Economic
Challenges
for the
Contemporary
World
Economic
Challenges
for the
Contemporary
World
Essays in Honour of
PRABHAT
PATNAIK
EDITED BY
Mausumi Das
Sabyasachi Kar
Nandan Nawn
Copyright Mausumi Das, Sabyasachi Kar and Nandan Nawn, 2016
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilised in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
First published in 2016 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Das, Mausumi, editor. | Kar, Sabyasachi, editor. | Nawn, Nandan,
editor. | Patnaik, Prabhat, honoree.
Title: Economic challenges for the contemporary world : essays in honour of
Prabhat Patnaik / edited by Mausumi Das, Sabyasachi Kar and Nandan Nawn.
Description: New Delhi ; Thousand Oaks : SAGE, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049015| ISBN 9789351508786 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9789351508779 (epub) | ISBN 9789351508793 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Economic development. | Economics.
Classification: LCC HD82 .E27 2016 | DDC 330dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049015
ISBN: 978-93-515-0878-6 (HB)
The SAGE Team: Supriya Das, Isha Sachdeva and Rajinder Kaur
Contents
Mausumi Das, Sabyasachi Kar and Nandan Nawn
C.P. Chandrasekhar
Pranab Mukhopadhyay
Nandan Nawn
Shouvik Chakraborty
Sabyasachi Kar
Surajit Das
Biswajit Dhar and Reji Joseph
Mausumi Das
Subrata Guha
Sudhanshu Bhushan
Shuji Uchikawa
Jyotirmoy Bhattacharya
Vineet Kohli
Pradip Kumar Biswas
Prasenjit Bose
Rohit
Debarshi Das
Praveen Jha
This unusual collection of essays, utilising diverse methodologies and addressing numerous, varied challenges faced by the world economy today, has one common feature. All the chapters are authored by PhD students of Prabhat Patnaik. This is a richly deserved tribute to a remarkable intellectual. Prabhat Patnaik is a brilliant thinker, Indias pre-eminent heterodox, Marxist economist, one of the finest orators anywhere and an individually generous person. The diversity of the volume, in terms of the kinds of methodology used, conclusions reached and intellectual orientations of the authors, reflects well Prabhats own openness and instinctive generosity with friends and students.
I had the pleasure of working with Prabhat over several years as series editors for two Oxford University Press seriesThemes in Economics and Readings in Economics. Themes in Economics was started by Sukhamoy Chakravarty, who invited Prabhat and me to join him as series editors. The aim was to bring out books that commissioned various authors to write papers and would be edited by the volume editor, lightly supervised by the three of us. Those were wonderful days of long discussions about what topics to cover, whom to invite as volume editors, all transacted over endless cups of coffee and conversation about philosophy, politics and economics. After Sukhamoys premature death in 1990he was 56 at that timePrabhat and I decided to carry on the editorial work, and both series continued for several more years. It was an excellent experience, trying to draw the best talents from around the country and to put together some of the most interesting ideas in economics for policymakers and students to read and do research on.
Prabhat was several years my senior at St. Stephens College, and we had had no overlap. While I was familiar with his phenomenally prodigious writings, it was during this editorial work that I got to know him well. It was wonderful to see how open he was to different schools of thoughts and methodologies, even though he himself had his own beliefs. We both felt that students ought to have the option about which ideas to accept and which ones to reject, and though we had our disagreements about which ones are best kept and which ones best rejected, we worked extremely well in choosing which ones should be read.
One can see the diversity of intellectual schools in this book as well, which includes chapters on mainstream mathematical economics covering general equilibrium theory and neoclassical growth theory, analysis of financial and stock markets, political economy, and heterodox and descriptive essays.
Although the book is meant for the global economy and is on economics in general, it is particularly relevant for contemporary India. After decades of running a relatively closed economy, starting in 1991, India reformed and opened up. Among other changes, the Indian rupee was allowed to float with minimal interventions from the Reserve Bank of Indiaoften described as a managed floatmany quantity restrictions on imports were removed and import duties were sharply lowered, and restrictions on foreign direct investments coming into India were reduced.
It is not surprising that India would soon be feeling the ebbs and flows of the global economy. India, in my view, did very well by the reforms, growing at around 7 per cent per annum from 1994, which would have been unthinkable even four or five years prior to that; but India was also exposed to global highs and downturns in ways it was not used to. The 1997 East Asian crisis hit India hard, as did the global financial crisis of 2008. Being, still, a relatively new globalised economy, India has a lot to learn on how to navigate global fluctuations and flows and get more out of being a globalised economy.
This collection of papers, apart from celebrating Prabhat Patnaiks outstanding career as an economist and teacher, also tries to chip away at the large task ahead for India, as the nations economy grows and integrates into the world.
Mausumi Das, Sabyasachi Kar and Nandan Nawn deserve congratulations for organising and editing this excellent compendium.
Kaushik Basu
Senior Vice President and Chief Economist, The World Bank
Professor of Economics and the C. Marks Professor of International Studies, Cornell University
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to all the authors of this volume for their cooperation. Our special thanks to C.P. Chandrasekhar for his comments and suggestions on the introductory chapter and to Praveen Jha for his help at a crucial point in publishing this volume.
We are grateful to Kaushik Basu for making time from his busy schedule and writing the Foreword to this volume.
We would like to thank N. Unni Nair, former Commissioning Editor at SAGE, for his interest, effort and most importantly patience in supporting this long-drawn project. We would also like to thank Isha Sachdeva, Production Editor, for efficiently leading the production team working on this book, and Neena Ganjoo and Pranab Jyoti Sarma for their excellent copy-editing.
