Articles by Poonam Gupta

Remittances to India have been growing rapidly since 1991, making the country one of the largest recipients of remittances in the developing world. This paper analyses the determinants of remittances to India and finds that their growth over time can be explained by the increase in migration and total earnings of migrants. Remittances are also affected by the economic environment in source countries, and appear to be counter-cyclical - i e, higher during periods of low economic growth in India. None of the remaining economic or political variables considered in the paper, including political uncertainty, interest rates or exchange rate depreciation, are found to affect remittances significantly.

Compensating Government Employees for Price Increase Basis, Trends and Forecasts Poonam Gupta Sanjeev Gupta Does the existing policy of dearness allowance (DA) payments compensate government employees for price increase without introducing distortions in the pay structure? Also, by how much wilt the liability of the govern- ment increase by the turn of the century if present trends in DA payments are maintained? In this paper, the recommendations made by various pay commissions and other bodies on DA since its inception are summarised to bring out the underlying rationale. This is followed by a discussion of the present trends in DA payments. Subsequently, forecast of such payments by the Union government as well as different state governments upto the year 2000 are made. Conclusions are drawn in the last section.

Estimates of Unreported Economy in India Poonam Gupta Sanjeev Gupta WE had in our paper [Gupta and Gupta, (1982)] presented estimates of the unofficial economy in India on a yearly basis for the period 1967 to 1978. For this purpose, we employed a technique suggested by Feigc [1979], that has been used to determine the size of the unreported economy in many developed countries including USA and Canada. The results had shown that the unreported activity as a proportion of official GNP has grown from 9.5 per cent in 1967 to nearly 49 per cent by 1978. In his comment, Sandesara [1982] argues that our estimates are on the high side. The purpose of this reply is to show that the theoretical basis of Sandesara's criticism is weak and his methodology inappropriate. Further, his analysis indicates a lack of understanding of the functioning of the unofficial economy. In the next section, we briefly summarise Sande- sara's analysis mainly to highlight its shortcomings. The last section gives the estimates of total economic activity (consisting of both official and unofficial) in India prepared by other researchers which point to the . fact that our estimates of unofficial economy are by no means over estimates.