Partha Ray · Runa Sarkar · Anindya Sen Editors Economics, Management and Sustainability Essays in Honour of Anup Sinha Economics, Management and Sustainability Partha Ray Runa Sarkar Anindya Sen • • Editors Economics, Management and Sustainability Essays in Honour of Anup Sinha 123 Editors Partha Ray Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta Kolkata, India Anindya Sen Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta Kolkata, India Runa Sarkar Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta Kolkata, India ISBN 978-981-13-1893-1 ISBN 978-981-13-1894-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-1894-8 (eBook) Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950938 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd 2018 This work is subject to copyright All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission 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Pte Ltd The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore Professor Anup K Sinha Preface It is not very often that one comes across an individual who is an outstanding teacher, a well-known researcher, an able academic administrator and a warm, approachable human being Professor Anup Sinha is one such person He was educated in Presidency College, Kolkata; University of Rochester, New York; and University of Southern California, Los Angeles After completing his Ph.D from the University of Southern California in 1983, he returned to Presidency College and taught at the Centre for Economic Studies for a number of years In 1991, he decided to join the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta (IIMC) where he taught till his retirement in 2016 In his long career spanning more than four decades, he has been a visiting faculty in a number of institutions in India and abroad, including Indian Statistical Institute, University of Calcutta, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, University of Southern California, Washington University in St Louis, Curtin University of Technology at Perth and Kyoto University A very popular teacher with an infectious ability to quickly build a strong rapport with his students, it comes as little surprise that he was voted the best faculty for a number of years in IIMC by students and alumni alike His doctoral work was on economic development, and he taught the subject over many years as a teacher He also taught macroeconomics to undergraduate as well as postgraduate students But his research interest of late went beyond the traditional confines of macroeconomics and economic development His major publications are in the areas of economic development and reforms, macroeconomic policies, globalization, business ethics and sustainable development Over the years, he moved away from the mainstream macroeconomics and economic development to the more interdisciplinary area of “sustainable development”.1 Some of his recent writings bear testimony to this See, for example, “Corporate Ethics” (in Kaushik Basu (edited) The Oxford Companion to Economics in India¸ Oxford University Press, Delhi, 2007); “The Aura of Green: Commitment in an Age of Uncertainty” (in Decision Volume 36, No August 2009, with Jamie Gilpin); “Good Governance and Sustainability: Making Sense of a Complex Agenda” (in S Singh-Sengupta (edited) Spiritual and Ethical Foundations of Organizational Development, Macmillan Delhi, 2009); “Sustainability: Ethics and the Future” (in Journal of Human Values, October 2013); “The Business of Development: A Case Study of Participation and Dependency” (in Decision June 2014); and “Sustainable Development and the Concept of a Good Life” (in Runa Sarkar and Annapurna Shaw (eds.): Essays on Sustainability and Management: Emerging Perspectives, Springer, 2016) vii viii Preface He has edited three volumes and co-authored two books, one titled Another Development: Participation, Empowerment and Well-being in Rural India and the other titled Economics of Sustainable Development.2 He was active, able and reputed as an academic administrator He served as Convener of the Faculty Council, Chairperson of the doctoral programme, Editor of IIMC’s academic journal DECISION, Dean and three terms as Faculty Representative on the Board of Governors at IIMC He served on the Board of National Bank for Agricultural and Rural Development (NABARD) from 2006 to 2009 He also serves on the Life Insurance Council of India as an Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) nominee He is a trustee of Uttaryan, a non-governmental organization which works with mentally challenged children and young adults However, the complete gamut of his interests is not restricted to academics alone, but is wide and varied He learnt to play the violin when in school and played the first violin in the school orchestra He was a well-known debater during his college days His passions (according to he himself) lie in the following; cricket, reading crime fiction and listening to classical music—the three “C”s of his life His interest in theatre is much more than pedantic—he performed in faculty plays at IIMC on two occasions He also frequently contributes op-ed pieces in newspapers on a variety of contemporary social problems In this volume, his colleagues and students have come together to honour him as a memorable teacher, a reliable friend and a wise mentor In consonance with his interest, chapters in this volume are arranged in four broad themes, viz economic development; vulnerabilities and inclusive growth; sustainability and corporate governance; and innovation and management As a prelude to the volume, what follows below is a brief description of these chapters Economic Development