Business & Economics

This edited volume celebrates the work of C.P. Chandrasekar, a leading economist from the global South. True to his varied expertise, interests and research, essays presented here cover a wide array of issues, namely money and finance, industrial policy, climate finance, financialization, imperialism, social reproduction, among other things. While these essays critically engage with these issues, they also provide a roadmap beyond neoliberalism for the world in general, and the global South in particular. This volume should interest all who believe in a political and economic alternative to the current orthodox approach to economic theory and policy.

A new structure of local government, the contemporary village panchayat, has emerged in rural India as a consequence of the Constitution (73rd Amendment) Act, 1992. This new statistical domain requires databases for the development functions that have been allocated to it. This book is a study of panchayat-level databases and their potential use in local-level administration, planning, and policy implementation. It examines the overall status of local-level data available in two contrasting village panchayats: Raina gram panchayat, Barddhaman district, West Bengal; and Warwat Khanderao gram panchayat, Buldhana district, Maharashtra, drawing on interviews on the process of record-keeping and use of accumulated data with officials. The study attempts to understand the current and potential use of such records in decentralized development planning, the periodicity at which the records are updated, and the reliability and accuracy of such records. A specific and unique aspect of the book is its attempt to evaluate the accuracy of certain panchayat-level databases.

A new structure of local government, the contemporary village panchayat, has emerged in rural India as a consequence of the Constitution (73rd Amendment) Act, 1992. This new statistical domain requires databases for the development functions that have been allocated to it. This book is a study of panchayat-level databases and their potential use in local-level administration, planning, and policy implementation. It examines the overall status of local-level data available in two contrasting village panchayats: Raina gram panchayat, Barddhaman district, West Bengal; and Warwat Khanderao gram panchayat, Buldhana district, Maharashtra, drawing on interviews on the process of record-keeping and use of accumulated data with officials. The study attempts to understand the current and potential use of such records in decentralized development planning, the periodicity at which the records are updated, and the reliability and accuracy of such records. A specific and unique aspect of the book is its attempt to evaluate the accuracy of certain panchayat-level databases.

The essays in this book are the texts of four public lectures on Marx's Capital, delivered by C. P. Chandrasekhar on the occasion of 150 years since the publication of Volume 1. The essays are titled: "Capital and the Critique of Bourgeois Political Economy"; "Order and Anarchy in the Capitalist System"; 'Revisiting Capital in the Age of Finance"; and "Marx's Capital and the Current Crisis in Capitalism." The book includes an introduction by Prabhat Patnaik.

In 2005, the Foundation for Agrarian Studies (FAS) initiated the Project on Agrarian Relations in India (PARI), with the aim of studying village-level production, production systems and livelihoods, and the socio-economic characteristics of different strata of the rural population by means of detailed village surveys. The present volume is the third in a series of field reports on surveys conducted by FAS in three villages in Karnataka: Alabujanahalli in Mandya district, Siresandra in Kolar district, and Zhapur in Gulbarga district. A census survey was conducted in the three selected villages. A unique feature of these surveys is the estimation of household incomes based on detailed information on income from crop production, animal resources, agricultural and non-agricultural wage labor, salaries, business and trade, rent, interest earnings, pensions, remittances, scholarships and other sources.

The two previous volumes in the series, Socio-Economic Surveys of Three of Three Villages in Andhra Pradesh: A Study of Agrarian Relations and Socio-Economic Surveys of Two Villages in Rajasthan: A Study of Agrarian Relations, have been published by Tulika Books.

The papers presented in this volume arise out of the session on money, banking and finance, organized under the auspices of the Indian History Congress, Kolkata, 2000. In most historical periods in India, groups of people have been engaged in exchanges of their products, with money being extensively used as a medium of exchange. There is no point, however, trying to define who exactly were the bankers, or bankers and money-changers, or bankers, merchants, and money-changers rolled into one, without specifying the context. They functioned in very different ways, and thus alert us to the infinite potential of human ingenuity. Further, they tell us something about the way the use of particular institutions has a perceptible influence on the evolution of the larger society.

The global crisis that broke out in 2008 raised many fundamental questions about the present economic order. This collection of articles from authors who include some of India's leading economic historians consists of studies in the growth of capitalism, the impact of colonialism, and the implications of the current phase of globalization for India and the world.

