Markets

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.

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.

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.