Articles by Shikha Jha

Towards Hunger Free India: Agenda and Imperatives edited by M D Asthana and Pedro Madrano;
Manohar Publishers, New Delhi, 2001; pp liii+592, Rs 895

This article shows that foreign aid to India merely substitutes for spending that the government would have undertaken anyway; the funds freed by earmarked aid are spent elsewhere. Moreover, in passing external assistance earmarked for the states, the central government makes a reduction in transfers it would have otherwise made to the states. From the country's perspective these fungibility results could be good; domestic spending priorities - inter-sectoral and inter-regional - are unaffected by foreign aid. For the donors, however, the results indicate that success of their projects, as measured by the conventional benefit-cost analysis, does not tell the whole story; the marginal use of their money and its overall development impact could be different from that intended.

(5) The proposed TRIPS prevents the grant of compulsory licences in the public interest.
(6) Under TRIPS no ceiling can be placed on royalty demanded on patents like in the Indian Patent Act.

Who Pays More?
Case of Excise Duties in India Shikha Jha P V Srinivasan How progressive is the revenue collected from different commodity taxes (excise duties) in India? This paper examines this issue based on the distribution of consumption expenditure. It also analyses how the incidence of tax on different expenditure groups is influenced by the commodity tax structure.

Indian Industry Shikha Jha The Behaviour of Industrial Prices in India by R Chatterji; Oxford University Press, Bombay, 1989; pp 224, Rs 150.
WHAT are the mechanisms for clearing different markets? Are the prices flexible enough to equate supplies and demands? Or are excess demands met by quantity adjustments? These questions are partly answered by the fact that the assumption of fix-price markets (at least) for manufactured goods is now a standard feature of most post-Keynesian macro models and is supported by a long line of empirical research starting with the Oxford studies on the price mechanism (T Wilson and P W S Andrews (eds), Oxford Studies on the Price Mechanism, Oxford University Press 1951), Information on the behaviour of industrial prices is very important for any economy- wide policy analysis, e g, in exercises such as applied general equilibrium modelling. For instance, if an assumption is made that demands and supplies determine prices, while in fact they are cost determined, then we could be over/under-estimating the inflationary impact. When prices follow a cost-based rule for certain industries it becomes necessary to specify alternative market clearing mechanisms for these industries since prices do not perform this role. Therefore, an analysis of the price/cost/ activity relation is useful especially at a disaggregated level rather than for the aggregate industrial sector as a whole.