The contributors to this volume are: Irfan Habib, Utsa Patnaik, B. Surendra Rao, Raj Shekhar Basu, Sanjukta Das Gupta, Arun Bandopadhyay, Amar Farooqui, Prabhat Patnaik, Vamsi Vakulabharanam, Jayati Ghosh, and Shireen Moosvi, who has also edited the volume.

The global financial crisis that exploded around September 2008 was just one more in a series of crises that have affected more than sixty countries in the era of financial liberalization. Of course the latest crisis is particularly significant in a number of ways: it originated in the core of capitalism, in the United States; it has spread dramatically across the world, even to countries that earlier seemed to be relatively secure; it calls into question many of the mainstream economic dogmas that have dominated economic policy-making for more than two decades. Yet, in some other ways, the current crisis is not very different from those that have preceded it in the recent past.

July 2007 marked a decade since the onset of financial crisis in several East and Southeast Asian countries. The crisis of 1997 focused attention on the dangers associated with a world dominated by fluid finance. It brought home the fact that financial liberalization can result in crises even in so-called 'miracle economies'. Prior to the crisis, the pace and pattern of growth in many countries in that region were challenging the dominance of the original capitalist powers over the global economy. The 1997 crisis set back that process, and even after a decade many of these countries have not been able to recover their pre-crisis dynamism. In hindsight, it is clear that currency and financial crises have devastating effects on the real economy. The ensuing liquidity crunch and wave of bankruptcies result in sever deflation, with attendant consequences for employment and the standard of living. The adoption, post-crisis, of conventional IMF stabilization strategies tends to worsen the situation: governments become so sensitive to the possibility of future crises that they continue to adopt very restrictive macro-economic policies and restrain public expenditure even in crucial social sectors. Finally, asset-price deflation and devaluation pave the way for foreign capital inflows that finance a transfer of ownership of assets from domestic to foreign investors, thereby enabling a conquest by international capital of important domestic assets and resources.

This book delineates the alternative trajectories of post-crisis development in different economies, the lessons they offer and the implications they have for alternative policies. It is important to take stock of these processes not only for understanding the experience of the 'crisis economies' of East and Southeast Asia, but also because it is becoming evident that the international financial system has still not evolved effective ways of preventing such crises among emerging economies and of reducing their damaging effects. Indeed, an examination of the post-crisis experience of countries outside East Asia reveals important similarities (as well as some differences) that have implications for all developing countries that have undergone a significant degree of global economic integration. This book therefore has a wider focus than the East Asian 'crisis economies' alone: it tries to situate post-crisis developments in a broader analysis of the recent political economy of international capitalism, in particular the role of mobile finance. It also offers comparative perspectives on post-crisis restructuring in other developing countries that have experienced crisis; as well as on the experience of other Asian countries that were affected by, but did not experience financial crisis. While the essays in this book were originally written in 2007, they still remain extraordinarily relevant to the present times, not least because they anticipate the processes that led to the global financial meltdown in 2008. A key insight of much of the analysis in this book is how market-oriented strategies to cope with the crisis created further financial fragility in many post-crisis economies. To that extent many of these papers effectively predict the severe impact the current global crisis is having on both financial variables and the real economy, in developing countries in particular.

This volume is a field report on surveys of agrarian relations in three villages in Andhra Pradesh conducted by scholars of the Foundation for Agrarian Studies. The study villages are Ananthavaram village in Kollur mandal, Guntur district; Bukkacherla village in Raptadu mandal, Anantapur district; and Kothapalle village in Thimmapur L.M.D. Mandal, Karimnagar district. This volume presents an analysis of statistical data collected through the village surveys with a special focus on differences across socio-economic classes and social groups. There are separate chapters on land and asset inequality, tenancy, household incomes, crop incomes, employment and wages, indebtedness, literacy and school education, and household amenities. The report attempts to contribute information, statistical data and analysis to the discussion on agrarian relations and economic distress in contemporary rural Andhra Pradesh and India.

Globalization is primarily about the steady growth of economic liberalization around the world, and the drift to a market society in which privatization and commercialization of social policies have followed the process in economic sectors. One of the apparent consequences is a remarkable growth of various forms of economic inequality and insecurity. This book considers a wide range of economic explanations for the increasing wage gap in a globalizing India, with a focus on how workers and small enterprises in India fare when faced with the processes of globalization and liberalization.

