Goa is a popular destination for migrants from other states. However, according to Census 2011, migration for business comprises only 2.7% of all migration. Using Census data, this study seeks to identify the factors that determine business migration to Goa. It is found that while the size of population of the home state positively influences outmigration, distance has a dampening effect, though its importance as a deterrent is declining over time. The variables of literacy and GSDP do not exert much influence on the volume of migration. A field study conducted to gain insights into the experiences of the business migrant community in Goa shows that most of the respondents have a favourable opinion about Goa, with very few cases of discrimination and abuse.

Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) are important as they can create an economic impact on international businesses and influence global economic policies. The key objective of this study is to understand whether India's agricultural export competitiveness with its partners has improved after the creation of these Regional Trade Agreements. The study applies the Revealed Comparative Advantage (RCA) index to gauge the export competitiveness of India with its RTA partners. The data has been analyzed for products in the agriculture category – Animals (product codes (PCs) 01 to 05), Vegetables (PCs 06 to 15), and Food Products (PCs 16 to 24) – based on the Harmonized System (HS2) classification. Out of 164 cases of agricultural export competitiveness, 84 cases have shown statistically significant changes after the formation of the studied RTAs. Among these 84 cases, 31 have shown improvement in the RCA, and 53 have shown a deterioration of the RCA. Considering India's agricultural export competitiveness, the India–Thailand Free Trade Agreement (FTA) is the most beneficial, while the India–Singapore Comprehensive Economic Cooperation Agreement (CECA) and the India–Sri Lanka FTA can be treated as highly disadvantageous bilateral agreements. The results have trade policy implications for India and other developing nations that are in the process of negotiating for more RTAs.

In India, the volume of internal migration is increasing rapidly after remaining stagnant at around 30% of the total population up to 2001. However, the volume of inter-state migration is substantially lower than that of intra-state migration. In the case of Goa, compared to other states, the proportion of inter-state migration is relatively higher. The main objective of this paper is to study the variables that influence the movement of migrants from other states to Goa. Through a gravity model framework, determinants such as density of population, distance, per capita NSDP, literacy and their role in migration are examined. Individual motivations for migration are also studied within a push–pull framework. It is observed from the results of the gravity models that while population density positively affects out-migration, distance and per capita NSDP of the source state have a negative effect. While economic factors dominate in both push and pull factors, the growing role of social factors in the choice of destination reflects the growing importance of networks in certain forms of employment.

The economic paradigms currently dominating the world are not sustainable. The threats from climate change, exploitation-based approaches to commerce, and the excess acquisition of resources loom large as well as the possibility of military flare-ups. Maintaining a balance between development and ecosystems, aspirations for growth, and the need for sustainability is a prescient challenge. The Indian Ocean Region (IOR) encompasses some of the poorest countries in the world and those that will bear the brunt of the negative impacts from climate change. This book explores the immense potential of the IOR and how best to maintain sustainable and responsible economic and strategic activities. The combination of science, innovation, and entrepreneurship will create a new blue economy business model, which has the potential to transform society. Based on critical analysis of the model and its practical applications, including risks as well as opportunities, the topics discussed range from food security, energy, and resilience to climate change, trade and investments, and improved maritime connectivity to tourism, poverty alleviation, and socioeconomic growth, encompassing a wide range of interests and expertise. FEATURES Examines the geo-politics, geo-resources, and geo-hazards of the IOR and identifies opportunities and methods to achieve success Covers a detailed assessment of available resources (fisheries, minerals, energy), threats such as pollution (plastic, acoustic, carbon, bio-invasion), geo-politics (maritime security, military invasion), and strategic vision (determining carrying capacity, ethical governance, and responsible ecosystem) of the Indian Ocean Analyzes the economics of the blue economy, the global scenario including the Pacific and Caribbean islands, and the aspect of the Chinese geo-political invasion in the Indian Ocean Inspires entrepreneurs to adopt new ways of creating economic benefits, reducing energy use, and increasing revenue while simultaneously helping the communities involved Discusses the threat and security perspectives of the IOR and the collective responsibility for a sustainable use of resources Crossing a wide range of interests and expertise, this book explores topics and ideas that will be essential to researchers and professionals in marine sciences, economics, business, geography, and political sciences. Graduate students in the same fields as well as any and all organizations that maintain a presence in the IOR will likewise find this book to be a valuable resource.

