The political economy of retail liberalization: The case of India

2014 ◽  
Vol 05 (01) ◽  
pp. 1440005
Author(s):  
Arpita Mukherjee ◽  
Tanu M. Goyal

This paper examines the political complexities of retail liberalization in a developing country such as India in the overall context of liberalization of trade in services. Drawing on the experiences of other developing countries and India's experiences in the past decade of allowing FDI in retail, the paper found that retail modernization is a part of economic development and it will continue to happen. The governments of developing countries have to take into account multiple perceptions related to retail liberalization and design a policy that is non-discriminatory and transparent. Appropriate policies should be in place to support the traditional retailers to face competition. Developing countries should be willing to bind their unilateral liberalization in trade agreements and this will enhance their bargaining power.

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-69
Author(s):  
Benoit Challand ◽  
Joshua Rogers

This paper provides an historical exploration of local governance in Yemen across the past sixty years. It highlights the presence of a strong tradition of local self-rule, self-help, and participation “from below” as well as the presence of a rival, official, political culture upheld by central elites that celebrates centralization and the strong state. Shifts in the predominance of one or the other tendency have coincided with shifts in the political economy of the Yemeni state(s). When it favored the local, central rulers were compelled to give space to local initiatives and Yemen experienced moments of political participation and local development.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Falih Suaedi ◽  
Muhmmad Saud

This article explores in what ways political economy as an analytical framework for developmental studies has contributed to scholarships on Indonesian’s contemporary discourse of development. In doing so, it reviews important scholarly works on Indonesian political and economic development since the 1980s. The argument is that given sharp critiques directed at its conceptual and empirical utility for understanding changes taking place in modern Indonesian polity and society, the political economy approach continues to be a significant tool of research specifically in broader context of comparative politics applied to Indonesia and other countries in Southeast Asia. The focus of this exploration, however, has shifted from the formation of Indonesian bourgeoisie to the reconstitution of bourgeois oligarchy consisting of the alliance between the politico-bureaucratic elite and business families. With this in mind, the parallel relationship of capitalist establishment and the development of the state power in Indonesia is explainable.<br>


Author(s):  
John Toye

Keynes’s writings are often disregarded in the context of economic development, overlooking that Russia was a developing country in his lifetime. He wrote about the experimental economic techniques that the Soviet government employed. He visited Russia three times and wrote A Short View of Russia in which he explained and criticized Bolsheviks’ policy of export and import monopolies, an overvalued exchange rate, inflationary government finance, and the subsidization of industry. These were policies that many developing countries adopted after decolonization. Keynes’s conclusion was that they were inefficient and that ‘bourgeois economics was valid in a communist country’. Did Keynes change his mind in the 1930s? If anything, he grew more harshly critical of Soviet economic policies and carefully distinguished them from his own endorsement of moderate trade protection and government supplementary investment in times of depression.


Electricity is critical to enabling India’s economic growth and providing a better future for its citizens. In spite of several decades of reform, the Indian electricity sector is unable to provide high-quality and affordable electricity for all, and grapples with the challenge of poor financial and operational performance. To understand why, Mapping Power provides the most comprehensive analysis of the political economy of electricity in India’s states. With chapters on fifteen states by scholars of state politics and electricity, this volume maps the political and economic forces that constrain and shape decisions in electricity distribute on. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it concludes that attempts to depoliticize the sector are misplaced and could worsen outcomes. Instead, it suggests that a historically grounded political economy analysis helps understand the past and devise reforms to simultaneously improve sectoral outcomes and generate political rewards. These arguments have implications for the challenges facing India’s electricity future, including providing electricity to all, implementing government reform schemes, and successfully managing the rise of renewable energy.


1989 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 787-797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Akhil Gupta

Economists and political scientists have become increasingly interested in the political economy of India during the past decade and particularly during the past three or four years. The titles under review will be valuable not only to India specialists but also to comparative scholars because of the intriguing mix of conditions found in India. More like a continent than a country in its diversity, India is in some ways very similar to densely populated, predominantly rural and agricultural China, differing most perhaps in the obstinacy and depth of its poverty. In the predominant role played by the state within an essentially capitalist economy, it is closer to the model of Western social democracies than it is to either prominently ideological capitalist or socialist nation-states; like other countries in the “third world,” the state in India plays a highly interventionist developmental role. Finally, since Independence it has pursued, more successfully than most nation-states in Latin America and Asia, policies of importsubstituting industrialization and relative autarchy. In terms of its political structures, India differs from most newly industrialized countries (NICs) in that it generally continues to function as a parliamentary democracy. The federal political system creates an intriguing balance of forces between central and the regional state governments, which are often ruled by opposition parties with agendas, ideologies, and organizational structures quite different from those of the central government.


2001 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-665 ◽  
Author(s):  
Asim Erdilek

The surge in foreign direct investment (FDI)—investment with managerial control by the foreign investor, usually a multinational corporation—has been the major driver of globalization in the past two decades and the accelerator of economic development in many developing countries. It has, however, bypassed Turkey. By all relevant relative measures found in the United Nations' annual World Investment Report, Turkey has failed to attract much FDI.


Author(s):  
Christopher S Magee

Abstract This paper provides one of the first assessments of the hypothesis that two countries are more likely to form a preferential trade agreement (PTA) if they are already major trading partners. The paper also tests a number of predictions from the political economy literature about which countries are expected to form regional agreements. The results show that countries are more likely to be preferential trading partners if they have significant bilateral trade, are similar in size, and are both democracies. Finally, the paper measures the effect of preferential agreements on trade volumes while, unlike previous studies, treating PTA formation as endogenous.


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