Chapters in this part cover varied themes of economic development such as construction of an adequate indicator of development, issues on governance, political economy and public–private partnership Maitreesh Ghatak discusses attempts to develop an adequate indicator of development and in the process highlights the many-sided nature of development For theorists, the nature of a relevant indicator often depends on a person’s view of the goals of development, and hence, there are disagreements about the proper indicator that should be used It has been known for long that a single-minded focus on per capita GDP does little justice to the idea of development in all its richness Alternative measures like the percentage of population below the poverty line, Another Development: Participation, Empowerment and Well-being in Rural India (with Runa Sarkar); Routledge, Taylor and Francis, New Delhi, 2015; Economics of Sustainable Development (with Runa Sarkar), Business Expert Press, New York, 2018 Preface ix measures of inequality such as the Gini coefficient and human development indicators have been proposed But objective as these may appear, no indicator can truly capture all the dimensions of something as multifaceted as the quality of life Ghatak notes, for example, that depletion of natural resources and pollution during the growth process and discrimination against the girl child are two important aspects of the development process which are not being addressed via the standard measures Moreover, development policies cannot be examined in isolation of the political setting Dictatorships seem to be more efficient in single-mindedly pursuing their visions of development, but due to the absence of the checks and balances (normally present in a democracy), they may not become aware of other deleterious consequences of the path they are pursuing before it is too late Sumon Kumar Bhaumik takes up the related issue of governance For him, governance encompasses both the formal and the informal bases for the relationship between the state and the private citizens as well as the relationship among private citizens One dimension of governance is “rule of law”, and data across countries over time not suggest that rule of law automatically improves with an increase in per capita income However, some research seems to indicate that governance quality is higher in democratic countries because in democracies officers are more accountable and there is a higher degree of transparency Governments can be non-benevolent and rent-seeking, and certain institutions are needed to keep them in check One cannot rely on the process of growth alone for the emergence of such institutions Sometimes, external intervention in the form of FDI or aid can be of help, but these can be double-edged On a more specific note, the economic approach to governance focuses on the mechanisms that facilitate transactions in modern exchange economies The establishment of clear rules governing transactions must be accompanied by the equal ability of all parties to get the rules implemented Carrying the idea of a non-benevolent state further, one can envisage situations in which the state itself acts as an intermediary to violate the rules and expropriate some of the parties engaged in transactions The state can enter into contracts with different groups to enable it to expropriate other groups and then share the revenue with the former The elites running the state apparatus must co-opt some groups through the distribution of spoils of expropriation and create “patron-client networks that extend down to the rest of the society” for winning the violent confrontations that the expropriation requires Bhaumik feels that this view of governance indicates that only an “open access order” where political factions have to enjoy the support of social and economic interests, broadly defined, can act as an antidote to this fundamental premise of a non-benevolent state trying to bend contractual rules through violence Amitava Krishna Dutt goes back into the history of economic thought and notes that the study of the economy, which used to be called the political economy, changed to economics and the term political economy fell into disfavour More recently, the term has experienced a revival, although not necessarily referring to the same thing as economics His chapter describes how the name change occurred, how the term returned and how political economy is distinguished from economics, the change in the nature of the study of economies that accompanied—though not x Preface precisely—the change in the name, the problems caused by these changes and the reasons for the change He argues that a return to the name political economy from economics and a return to what political economy tried to before the change in name are desirable not only for a better understanding of the economy but also for the well-being of people, especially those who have been excluded and marginalized In contrast to the broad sweep of the other three chapters in Part I, Indrani Roy Chowdhury and Prabal Roy Chowdhury analyse a very specific tool now finding widespread use—the public–private partnership They analyse the possibility of collusion between the private firm and the government department in the process of PPP formation They develop a simple model based on risk-sharing to look at this possibility They show that PPPs are most likely to form in case the externality gains out of the project are significant, and agents are risk-averse Otherwise, PPP formation may lead to bribery and sub-optimal project choice In the light of this possibility, the government may opt for direct control over the project