The notion of optimality pervades most domains of decision-making 1 , including human development 2 , resource allocation and optimality in human capital formation 3,4 . Some studies have estimated optimal school size with the view to enhancing student learning outcomes 5 . There have also been studies on the optimal amount of financial aid that is offered to students 6 . The notion of optimality should also pervade the higher education sector, as it places demands on scarce public funds and therefore needs rational rules for allocation.

This chapter aims to identify complementary and competing sectors of trade between India and Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) to consolidate their strengths and to overcome the deficiencies. Identification of synergies between India and ASEAN is important for further cementing the economic cooperation and deepening the relationship. India–ASEAN Free Trade Agreement generated intense debate on its likely fallout on India's economy, particularly on certain agricultural sub-sectors on which the livelihoods of large number of people are depended upon. The proliferation of large number of Regional Trade Agreements in the international trading environment in the recent past is mainly due to the failure of the world trading system to provide a quick and acceptable solution to the problems it encountered during its existence. Theoretical studies on regionalism focused two important issues, namely how formation of regional trade blocks impact the welfare of the members and world at large and secondly whether regionalism helps or hinders the process of multilateral trade liberalisation.

Various stakeholders use the ranking of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as a measure of quality. This is evident from numerous ranking efforts - both of the government (National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD), the National Academic Accreditation Council (NAAC) and the National Board of Accreditation (NBA)) and the private sector. Developing countries like India should assess the academic quality by working with parameters that are globally acceptable, transparent to all stakeholders and not amenable to the control of lobby groups. One such parameter is publications in reputed international journals indexed by databases like Scopus and Web of Science is also considered by the NIRF. However, in contrary to the NIRF method, we propose that instead of considering the total publications the computations should be based on the publication rate (number of publications per teacher) to control the faculty size bias. Besides using the NIRF 2017 data, we observed that higher density of Ph D students increases both the number and the quality of publications and HEIs that invest more, tends to have a higher publication rate. Therefore, we conclude that the Indian HEIs should increase the number of Ph D students and access better funding in order to improve their global presence.

