Suchergebnisse

Chapter 1: "Instrumentalism" and Friedman's Methodology: A Short Objection -- Chapter 2: A Sort of Paretian Liberalism -- Chapter 3: Liberty, Equality, and Impossibility: Some General Results in the Space of "Soft" Preferences -- Chapter 4: The Arrow Paradox with Fuzzy Preferences -- Chapter 5: Equality, Priority, and Distributional Judgements -- Chapter 6: Two Logical and Normative Issues Relating to Measurement in the Social Sciences -- Chapter 7: Social Groups and Economic Poverty: A Problem in Measurement -- Chapter 8: Reckoning Sub-Group Poverty Differentials in the Measurement of Aggregate Poverty -- Chapter 9: Poverty Measurement in the Presence of a "Group Affiliation Externality" -- Chapter 10: Revisiting the Normalization Axiom in Poverty Measurement -- Chapter 11: The Focus Axiom and Poverty: On the Co-existence of Precise Language and Ambiguous Meaning in Economic Measurement -- Chapter 12: Assessing Inequality in the Presence of Growth -- Chapter 13: Revisiting an Old Theme in the Measurement of Inequality and Poverty -- Chapter 14: Inequality Measurement with Subgroup Decomposability and Level-Sensitivity.

Population, health, and development -- India's real population concerns -- India's bogus population concerns -- Defecation and development -- In whose interest? The drift of economic policy -- Letting the RBI be -- On child labour legislation -- A suddenly 'pro-poor' budget? -- The demonetization stunt -- The economy: a dubious score-card -- Governance by contradiction -- On some elitist perspectives on policy-'freebies' -- The 'liberal' Indian perspective on India's social economy -- Public policy outcomes: is it the message or the messenger? -- Some basic issues underlying basic income.

"This volume is about economists, economics, and issues of concern to Indian society. Some essays are expository, and some satirical. Together, they offer a commentary on the state of the discipline of economics today, and also on aspects of contemporary India's society and polity. The volume affords insights into, among other things, - the pervasive influence of economists such as Kenneth Arrow and Anthony Atkinson, and thinkers such as Tom Paine, Jonathan Swift, and Dadabhai Naoroji; - the place of markets and game theory (and even crime fiction!) in present-day economics; - the affectations and convoluted mathematization of a good deal of 'mainstream' economics; and - India's recent political climate, and the conduct of various arms of the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary in the country. Engaging and lucidly written, this volume should be of interest to scholars of economics, political science, development studies, South Asian studies, and above all, the general reader"--

Chapter 1: The Intrinsic Bane of Inequality -- Chapter 2: The Instrumental Harms of Inequality -- Chapter 3: Distributive Justice and Utilitarianism -- Chapter 4: Distributive Justice and Welfare Economics -- Chapter 5: More on Distributive Justice and Welfare Economics -- Chapter 6: On the Conflict between Equity and Efficiency -- Chapter 7: Equality, Efficiency, and 'Levelling Down' -- Chapter 8: Equality and Liberty -- Chapter 9: Inter-Personal versus Inter-Group Inequality -- Chapter 10: The Measurement of Economic Inequality -- Chapter 11: Economic Inequality in India and the World -- Chapter 12: The Language of the Poverty Line -- Chapter 13: The Logic of the Poverty Line -- Chapter 14: India's Official Poverty Lines -- Chapter 15: Poverty Comparisons across Populations of Different Sizes -- Chapter 16: Targeting Assistance to the Poor -- Chapter 17: Do we have an Obligation to Assist the Distant Needy? -- Chapter 18: Poverty and Inclusive Growth in the Light of the Quintile Income Statistic -- Chapter 19: Deprivation in the Midst of Affluence -- Chapter 20: Growth, Poverty, and Inequality in India: Pulling the Threads Together

Essays in Economics and Other Cheerful Themes is a collection of pieces on economy, polity and society, written by a social scientist over a number of years. The book addresses conceptual and empirical issues in development at both national and global levels. The philosophical bases of these issues are sought to be addressed in relatively non-technical and accessible terms.The book also makes space for essays that deal with less solemn phenomena, such as cricket, film, the conduct of academic institutions, and the esoteric excesses of scholarly writing in the social sciences and humanities. Th

Stewardship theory of corporate governance is a normative alternative to agency theory. This article argues that the stewardship behaviour of managers results in exemplary corporate governance practices when the espoused values of the firm are aligned with the enacted values. The case study method is used to prove this argument by studying corporate governance practices in a family-owned business group in India. The Murugappa Group is a 100-year-old family-owned business group, known for their ethical practices and currently managed by the fourth-generation family members, without undergoing any split. The espoused as well enacted values of the group are studied and corporate governance practices of the group firms analysed in this article. The article focuses on the governance structure of the group, its succession planning practices and the ownership structure. The analysis indicates that aligning the enacted values with the espoused value helped the group to adapt itself to the changing external economic environment and continue creating shareholder value, the essence of corporate governance.

AbstractThe dominant convention in the measurement of inequality and poverty is to employ scale-invariant and replication-invariant measures, that is, measures that are thoroughgoingly relative. This is a routine feature of both the theoretical and applied literature in the area, despite weighty arguments that have been advanced by certain practitioners in favor of centrist measures which avoid the "extreme" values of both income-relative and income-absolute measures. The present paper extends these arguments in favor of measures which arebothincome-centrist and population centrist. A comprehensively centrist Gini coefficient of inequality is proposed, and likewise a comprehensively centrist class of poverty measures which are counterparts of the well-known Foster-Greer Thorbecke class of relative poverty measures. It is suggested that our diagnosis of the problems of inequality and poverty is likely to be a profoundly variable function of the precise types of inequality and poverty measures we employ in order to assess the magnitudes and trends of the phenomenon.

In a great deal of empirical work on distributional analysis, the only sorts of inequality measures employed are ' relative' ones. The present paper argues the case for a more plural approach to inequality measurement, in which both 'absolute' and 'intermediate' conceptualizations of inequality are admitted. In particular, it is suggested that there is a strong case for the employment of intermediate measures of inequality in assessing over time changes in inequality and, through that route, the inclusiveness or otherwise of the process of growth in per capita income. The purpose of the paper is two fold: exposition and persuasion.

Distributional judgments'-judgments on the extent of inequality in the distribution of income and wealth-are routinely made by economists in exercises aimed at comparing inequalities in alternative situations. Yet the measurement of inequality is informed by certain nuances, which it would do well to be attentive to. In particular, the values underlying measurement protocols are not always made explicit, which tends to lend a somewhat misleading semblance of 'value-neutrality' to the activity of measurement. It is argued, with specific reference to the problem of inequality measurement, that such an orientation can compromise the possibility of accurate diagnosis and appropriate policy prescription. There is little that is original in this article, and much that is owed to the pioneering contributions of Serge-Chritophe Kolm. The emphasis throughout is on explicating an important issue through a deliberate effort at achieving simplicity in both argument and expression.