instead of forming a PPP Vulnerabilities and Inclusive Growth The chapters in this part are spanned over both theoretical and empirical aspects of vulnerabilities and inclusive growth These cover theoretical issues as diverse as explanations of the recent Greek crisis, the extent of private contribution to higher education, and the case for and against a unitary education policy across all parts of the society These apart, there is an empirical and conceptual contribution that looks into the definition of unemployment in India Ghosh and Ghosh in their chapter, “Capitalism, Crisis and the Common Man”, develop a simple model that redresses many of the major deficiencies of the characterization of the financial sector in the standard IS-LM-based open-economy macro-models Going beyond Bernanke–Blinder (1988)-type IS-LM model with a credit market, their extended version of an open-economy Keynesian model incorporates financial intermediaries and imperfect capital mobility In their model, it is shown that the multiplier process that occurs in the real sector and the money or credit multiplier process that occurs in the financial sector take place simultaneously reinforcing each other They apply this model to explain some of the stylized facts of the Greek crisis Their results tend to indicate that the higher growth rate in Greece since 1997 could have been due to higher growth rates of GDP in other European countries and USA and the higher growth rate of inflow of capital Furthermore, the higher growth rates in other European countries and USA and the higher growth rate in net inflows of capital could have brought about sharp falls in interest rates This could have induced the Greek government to borrow on a large scale to finance additional expenditure which is the primary reason behind the accumulation of a sizable amount of debt by the Greek government by the beginning of 2008 Preface xi Dasgupta in his chapter “School Language Policy, Crime and the Minority Underclass” develops a theoretical model of a society consisting of a majority and a minority These communities differ in terms of a set of behavioural-expressive traits and conventions Individuals born into a community acquire that community’s traits and conventions as part of their upbringing within the community In such a set-up, he examines the case for linguistic–cultural unification of the educational system in societies with a majority and a minority ethnolinguistic community It is demonstrated that that possible aggregate efficiency gains from such unification have to be balanced against the consequences of greater income inequality within the minority community Such expansion may set in motion attempts to expropriate productive individuals which, through cumulative causation, may more than dissipate any income gains accruing to the minority community from integration Thus, the efficiency case for a unitary education policy needs to be qualified by the possibility of both immiserization and criminalization of the minority Bag and Mondol in their chapter, “Private Giving in Higher Education”, start with a stylized fact about the significance of private giving in higher education in USA by alumni and top philanthropists as against its non-existence in a country like India, independent of the wealth differential between an American and an Indian They view education as a consumption good but to be provided only voluntarily In particular, the greater the collective contributions to education, the better is the quality of institutions where young people can gather knowledge that serves them not only for future careers but also in the enrichment of life experience Their starting point is Krugman (1979)’s model, wherein it has been shown that in an economy with only private goods, consumers with a preference for product variety, economies of scale in production and monopolistic competition, different regions could have a tendency to merge into a single conglomerate region Their formal models show that high labour cost due to low population base could have made private good more costly and public good relatively more attractive in an advanced country Dutta and Husain in their chapter, “Being Out of Work: An Analysis of Unemployment and Its Duration in India”, look into some of the data-related issues on measuring unemployment in India and question the currently used definition of unemployment in India by different agencies like NSSO, Labour Bureau or Census Using data from the NSSO's 68th round survey, they propose a new definition of unemployment which utilizes information on the duration over which the respondent is without work in the year preceding the survey They estimate the incidence of such “out of work” respondents and identify groups who are most at risk of being “out of work” using a two-stage least square logistic model They argue that policymakers and researchers have failed to utilize the potential of such information that not only can generate more realistic levels of unemployment but also can provide information on the duration of unemployment .. .Economics, Management and Sustainability Partha Ray Runa Sarkar Anindya Sen • • Editors Economics, Management and Sustainability Essays in Honour of Anup Sinha 123 Editors Partha Ray Indian Institute... number of institutions in India and abroad, including Indian Statistical Institute, University of Calcutta, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, University of Southern California, Washington... business manager’s life and leadership role In underlining the role of business incubation in promoting new business enterprises, Bhaskar and Phani propose a generic framework of a business incubator