Articles by C H Hanumantha Rao

Economy C H Hanumantha Rao In India, the cost of biological sources of energy seems to be increasing relative to that of mechanical sources even though unemployment and underemployment have been growing. It may be argued that this has happened because farm machinery has been made artificially cheap or because farmers tend to overinvest for lack of alternative opportunities. But available evidence does not support these arguments.

Reply C H Hanumantha Rao IN his article "Sacred Cattle and More Sacred Production Functions''[1] V M Dandekar raises two important questions. First, he observes that for a test as to whether there exists surplus cattle in relation to the given resources, what is relevant are not output riasti- cities for an animal with respect to resource inputs as formulated by me[2] but marginal productivities of inputs. Secondly, he argues that the choice of the Cobb-Douglas production function is inappropriate for this purpose.

Review of Agriculture June 1969 Reply C H Hanumantha Rao THE extension of my welfare analysis by T N Srinivasan and P K Bardhan is useful as it provides a method for identifying empirically the income groups in rural (urban) areas who may be better or worse off than their urban (rural) counterparts, given the assumption of identical preferences. One of the main points of my welfare analysis was that the large expenditure groups may not experience a real income advantage in rural areas as compared to their urban counterparts. The estimates of Srinivasan and Bardhan confirm this proposition as they conclude that "for a given price difference the higher expenditure groups spending a larger proportion on more expensive urban goods are worse off relative to their urban counterparts''. It is important to note this because many of the prevailing studies on tax burden assume that real incomes of the rural rich are higher than those of their urban counterparts.

A Comment C H Hanumantha Rao IN his article "Farm Size and Yield 1968) Ashok Rudra claims that his findings, based on data pertaining to 20 villages collected by the Agro- Economic Research Centre, University of Delhi, "flatly contradict the earlier finding of the Farm Management Studies that yield per acre declines with the increase in farm size" Rudra suspects that the process of aggregation is responsible for what he calls the "spurious ' correlation" of the Farm Management Studies. He observes that "if they had only looked at the nature of the scatter of the disaggregated raw data they i could not have drawn the conclusions that were drawn on the basis of aggregated data representing size group averages for entire districts".