Articles by Vinish Kathuria

The information technology industry has been the hallmark of the Indian growth story since the 1980s. The Indian IT sector has relied heavily on non-home markets for demand and resources and built deep global ties using co-location with clients, enabled by international travel and temporary on-site migration, acting as a key mechanism in developing “cognitive proximity.” However, the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to make international travel and migration more restrictive and costlier, maybe for a long time. The paradigm shift creates significant barriers for IT firms to be able to maintain cognitive proximity with its clients and could adversely impact their global competitiveness.

This paper analyses the productivity performance of both the organised and unorganised segments of the Indian manufacturing sector using unit level data. Both partial and total factor productivity measures are employed. Our analysis reveals that labour productivity has increased for the organised sector over time, whereas both labour productivity and capital intensity growth have slowed down in the unorganised sector during the period between 2000-01 and 2004-05. The improvement in TFP growth in organised manufacturing in the post-2000 period as compared to the second half of the 1990s across most states in India is heartening as also the fact that output growth was mostly productivity-driven in the post-reform period. However, the declining TFP and the increasing capital intensity of the unorganised sector are causes of worry and raise several important questions.

Delhi's CNG experiment has been hailed as among the few success stories of its kind in recent times. This paper investigates whether the enactment of policy instruments in Delhi affected ambient air quality and whether CNG conversion impinged on the pollution profile. To carry out the analysis, daily ambient air quality data was used from June 1999 to September 2003 from the busiest crossing in Delhi. The results do not indicate an all-round improvement in ambient quality as NOx rose after the conversion, whereas SPM and PM10 showed only a marginal fall; CO was the only parameter that showed a significant decline. But the problem so far has been addressed from a limited perspective and there are in fact three ways to approach it: reduction in emissions per unit of fuel used; fewer vehicle kilometres travelled in total and less fuel use per vehicle kilometre travelled. Unless all three modes are enmeshed, one would not expect the air quality to improve.

The present study attempts to analyse the performance of rural public health systems of 16 major states in India using the techniques from stochastic production frontier and panel data literature. The results show that not all states with better health indicators have efficient health systems. The study concludes that investment in the health sector alone would not result in better health indicators. Efficient management of the investment is required.

Stringent regulations to control pollution due to effluents have not stifled the growth of the palm oil industry in Malaysia; rather, they have complemented the industry's efforts to innovate and remain competitive.