Articles by Rajesh Mehta

The Agreement on Agriculture (AOA), one of the major agreements signed in Marrakesh under the Uruguay Round in April 1994, has three basic clauses; market access (tariffication), domestic support and export competition. The authors review India's status with regard to each one of these and also try to compare it with what is happening in the rest of the world, especially how the developed countries are adjusting their agricultural policies to make them compatible with the provisions of the AOA. In the light of this analysis, they delineate the broad contours of an agenda for Indian negotiators in the Seattle round with respect to these three clauses, keeping India's interests in mind. Section II of the paper concentrates on the issue of market access, Section III on domestic support and Section IV on export competition. Section V presents some concluding remarks and also refers to some other important issues that too need to be taken care of in the Seattle round.

Short-Term Econometric Forecasting Models in India A Study in Prediction Performance Kalyan Raipuria Rajesh Mehta This paper reports the results of an analysis of the observed deviations in actuals compared to forecasts of short- term econometric forecasting models for the Indian economy and concludes that the models need constant development in terms of specification and identification corresponding to the movement of the economy and changes in the behaviour of the economic actors and in their interrelationships.

East European Developments Impact on Trade of Developing Countries R G Nambiar Rajesh Mehta G A Tadas This article makes an attempt to evaluate the potential impact of East's entry into the 'global economic zoo' on developing countries particularly from the standpoint of latter's trade opportunities in the nineties. The East's entry into the world's free markets' appears to have ruinous ramifications for developing countries' trade. There are two circumstances which reinforce this conclusion. The first is the findings of the 1980s which show a firm trend of trade diversion that has already begun to flush out the developing countries not only from the markets of North, but also from its own markets. The second circumstance is the apparent tendency for the structure of intra-East Europe trade to be very similar to the export structures of the developing countries.

The main focus of this paper is on relative price structure and price behaviour