Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research

About: Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research is a facility organization based out in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Monetary policy & Inflation. The organization has 307 authors who have published 1021 publications receiving 18848 citations.

Libraries–a Key to Harness E-Learning: Issues and Perspective

Abstract: E-learning is a nebulous term; meaning teaching-learning facilitated through the modern media like web, satellite, cable networks, etc. Though it is successful in spreading its wings on today’s higher education sector, it’s linkages with the libraries are still feeble. The academic and other types of libraries, especially from the developing countries such as India, are struggling to cater to the increasingly heterogeneous requirements of the e-learners and associated community. This paper presents the key role of LIS professionals in the e-learning paradigm. After a thorough analysis of the e-learning scenario, authors have realised that libraries and librarians have an important role to play possibly through the digital libraries–a contemporary movement growing along-with the e-learning. The aspirations of e-learner community from the LIS professionals in this new era of e-learning are propagation of the movement itself, course content development, technical facilitation, technical trouble shooting, fuelling open-archives, improving user interfaces, identifying and training the usage of free and open source software tools to the user community to ensure maximum participation in teaching-learning process. The paper also discusses e-learning-library linkages and the innovations implemented in the top ranking off-shore public libraries that the Indian LIS community can follow. It reveals an emanating strongly bonded model of e-learning–library linkage required for the sustainance and mutual growth of the duo. This will also lend a hand in emerging an open knowledge culture and ultimately beneficialfor the evolving knowledge society.DOI: 10.14429/djlit.29.226

New Keynesian aggregate supply in the tropics: food prices, wages and inflation

Abstract: Since consumer prices are a weighted average of domestic and imported goods prices, domestic Price Inflation (WPII) should cause Consumer Price Inflation (CPII). But at low per capita incomes average wages respond to food prices, raising costs and hence domestic prices. Then CPII, for which food is the dominant component, should Granger cause WPII. This reverse causality is derived and finds support in an estimated new Keynesian Aggregate Supply (AS) framework with the wage-price link. The AS and the identity both hold as long-run cointegrating relationships. The AS is elastic but food prices and the exchange rate are important for inflation.

Impact of Mining on Agricultural Productivity

Abstract: Development activities in developed as well as developing countries have significant impacts at regional, state and national level. Most research on this kind of impact has traditionally focused on the broad macro economic level. The micro impacts generally at community level are largely neglected. However, most of the times these micro impacts are in form of externalities: a cause of market failure. It is a third party (or spill-over) effect arising from the production and/or consumption for goods and services for which no appropriate compensation is paid. In this paper we have attempted to analyze the agricultural productivity (paddy) in a coal mining region. Our study concentrated on the Ib Valley coal field of Orissa. Our sample consists of five villages situated near the coal mines (we call them as mining villages) and 2 villages, which are away from the coal mines (we call them as controlled villages). We use survey data of 132 plots owned by the farmers in the sample villages. We use the method of Fisher and Tornqvist indices for the present analysis, which show a negative impact on TFP due to mining activities. In terms of partial productivity measure (yield) mining villages also lagged behind. Further, as a robustness check, our regression results show a strong (significant) negative impact of mining on the TFP. Apart from this, we observe a shift in livelihood from agriculture to mining related work. This social change is an indicator of rural development in Ib Valley coal field area despite of reduction in agricultural productivity. Such rural development in terms of increased earning through mining activities in the study area has always a trade-off with reduction in agricultural productivity.

India in the globalized economy : Growth spillovers & business cycle synchronization

Abstract: In recent decades, in the wake of accelerated globalization, the issue of output coupling/decoupling has assumed considerable importance in academic as well as in policy debates. Special attention has been focussed on the following four issues (i) whether economies are getting increasingly synchronized in their cyclical behaviour and in particular whether EMEs are getting synchronized with the advanced group of countries (or otherwise) and/or among themselves ? (ii) whether similar synchronization is also evident in the growth profiles of EMEs and advanced economies ? (iii) what are the main factors driving this two types of synchronization ? and (iv) are the factors driving growth synchronization different from those driving business cycle co-movements? This is a single-country study which examines the decoupling issue from the perspective of the Indian economy over a fairly long time span viz. 1961–2008, dividing the same into three sub-periods characterized by relative insularity (1961–1978), restricted globalization (1979–1993) and full-scale globalization (1994–2008). Among the important potential determinants of co-movements suggested by the available literature are inter-industry and intra-industry trade intensities, co-ordination of fiscal and monetary policy, financial integration etc. Our key finding is that the economic determinants for India’s cyclical synchronization differ across short (16–32 months) and medium cycles (32–64 months) and vis-a-vis growth spillovers.