Are Reforms Productive? Explaining Productivity and Efficiency in the Indian Manufacturing

Marie-Ange Véganzonès, Arup Mitra () and Chandan Sharma

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: India's economic liberalization in the 1990s provides scope for research on the effects of policy reforms on economic performance. This study examines some of these policy changes and their impact on firms' productivity and efficiency. We assess, specifically, the role of export and import (total, intermediate, and capital goods) as an outcome of trade liberalization, R&D, technology transfer, and infrastructure endowment over the period 1994-2008. Although our analysis may involve certain biases in capturing the causal relationships, results suggest that infrastructure is a crucial determinant of manufacturing performance in India. This is true for a wide range of variables, such as transport, energy, and information and communication technology (ICT). This finding has important policy implications in the Indian context, as several parts of the country are constrained by severe infrastructure shortages. Other empirical results concern knowledge transfers, which seem to materialize more through exports than imports. Our findings also suggest that R&D is not a productivity-enhancing activity in India and that firms rely more on purchase of foreign technology. This outcome does not come as a surprise because Indian firms are known for low in-house research and limited innovation-oriented activities.

Keywords: Trade liberalization; Infrastructure; Technology Transfert; Firms’ Productivity; Manufacturing; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-04-30
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in Institut of Economic Growth, Seminars on Economic Policy, Apr 2012, New Delhi, India

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Are Reforms Productive? Explaining Productivity and Efficiency in the Indian Manufacturing (2013)
Working Paper: Are Reforms Productive? Explaining Productivity and Efficiency in the Indian Manufacturing (2013)
Working Paper: Are Reforms Productive? Explaining Productivity and Efficiency in the Indian Manufacturing (2013)
Working Paper: Are reforms productive? Explaining productivity and efficiency in the Indian manufacturing (2012)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03058727

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().