. Therefore, land requirement for other purposes particularly for agriculture, forest and environmental balance must be incorporated into the models of development by all governments in the developing countries.

It is the largest rural development project in human history. It has saved the vulnerable, alienated, unskilled poor in about 7.80 lakh villages during last 10 years. But unlike the Himalayan states, corruption among lower level politicians and suppliers along with lower bureaucracy has been responsible for lack of permanency of the assets created and lower wage payments. The Act must be changed according to topography, levels of living, occupational structure, soil quality and poverty.

It is shown under a comparative static framework with the help of social overhead and economic overhead capital that regional disparities measured by any means are rising in India from the era of planning to globalization period. The better off states have consolidated their positions under free marker globalized economic model set since 1991.

The nineties of the last century have witnessed the emergence of a new role the port infrastructure can play. Governments around the world have undertaken drastic measures for improving the operational efficiency of national ports through institutional reforms. Billions of private capital have been pledged for capacity expansion and service modernization in the world port system during 1991-1998. although India has recently opened this sector for private investments, the performance of the post system is not up to the mark. This paper
attempts to find out the role played by port performance indicators (derived from principal component analysis) and labour endowment in determining port traffic ina comparative static framework. Even the use of OLS regression has come out with very satisfactory results. Both explanatory variables have been found to exert positive and significant impact upon port traffic. Finally, the use of a time
dummy indicates some sort of stagnancy in Indian ports since liberalization in 1991.

This paper attempts to find out causal relationship between port performance and port traffic by using Indian data.
The use of cointegration analysis has come out with the result that performance precedes traffic in most of the ports
of India. Hence, government policy towards performance augmenting facilities should be given priority so that higher
efficiency induces higher traffic.

The purpose of the present paper is to understand the broad changes in the relationship between state level poverty, inequality, income and purchasing power from the pre-reform to the post-reform period. It investigates the inter- and intra-state purchasing power differentials in rural and urban areas corresponding to the proportion of people thereof in each of the states in a comparable set up and over time from 1987-88 to 2004-05 up to which latest large sample consumer expenditure data are available. To start with, we have tested the robustness between expenditure date (NSSO, GOI) and product data (CSO, GOI) across the states over the same period. The significance of rural urban divide becomes all too important in view of the fact that rural and urban balance is a necessary condition for overall development of any constituent region. We have estimated the Lorenz ratios for both rural and urban areas of the states for the pre- and post-reform period. We have also estimated the share of state population corresponding to all India lowest 30 percentile class (‘poorest of the poor’), middle 50% class (‘vulnerable middle class’) and top 20% class (‘the rich’) in both rural and urban areas of the major states over the last four large sample survey rounds of NSSO-1987-88, 1993-94, 1999-2000 and 2004-05. This has helped us to understand the intra-state disparity between population and their endowment share. It is found that while overall poverty and inequality are marginally on the decline in rural areas, slow reduction in urban poverty and rising urban inequality in almost all the states have marked India’s latest pattern of development under fast rising trade openness and unprecedented foreign exchange reserves. The results are highly significant to warrant urgent steps by all concerned in the event of rising failure of the ‘trickle down’ process in Indian states in recent period. The question of vertical mobility of limited group of people versus horizontal rift across different expenditure classes within a state has come out as a dominant feature of post-reform India where rural urban divergence within each of the states has been intensified. It is conjectured that this is more a government failure rather than market failure, given the fact that market in India is pervasively imperfect across regions. The widespread rise in intense regional disharmonies in recent period across rural areas of the states is a pointer to the statistical significance of our results. Under such intense intra-state spatial disparity, market may fail to deliver the ‘good’ for the ‘excluded’ people because of corruption, administrative inefficiency, informalization, faulty labour laws and low quality infrastructure facilities. There is urgent need to review the existing strategies to tackle rural and urban poverty and inequality syndrome in a simultaneous framework, and not in isolation from each other.

The purpose of the present paper is to understand the broad changes in the relationship between state level poverty, inequality, income and purchasing power from the pre-reform to the post-reform period. It investigates the inter- and intra-state purchasing power differentials in rural and urban areas corresponding to the proportion of people thereof in each of the states in a comparable set up and over time from 1987-88 to 2004-05 up to which latest large sample consumer expenditure data are available. To start with, we have tested the robustness between expenditure date (NSSO, GOI) and product data (CSO, GOI) across the states over the same period. The significance of rural urban divide becomes all too important in view of the fact that rural and urban balance is a necessary condition for overall development of any constituent region. We have estimated the Lorenz ratios for both rural and urban areas of the states for the pre- and post-reform period. We have also estimated the share of state population corresponding to all India lowest 30 percentile class (‘poorest of the poor’), middle 50% class (‘vulnerable middle class’) and top 20% class (‘the rich’) in both rural and urban areas of the major states over the last four large sample survey rounds of NSSO-1987-88, 1993-94, 1999-2000 and 2004-05. This has helped us to understand the intra-state disparity between population and their endowment share. It is found that while overall poverty and inequality are marginally on the decline in rural areas, slow reduction in urban poverty and rising urban inequality in almost all the states have marked India’s latest pattern of development under fast rising trade openness and unprecedented foreign exchange reserves. The results are highly significant to warrant urgent steps by all concerned in the event of rising failure of the ‘trickle down’ process in Indian states in recent period. The question of vertical mobility of limited group of people versus horizontal rift across different expenditure classes within a state has come out as a dominant feature of post-reform India where rural urban divergence within each of the states has been intensified. It is conjectured that this is more a government failure rather than market failure, given the fact that market in India is pervasively imperfect across regions. The widespread rise in intense regional disharmonies in recent period across rural areas of the states is a pointer to the statistical significance of our results. Under such intense intra-state spatial disparity, market may fail to deliver the ‘good’ for the ‘excluded’ people because of corruption, administrative inefficiency, informalization, faulty labour laws and low quality infrastructure facilities. There is urgent need to review the existing strategies to tackle rural and urban poverty and inequality syndrome in a simultaneous framework, and not in isolation from each other.

