Essays on the Indian economy: Competitive pressure, productivity and performance

India undertook a drastic economic reform program in 1991, with the significant objectives of removing existing inefficiencies and enhancing global competitiveness. A competitive environment is a prerequisite condition for gaining higher productivity. The main desired role of economic liberalization is to enhance the efficient utilization of inputs with relaxing constraints input use and technology choices and gains from international trade by bringing global competitive pressure to the economy. The dissertation proposes a macro productivity-efficiency analysis while taking care of the inter-linkages in the economy. This is extended to address to a few important issues of the Indian economy, viz. income distribution, poverty, wage inequality between skilled and unskilled labour, returns to education and performance of formal and informal sectors. These above-mentioned issues are captured with the help of three independent essays. The analytical tool is based on a general equilibrium-activity analysis where welfare maximization subject to input and trade constraints results in competitive equilibrium. Competitive input prices reflect factor productivity. Incorporation of input-output framework captures the inter-sectoral linkages. The social accounting matrix (SAM), which plays an important role in establishing inter-linkages in the economy by combining input-output analysis and household income distribution, provides the basic data set for our model.