Articles by Pulapre Balakrishnan

Land reforms in Kerala, far from being a remarkable success, have been a major failure. They were meant to redistribute land and not to improve productivity. It is time the state government considered ordering that redistributed land should be returned if the beneficiaries do not cultivate it and also reversing the existing anti-tenancy law. Kerala's food security demands that the state think afresh about its policies for land and production.

Mudunuri Bharathi (‘Lack of Linkages’, December 8, 2007) is wrong to infer from our study that “…the sectors in the Indian economy with a sublime lack of interdependence may be performing as three unrelated engines.” Actually, our time-series econometric estimates bear out a recursive structure,


Understanding Economic Growth in India, Further Observations Pulapre Balakrishnan, M Parameswaran The authors respond to Ravindra Dholakia

This article follows a recent development in the estimation and testing of multiple structural breaks in linear models to identify phases of growth in India since 1950. The noteworthy feature of the methodology is that it allows the data to parametrise the model, thus yielding results that are immune to the prior beliefs of the researcher. The resulting estimates reveal that there are two growth regimes in India since 1950. The authors then decompose by sector the contribution to the change in the growth rate across these regimes. Finally, by means of a simple econometric model, they test a hypothesis that emerges from their estimation and testing for structural break in the main sectors of the economy to provide an explanation of the growth transition in India. In passing, the authors consider the bearing of their results on extant explanations of the same transition.

The high and rising export intensity of India's software production reflects its global competitiveness. The progress of the industry is intrinsically related to the development of this competitiveness. The competitiveness has been developed in two stages. First, via long-term investment by the state in technical education and science and technology, with neither necessarily directed at the production of software. Subsequently, an incipient software industry with recognisably high export potential has been targeted via fiscal incentives and the provision of export-enabling infrastructure. The emergence of a globally competitive Indian software industry serves as an interesting example of successful state intervention at a time when the model is largely out of fashion.