Till very recently, environment did not get any legitimate entry into academic research. Here we begin from contemporary prophesy of economists, and travel down memory lane of 20,000 years. There is a long lasting debate on whether technology destroys environment, or they go hand in hand with it. There is no doubt that futuristic prediction has hardly ever stood valid in recent history. But the disorders in nature as revealed in last few decades across the world can hardly be the story of suspect. Now the question is: Will human ingenuity and technological breakthrough be able to save life on Earth beyond 2070? The paper explores in the form of ‘stylized history’ whether imprudent use of (1) non-food needs and savings, (2) recorded language and accumulated knowledge, and (3) privacy has made the humans responsible for devastating the balance in Nature.

Till very recently, environment did not get any legitimate entry into academic research. Here we begin from contemporary prophesy of economists, and travel down memory lane of 20,000 years. There is a long lasting debate on whether technology destroys environment, or they go hand in hand with it. There is no doubt that futuristic prediction has hardly ever stood valid in recent history. But the disorders in nature as revealed in last few decades across the world can hardly be the story of suspect. Now the question is: Will human ingenuity and technological breakthrough be able to save life on Earth beyond 2070? The paper explores in the form of ‘stylized history’ whether imprudent use of (1) non-food needs and savings, (2) recorded language and accumulated knowledge, and (3) privacy has made the humans responsible for devastating the balance in Nature.

The most precious material in the world today is fresh (drinking) water. The way civilization has progressed, nature and water are most tormented and ignored. This stage has not reached in one day, or one century. Human folly has been responsible for the future survival of the animal kingdom more particularly water. A sustainable engineering model is developed here to implement rain water harvesting in efficient manner with very low cost.

Obsession with poverty per se in post-independent India particularly from late 1960s has been responsible for the derivative status of the factors responsible for overall social and economic development across diverse regions of the country. Planning in the true sense of the term got increasingly less priority compared to short run disaster management type policy during these decades. Consequently, poverty, inequality & purchasing power were treated as one dimensional phenomenon isolated from and independent of physical infrastructure facilities, social development parameters and the expanding external sector. There were adequate signals even from official information that development in any sense of the term had been strictly concentrated in selective pockets of the country. And people with higher merits and better skills have been overcrowding these pockets at the utter neglect of the vast geographies with enough of natural resources and potentially skilled people remaining unutilized and no possibilities of man made resource creation. Empirical researches done during the last decade have amply shown that Indian states have over last 30 years behaved against the neo-classical prediction of convergence among the states. In layman’s language, this means that states with higher levels of development 30 years ago have grown at faster rates and vice versa thereby widening inter-state disparities in all spheres of social and economic life. This is all too known and of late recognized by the Central authorities. But there is tremendous dearth of studies dealing with intense and rising disparities in all spheres of development at the sub-state level. Note that there are 29 states, which contain about 600 districts. Considerable details of socio-economic information are available at present for 582 districts particularly from Census, NSSO and Crime Bureau. When people talk about inter-state disparities, the frequent conclusion in India is: India contains many nations within. In a sense, this is tantamount to taking pride in our glorious “Unity in Diversity”. But if one crosses the border of the states, and probe deeper into the districts except Kerala, Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and partially Gujarat (omitting, of course, Delhi and Goa just for their small size), it would not be easy to control the temptation that there are many nations within many states.
This book attempts to examine sub-state level disparities and divergences reached within most states after 50 years of so-called planning through socialistic pattern of society under democratic governance system. The parameters used are overall social development indices and its constituents such as work participation indices, health & housing indices, human capital indices, technology & communication indices derived from Census 1991 and 2001 as well as poverty, inequality and purchasing power estimated from household concumption expenditure as given by unit level data of NSSO. In addition to estimating tentative size of what is called the middle class, the best and worst districts are identified in terms of social development indices and poverty and placed in India’s district-wise map. These secondary data sets are supplemented by a “Perception Survey” addressed to rural poor, rural non-poor, urban poor and urban non-poor across the major states of India. Both sets of results are significant enough to warrant urgent involvement by the national government at the sub-state level. The unanimous implementation of the MGNREGA in rural India was the perfect choice in a country where textbook monetary and fiscal policies miserably failed after almost sixty years of independence way back in 2005-06. This book will be sequeled by another inquiry to explore the fate of the employment guarantee scheme to reach the doors of the excluded people.