Articles by Manabendu Chattopadhyay

Production Technology Introduction IN earlier communications to this journal Dey and Rudra (1973 a, b) presented some results based on farm-level data of Farm Management Survey of West Bengal of a test carried out for the hypothesis of al locative efficiency of fanners under the assumption of Cobb-Douglas technology.' The authors considered the production function connecting value of output (O) with two input variables defined as labour input (L) and material inputs (M) both for crops taken individually and for crops taken together. They studied empirically the relation between the pairs of variables (M L and O) and found that there is a strong association between the pairs of variables for all crops and no association for individual crops. The lack of association between the variables for individual crops with the derived test results prompted them to conclude that the hypothesis of allocative efficiency of farmers gets rejected at least in the case of West Bengal irrespective of any production technology. The aim here is to examine the same allocative efficiency hypothesis in the same region after a period of about 18 years. During this period, some authors argue that a transformation of West Bengal agrarian economy has taken place in terms of its changes in production of major crops. This has been possible partly due to the widespread use of modern agricultural inputs and partly due to the institutional changes that occurred for the implement ation of land reform programme and the establishment of the three-tier panchayat system in the 1980s in rural West Bengal [Saha and Swaminathan 1994]. It will be interesting to examine the efficacy of alio- cative efficiency model under the changing conditions of West Bengal agriculture.

Pradip Maiti Manabendu Chattopadhyay With reference to urban India, this paper examines how absolute levels of living of different groups of the population have been changing over time and whether disparity in levels of living across different groups has worsened Also examined is the incidence of urban poverty over a long period spanning almost four decades.

Foodgrains Production THERE arc some propositions in our empirical literature regarding the performance of foodgrains production in Indian agriculture:

This is the sixth and last paper in the series reporting the results of a sample survey conducted in the Calcutta Municipal Corporation area to examine the extent of interand intra-occupational differences in income and level of living of employees in a variety of public and private sector agencies. This paper analyses the inter-employer variations as well as the inter-occupational differences for all the employers taken together. It also summarises the empirical findings of the entire series.

Using a sample of private sector employees in Calcutta the authors analyse the nature and extent of differences in income, service conditions and levels of living across occupational groups. This is the fourth in a series of articles aimed at analysing interand intra-occupational differences in income and standard of living.