While most discussions on globalization stop with the impact of the opening up of the economy on large enterprises and workers in them, here the authors try to tell the story of what happens to workers and enterprises at the bottom of the pyramid. Key questions raised about the experience of Indian development since the onset of economic reforms in 1991 include the limitation of the notion of the informal sector: while there has been a growth in labor informalization and production in small-scale units, much of the informal labor is in or around large-scale producers. As a result, India has actually created a highly flexible labor system. Second, the issue of outsourcing of jobs which has excited comment around the world: while there is an international re-division of labor taking place, the general equilibrium dynamics of this process defy easy description. Third, the limitations in the conventional analysis of the links between educational skills and economic performance: while the commercialization of education is a matter of serious concern, it is not necessarily correct to presume that formal schooling is an adequate proxy for the possession of skills in workers.

The essays gathered in this book address two broad questions. What are the legacies of the imperial age and the colonial epoch, in the capitalist economy of the present day? And what challenges do global financial dynamics pose for developing countries, and for lower- and middle-income households?

Increasing cross-border economic flows have attracted ever more attention. Ironically, cross-border financial relations are centuries old: they date to the birth of the modern nation-state, and, indeed, emerged under the dual shadows caste by imperialism and colonialism. Under colonialism, the financial flows were asymmetric, almost always flowing from the periphery to the core. This historical fact has a continuity in the world economy's financial core - the US, Western Europe, Japan, and newly emerging urban East Asia, and a few selected regions elsewhere. There, globalization has, in the past quarter-century, provided ever more investment and credit options for firms and consumers with access to what Marx would have called 'world money'. But any balance-sheet of the contemporary impacts of cross-border financial flows for nations outside this global core - that is, formerly colonialized and imperially dominated areas - would look quite different. Certainly, there are global 'financial citizens' in these countries, who have benefited from freer global financial flows. But, overall, these nations' macroeconomies have been compromised by contractionary policies forced on them due to recurrent cross-border financial crises; further, many micro-economic tragedies have unfolded in the wake of these macroshocks.

The chapters in this book investigate three interlocking domains: the terrain of ideology about how global financial markets are supposed to work, across nations and across agents; the terrain of institutions and market structures; and the terrain of macro-economic and regulatory policy. Special attention is paid to the situation of India. This book demonstrates that, because asymmetric power rooted in imperialism and exploitation underlies the current era, exclusion and fragility are persistent features of the world in which we live.

Historically, much of economic thought, especially until the 1960s, has been preoccupied with the central concerns of development economics. It is thus contemporary mainstream economics - dominated by those with a touching faith in the virtues and infallibility of the market - that emerges as almost exceptional when viewed in a longer-term perspective. Although economics has gone through many changes over the centuries, the original developmental concerns of economists have persisted until relatively recently - diminishing, ironically, only as development economics emerged as a sub-discipline in the post-war period.

This book reviews the history of economic thought to highlight these enduring developmental concerns in earlier economic discourses. This survey also shows that various schools of economic thought, over the years, have pointed to the role of the state in leading and coordinating economic transformation and progress. In the second half of the twentieth century, often static, abstract and formal approaches displaced historically informed and institutionally nuanced discourses. Thus, the narrow approaches of contemporary economics have marginalized greater appreciation of history and other social sciences.

In the first three chapters of the book, Erik and Sophus Reinert offer fascinating surveys of mercantilism, the Italian tradition associated with its city-states, and the later German economic tradition. Mushtaq Khan surveys the historical debate over capitalist transformation. Jaime Ros reviews the impact of modern growth theory on pioneering development economists, while Amitava Dutt considers the role of international trade in early development economics. Alfredo Saad-Filho assesses Latin American structuralism and dependency theory. Finally, Tamas Szentes discusses development in the history of economics.

This book provides an analysis of the impact of subordination in the major EMEs. Distinct from ‘dependence’ under official aid till 1970s, subordination prevailed over developing nations withliberalization of capital-flows by the 1990s when markets used as agents for overseas capital for extracting surpluses. Domestic economic policies changed under autarkic neo-liberal norms with stagnation in the real economy. Critiques, of the neo-liberal premises follow in the book with suggested heterodox alternatives. The book also dwells on the economic dynamics of thestructural changes which led finance attain its dominance for those economies with deleterious consequences for the real economy.