Articles by Prabir De

Coherent national strategies, backed by regional cooperation efforts, offer a way forward for economic recovery in South Asia, which is rapidly becoming the next COVID-19 global hotspot. Challenges and policies relating to macroeconomics, health, economic sectors, stimulus measures, and reforms, which are all crucial for the region’s recovery are discussed.

In a major bid to facilitate cross-border transportation and trade, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal signed the landmark Motor Vehicle Agreement in June 2015. Is this agreement capable of unlocking the huge trade potential of these countries and deepening regional integration in a region known to be the least integrated in the world? This note attempts to address some of these questions, reviews the salient features of the agreement and discusses the challenges involved in its implementation.

This paper highlights the issues surrounding trade in education services in India. Concentrating on the ease and difficulty of trade in education services through different modes in India, it shows that the process of trade in education services through World Trade Organisation modes 3 and 4 has just begun in India, whereas mode 2 is still the most prevalent mode of trade in education services. A field survey undertaken in this context also identifies some barriers to movement of foreign students to India.

This paper explores the role played by infrastructure in determining the level of economic development across the states over different time spans during the past quarter century. A comparative static framework is developed in order to test the movement of the development trajectory of the states in the infrastructure-income plane. The findings of the paper are statistically significant and have serious implications for future regional policies. It shows that, interstate disparities in physical, social and economic infrastructure facilities have remained at an alarmingly high level. There are also indications that interstate differences in infrastructure are responsible for a growing regional income disparities.

Grounding Economics in Geography This paper is concerned with the economics of Indian ports as one important phenomenon in Indian economic geography, and its relationship with regional development under the free market economy. A port performance index derived with the help of principal component analysis of eight individual port performance indicators shows that overseas traffic intensity is the most significant determinant of performance. With increasing openness of the economy and absence of an integrated policy toward export transport network, there is a decline in export intensity and rising domestic coastal traffic in Indian ports.