Buddhadeb Ghosh

Causality between performance and traffic: an investigation with Indian ports

This paper attempts to find out the causal relationship between port performance and port traffic by using Indian data. The use of cointegration analysis has come out with the result that performance precedes traffic in most of the ports of India. Hence, government policy towards performance augmenting facilities should be given priority so that higher efficiency induces higher traffic

Intertemporal efficiency variations in Indian manufacturing industries

One of the important sources of growth of an economy is the efficient and productive use of existing resources. The Indian industries after three decades of protected industrial culture has produced an inefficient regime. This is supposed to be corrected by the on-going economic liberalization. An application of Time-Varying Frontier Production Function approach with both fixed and variable ranking models in Indian industries helps in testing the hypothesis of intertemporal movement of technical efficiencies (TE) on which the current globalization program is based. The results are significantly conclusive: TEs have been falling over time. This along with TFP changes helps us to understand the nature of industrial development in recent past. An inquiry into the sources of inter-industry efficiency variations shows that skill, labor productivity and profit play significantly positive role, while capital intensity works against general beliefs.

Frontier Production Function and Extreme Observations

Extreme Observations (EOs) play a significant role in the estimation of Frontier Production Functions (FPFs). The EOs can be defined to be the observations with either the maximum or the minimum efficiencies. The estimation of FPFs is known to be very much sensitive to the presence of EOs. It will be reviewed in this paper how the different models of single equation FPFs and the estimation procedures were developed in order to tackle the problem of EOs starting from the model proposed by Farrell (1957). The authors then propose a model of FPF with Errors-in-Variables (EIVs) and shows that the model may be effective even when the EIVs are negligible. JEL Classification : C 13. Keywm·ds : Frontier Production Function, Extreme Observations, Estimation and Errors-in-variables.