ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

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Drug Price Control in India

Price control of life-saving essential medicines is the need of the hour, but the National Pharmaceutical Pricing Authority has allowed a hike of 10% in nearly 800 drugs and devices listed under the National List of Essential Medicines from 1 April 2022 because of the rising input costs. Prices of scheduled drugs are allowed an increase each year acc­ording to the wholesale price index. Input costs are rising primarily because India is heavily dependent on China for drug imports.

The Adoption of Unified Payments Interface in India

This article examines the trend, pattern and rate of adoption of the Unified Payments Interface transactions in India. For estimating the results, the study utilises the generalised modified exponential function, which allows for more flexible S-shaped curves. Based on data from the Nation­al Payments Corporation of India, the number of UPI transactions is likely to increase more than sixfold in a span of five years’ period. The predicted rapid growth in UPI transactions has significant implications for the payments app developers, internet service providers, the NPCI, and the UPI regulator—the Reserve Bank of India.

Reviving the Lending Appetite of Banks

The flow of bank credit is crucial to revive the economy. The fear of potential asset quality woes has reduced the risk appetite of banks. Going beyond the restructuring support, banks need policy support by relaxations in prudential norms in the near term to be normalised in the next four–fi ve years. Coping with the adversities of the pandemic needs a collaborative policy support of all stakeholders to step up the lending appetite.

Agro-food Systems and Public Policy for Food and Agricultural Markets

This transcription of a presentation, commentary and a discussion at IIM Banglore in 2020 has three parts. In Part 1, contested definitions of food, urgent food questions and concepts of food systems are clarified before considering the ways agricultural markets are integrated in food systems, the contradictory principles at work in policies for their regulation, and the ways such policy practices are imagined. Sixteen multidisciplinary depictions of global food systems, agricultural markets and food policies are analysed, concluding that their conceptual fracturing results from a disregard of theory. New models of the Indian food system will need to give rigorous attention to institutions for policy.

Part 2 problematises the empirical granularity needed to understand market behaviour that policymakers ignore as they shift agriculture from being the driver of industrialisation to being a residualised welfare sector. By continuing to ignore and misunderstand existing physical markets, regulatory reforms like the new central laws assume that the deregulation would somehow automatically bypass the vast number of private intermediaries necessary for distribution whose relatively easy-to-enter, small-scale activity undercuts the transaction costs of corporate agribusiness. In doing so, they lose sight of the original purpose and need for public regulation in primary agricultural markets in the first place.

Part 3 discusses the need for consultative policy processes for policy and the implications for small scales and informality in agriculture and its markets of the close integration of self-employment in the rural non-farm economy.

Market Mindset Mars Medical Care in China

Commercialisation of Medical Care in China: Changing Landscapes by Rama V Baru and Madhurima Nundy, Oxon and New York: Routledge, 2020; pp xviii + 112, Rs 695.

 

Time-varying Nature of Stock Market Interdependence

In the literature on global market integration, the strength of interdependence has been measured in different ways. However, only an accurate measure of strength of interdependence helps in understanding the nature of integration among markets. This article, by employing novel time-frequency based wavelet techniques, analyses the interdependence of global equity markets from a heterogeneous investor perspective, with a special focus on the Indian stock market. With the wavelet framework effectively capturing the heterogeneity of market participants’ space of operation, an analysis grounded in this framework allows one to capture information from a different dimension than the traditional time domain analyses, where the multiscale structures of financial markets are clearly extracted.

Liberal Approach to Inequality

The Globalisation of Inequality by Francois Bourguignon, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2015; pp 210, $27.95.

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