Articles by Neeraj Hatekar

Part 2 of the survey looks at experimental results dealing with individual choice. The discussion compares the two dominant experimental methodologies that govern individual decision-making experiments in social science. It then discusses decision-making experiments under two main heads - the psychology-oriented experiments (or what has now morphed into behavioural economics) and experiments that test observed behaviour against theoretical benchmarks derived from neoclassical microeconomic theory. The last section provides an overview and looks ahead to the future of experiments in decision-making.

This study takes a closer look at some of the drivers of inflation in manufacturing prices in India. It indicates that "overheating", which has recently acquired policy focus, drives inflation in the short run, whereas international materials and energy prices drive inflation over the short as well as the long run. The study implies that restrictive monetary policy might be of only limited relevance in controlling non-food inflation. Public policy aimed at minimising the impact of input cost shocks might work better in the long run. In the meanwhile, the restrictive monetary policy followed by the Reserve Bank of India might worsen the downturn that has begun in January 2010.

The higher education scene in the country is set to experience a dramatic change but the ability of the state universities to cope with this change is extremely doubtful. The success of the new central universities and the proposed national universities will come about at the cost of the state universities, which cater to the majority of students in the country. This article proposes that postgraduate teaching and research in state universities will have to be taken over by the central government to ensure the survival of this important part of the higher education system.

This paper examines whether laws with inadequate penal provisions can still work towards eradicating undesirable social customs. Data on age at marriage from family genealogies in India from 1905 to 1980 is used to examine the effectiveness of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929). The findings reveal that though the law lacked adequate penal clauses, it still contributed towards increasing the age at marriage. It worked because a cultural shift towards later marriages was already taking place; the law worked by reinforcing the cultural change. The paper draws attention to the importance of the context in which social legislation operates and the contingent factors that determine its success or failure.

A History of Capitalism: 1500-2000 by Michel Beaud; Aakar Books for South Asia, Delhi, 2004;
NEERAJ HATEKAR The book under review is the fifth edition of one that was first published in English in 1983 by the Monthly Review Press. The present edition consists of seven chapters. The previous six are more or less the same book which was published in 1983, while the seventh chapter has been added to take account of developments in capitalism in the last decades of the 20th century.