Sugata Marjit

COVID-19 has adverse impacts on contact-intensive sectors, viz., manufacturing, tourism, and the entertainment sector (ES). In a general equilibrium (GE) model with online, entertainment and informal sectors employing skill, unskilled, and capital, we show that COVID-19 could cause polarization pushing contact-intensive entertainment industry on the brink of collapse while the other two survive. Dual roles of factor intensity and contact intensity (CI) contribute to such finite changes, triggering inter-skill wage inequality. This is the first of its kind to offer a theoretical mechanism capturing the contractionary effects on contact-intensive sectors and wage inequality. These results match with the literature emphasizing the hardships faced by the cultural sector.

The paper explores the emergence and consequence of contract farming as a new subsector of agriculture in a small open developing economy, applying the theory of finite change in a general equilibrium framework. In this paper, we analyze the entry of a cash crop-producing foreign contract farming (CF) subsector within the agricultural sector of a country. Entry requires a cash crop price that is substantially above the price of the food crop already being produced within the country. CF (a) increases GDP and hence aggregate economic welfare; (b) may make income distribution more skewed; (c) reduces domestic production of food and hence, (d) increases food import and hence food insecurity. Thus, CF might imply a trade-off between inequality and growth. We employ a variant of the 3 × 3 mixed specific factor-Heckscher Ohlin general equilibrium model of production and trade where introduction of a new policy may lead to the emergence of a new sector resulting in finite changes where we show the possibilities of sectoral diversification with combinations of contract farming vis-à-vis traditional agriculture under some plausible conditions. Our results seem to be consistent when compared to some empirically robust conclusions found in the literature and some secondary data available on the FAO website. We also argue that the food insecurity problem gets aggravated as more and more countries engage in contract farming. Policy simulations identify critical parameters confirming the dominance of distribution over the growth effect in terms of a social welfare function. Simulations imply that there could be a food insecurity problem, as rises in GDP could result in increasing inequality so that government—to preserve social welfare—could restrict the extent of contract farming if non-food-producing sectors expand, causing terms-of-trade deterioration of food-importing nations.

The flourishing of IT-sector and IT-enabled services has led to emergence of different activities by leaps and bounds thanks to proliferation of Virtual plaform-based transactions, and E- commerce. However, massive layoffs started in 2022, as all tech giants encountered revenue declines amidst supply chain issues, inflation, Ukraine war, leading to deflation and fears of recession squeezing consumer and business spending. This has happened across the globe. In the context of the countries supplying low-wage labor (skilled wage in Indian Silicon Valley at Bengaluru is lower than that in the Californian Silicon Valley), similar episodes unfolded but to a different extent. The evidence suggests that layoffs in developing economies like India is much less than that in the US with limited impact on Indian industry despite severe global downturn. Jobs and hiring will move out of the developed markets to these emerging markets with cost advantages owing to lower salaries, as with low demand, drive to cutdown costs will induce firms to outsource some operations outside while focusing on core functions provided the cost of outsourcing is not too high. In this paper, we build a model to show how contraction in demand for IT-enabled works will determine how much of works to be completed in the US (home) and the remainder to be sourced out to say, India (abroad). We identify the conditions under which switching from pure domestic production to outsourcing using hired foreign workers will happen. We show that in both cases of perfectly competitive homogeneous product as well as in case of differentiated goods oligopoly scenarios that the hiring ceases drastically in the home while the outsourced workers will not suffer to a large extent. Home bears the burden of adjustment due to the sheer cost disadvantages of the home.

The standard literature on discrimination in labour market discusses discrimination-generated inefficiency at the firm level which cannot be sustained under competition. As competition gets intense, firms would be more disciplined and would be forced to refrain from practising discrimination. This forms the core of the pioneering works by Becker (1957) and Arrow (1973). In this article, we argue that when firms are heterogeneous in terms of productivity, some of the more efficient firms can easily survive practising discrimination and only relatively inefficient firms will quit the market. Thus, incentives to discriminate, if any, would be greater for more efficient firms. Once they survive, measured efficiency of the market would, in fact, increase. Thus ironically, discriminating industries would exhibit higher efficiency. This article shows that, in a model with heterogeneous firms, a competitive market system cannot eliminate the problem of discrimination. Thus, competition and discrimination may coexist.

We consider a small open developing economy with presence of both final and intermediate goods where we analyze the impact of liberalizing trade and capital flows on wage inequality when such policies are undertaken in a sequence. Our findings suggest that when skilled sector is capital intensive relative to the unskilled sector, wage gap always increases independent of the sequence of reforms, but the extent of such increase may vary according to the chosen sequence. However, when unskilled intensive sector is more capital intensive, the impact of these reforms on skilled-unskilled wage gap is ambiguous. Later we also demonstrate the robustness of our results to alternative assumptions on the structure of the model.

The path‐breaking work of Card and Krueger, showing that a higher minimum wage can increase employment, turned the age‐old conventional wisdom on its head. This paper demonstrates that this apparently paradoxical result is perfectly plausible in a competitive general equilibrium production structure of a small open economy with a non‐traded good, without recourse to monopsony, spatial heterogeneity, heterogeneity of consumers and so on, the usual theoretical drivers behind the result. Following Jones and Marjit, we build a simple general equilibrium model with production complementarity and we show that a higher minimum wage can raise aggregate employment. Expansion in the non‐traded sector following a wage hike may be consistent with the overall expansion of the export sector in a multi‐good framework, an unlikely outcome in a conventional two‐good model which cannot accommodate with production complementarity.