There is a belief that ‘the only safe and better way to improve quality of higher education in India is to delink most of the colleges from affiliating structure. Colleges with academic and operational freedom are doing better and have more credibility’. In order to attain autonomy, colleges are expected to have ‘Academic/extension/research achievements of the faculty’, as one of the stated objectives to grant autonomy is to ‘Promote research in relevant fields’. The critique of the affiliating university system is that it treats every college alike, irrespective of its strength, weakness and location, resulting in retarding the academic development of individual colleges. Grant of autonomy would unshackle the colleges from such regulatory systems and make them ‘centres of excellence’. The idea of autonomous colleges in India can be traced to the Education Commission (1964–66). The granting of autonomous status to colleges began in late 1980s. However, some colleges in Tamil Nadu were granted autonomous status as early as 1978–79. The XI as well as XII Five-Year Plans targeted to grant autonomy to about 10% colleges that deserved such status. As of today, the country has 621 autonomous colleges (170 Government and 451 non-Government) spread over 24 states covering 104 universities. The hypothesis that autonomous colleges would become centres of excellence remains an untested claim to the best of our knowledge and therefore, is a knowledge gap both in the literature as well as policy-making. We examine this hypothesis with data from the top 100 colleges in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2017. Our findings challenge the claim of superiority for autonomous colleges over constituent or affiliated colleges. Therefore, policy focusing on academic excellence may be misguided by equating autonomy with excellence. If we look at the distribution of colleges by the state of autonomy, we find that 46 colleges in the top 100 are autonomous, of which 44 are non-Government (Table 1). The top 20 colleges have an equal share of autonomous and non-autonomous colleges. It is only in the second band that the number of autonomous colleges is more. In all the other bands, nonautonomous colleges are either equal or dominate. Therefore, prima facie there is no evidence of autonomous colleges performing better than the non-autonomous ones in this group of the top 100 colleges. Among the 54 non-autonomous colleges, 41 are non-Government and 13 are Government or constituent colleges. In the top 100 colleges, non-Government colleges (85) dominate the Government or constituent colleges (15). Despite the fact that NIRF 2017 uses a transparent mechanism for ranking colleges in India, the ranking methodology itself has been questioned. Loyola College, Chennai, is a complete outlier with 1249 postgraduate students, 522 Ph D students, 525 Scopus publications (an average of 19.3 publications per faculty member) in three years. On the other hand, the other 99 colleges had an average 502 PG students, 42 Ph D students, 28 Scopus publications (an average of 1.7 publications per faculty number). Yet, Loyola College is ranked second by NIRF. One reason could be that NIRF uses perceptions to rank institutions and this can lead to systematic errors, especially size bias. Earlier contributions provide a way to overcome this problem and therefore we propose to use the exergy measure as discussed in the literature. This allows us to examine concrete measurable outcomes that are based on research output (as this is one of the objectives for grant of autonomy). There is an existent methodology to do this and we borrow the same to answer the question – does autonomy significantly explain academic outcomes. We restrict to our publication data to Scopus journals for creating the exergy indices because its coverage is broader than Web of Science (WoS) and Indian Citation Index (ICI) thereby avoiding the possibility of double counting. Information from the dataset of NIRF 2017 on the top 100 colleges is augmented by extracting information from the respective college websites about their status of being autonomous, affiliated or constituent colleges. Before we proceed to discuss the regression analysis, we present results of the t-test to check for difference of means in publication rate (Scopus publications per faculty). We have excluded Loyola College from this as it is an outlier, as discussed earlier. A t-test for equality of means (assuming unequal variances) comparing autonomous and non-autonomous colleges by management type indicates that there is no reason to reject the null hypothesis (that means are equal). We use an ordinary least squares model to predict research outcomes. Four alternative measures are used namely, number of Scopus publications per faculty (Scopus-per-faculty) and three exergy measures as defined below.

This article investigates the role of currency futures market in India in the context of high volatility of Indian rupee (INR) in recent years. It examines whether the spot volatility before and after the introduction of currency futures were significantly different. It also examines the volatility causation between currency spot and futures market in India. The study considers three international currencies, namely US dollar (USD), British pound (GBP) and Euro in relation to INR for the period of 2006-2013. It made use of GARCH model framework and Granger causality test. The GARCH model results indicate that after the introduction of futures, there is less volatility for GBP and Euro but not in the case of USD. The Granger causality test reveals that USD and Euro has unidirectional causality, which means that spot causes future fluctuations, while in the case of GBP, there is bidirectional causality. The study concludes that the introduction of futures is not effective in reducing spot volatility for INR-USD but there is a marginal effect for INR-GBP and INR-Euro.

Against the background of international scenario of exchange rate volatility, the present paper analyzes rupee volatility and its impact on the macroeconomic variables of India considering data for the period 1997-2013. The evidence shows that the exchange rate volatility of India is not purely a domestic phenomenon. Further, the results of log-log regression model show that the negative impact of depreciation is limited to inflation and trade balance. All other variables show positive impact. Thus, strong empirical evidence is obtained to conclude that the impact of appreciation on macroeconomic variables is higher as compared to that of depreciation on these variables.u0000

India and ASEAN signed a Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in trade in goods which came to effect from 1st January 2010. There were apprehensions on the likely impact of this RTA on some sensitive sectors of India such as agriculture, fisheries and plantation crop as large number of people depend on these sectors for their livelihood. India is a large consumer of marine products and export also export part of the catch to international markets (1.7 percent in total world export in 2007). Some of the ASEAN partners of India namely Thailand (5.82%), Vietnam (3.86) and Indonesia (2.14%) have larger presence in international fisheries trade and there is a possibility that they can export these products in to India in the post FTA period. In this context the paper looked in to the various provisions of India ASEAN FTA on fisheries sector and calculated trade complementarity and similarity using different trade indices. The paper found that India has taken adequate precaution to protect its marine sector from large scale dumping. The apprehension that India-ASEAN FTA will lead to substantial import of marine products in to India is unfounded.