Anweshan - journal of Department of Commerce

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Open Access
Post-Reform Life Insurance Industry in India: A Study on Scale Efficiency
(University of North Bengal, 2019-03) Sarda, Madhu; Ray, Indrajit
Indian life insurance industry witnesses a rapid growth during the post-reform period. The current statistics on number of policies and branches, sum assured, premium, share capital, insurance penetration, insurance density etc., show noticeable hike, compared to their respective values at the outset of reform. Also, total fund registers a steep rise with a compound annual growth rate of approximately 17.90% in the last seventeen years. In view of this magnanimous growth of scale, represented here by the summation of total fund and income there from, the present article seeks to measure scale efficiency of the Indian public and private life insurance sectors, both sector-wise and in totality, during the post-reform period. This study applies Econometric Frontier Approach (EFA) to estimate Transcendental Logarithmic (Translog) cost function consisting of one output and two input variables, labour and capital for a time period from 2003-04 to 2017-18. Results on scale efficiency scores of private and public life insurance sectors are 0.274378 and 0.808870 respectively. However, though both the sectors exhibit scale economies, a cautious cost effective policy should be adopted in future by public life insurance sector to raise total fund and to invest them. Indian life insurance industry as a whole portrays huge opportunity to scale-up its total fund as current scale efficiency score is as low as 0.140533.
Open Access
The Marshallian Theory of Industrial Districts and Its Italian Variant: The case of a pottery industry agglomerate in West Bengal
(University of North Bengal, 2017-03) Thanislaus, Lawrence; Ray, Indrajit
Rightly from the days of Alfred Marshall the concept of industrial district has been assuming importance in the economic literature. Various theoretical aspects of this concept have been discussed under the genre of ‘the theory of industrial districts’.1 The theory has also been put into empirical tests in various countries, which have enriched the facets of the theory. In this background, the present article seeks to analyse an industrial agglomerate in West Bengal, in the neighbourhood of the Siliguri town, which has a more recent origin, the post-Partition period of Bengal. It is an agglomerate of the pottery industry, which belongs to the cottage sector,. It gives an opportunity to verify whether this cottage-industry agglomerate exhibits the traits of the theory of industrial district, which has largely been developed on the experiences of modern industries in developed countries. The organisation of this article is this. Section I defines the term ‘industrial districts’, and then describes their features and seeks to identity the reasons for their emergence. It also cites examples of such districts in various countries along with their characteristics, along with the government interventions in those countries in this respect. The remaining sections deal with our case study. Section II describes the locational features of the study area; and Sections III discusses the status of the industry in a nutshell. Finally, in Section IV, we argue that Pal Para represents an industrial district, which belongs to the genre of Marshallian industrial districts. Section V concludes. I
Open Access
Rational Inefficiency: A Discourse on John Richard Hicks, Joe Staten Bain and Harvey Leibenstein
(University of North Bengal, 2016-03) Pradhan, Nandita; Ray, Indrajit
Rationality and efficiency are often considered two sides of a same coin. Often we argue that in the absence of market failures, rationality always generates efficiency. The present paper, however, goes against this current of wisdom. It argues that rationality reflects the state of mind that determines the course of decision-making for an individual. Efficiency, on the other hand, conventionally reflects the financial results of an economic activity. But the human mind always desires more than what those financial outcomes provide. Therefore, rationality should not be identical to efficiency. This is the concept of ‘rational inefficiency’, or equivalently, ‘irrational efficiency’, which is theme of this article. It discusses in this context three important hypotheses, as developed in the literature on efficiency. Those are (a) the Quiet Life Hypothesis, (b) the Structure-Conduct-Performance Hypothesis, and (c) the x-efficiency Hypothesis.
Open Access
Long-run effects of FDI in India’s multi-brand retail trade: Lessons from cross-country economic history
(University of North Bengal, 2013-03) Pradhan, Nandita; Ray, Indrajit
In view of the recent debate on the entry of FDI in India’s multi-brand trade, this article seeks to analyse the long-run effects of this policy-options on the formation of industrial capital and entrepreneurs. To do so, we look into the economic history of two of the presently developed countries, the United Kingdom in Europe and Japan in Asia. Their historical sequences suggest that the industrialisation process in an economy should obtain capital and entrepreneurs from the agricultural and tertiary sectors, and that a congenial policy-environment is imperative to these ends. Also, we deal with the economic history of India during the early colonial period, and learn that, owing to hostile governance, the period witnessed a reverse flow of those critical factors of production from industries and trade to agriculture. This article, therefore, concludes that FDI in multi-brand trade, which is expected to hard-hit tiny and small traders in the long run, may jeopardise India’s prospect of domestic capital formation and entrepreneurs for industries. This will be very harmful for our future course of industrialisation.

Anweshan - journal of Department of Commerce

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