Articles by C P Chandrasekhar

and Efficiency in an Import-Substituting Regime A Study of Two Industries C P Chandrasekhar India's post-independence strategy of import substitution based industrialisation has been subjected to a neoclassical critique from the point of view of efficiency by Bhagwati, Srinivasan, et al The negative aspects like high costs, technological obsolescence and inefficiency are traced to a wide array of controls on trade, capacity creation, production and prices. Votaries of the market mechanism basically arguecapacity creation, etc, have forced sub-optimal decisions on the entrepreneur. There is, as to why controls should necessarily lead to inefficient operation or the adoptionthere is a need for an empirical study of the concrete experience in order to establish that state controls on trade, however, no a priori reason of obsolete techniques. Hence the relation, if any, between controls inefficiency. This paper examines the evidence available in the case of the capital goods and synthetic fibres industry for support of the above mentioned critique of import substitution based industrialisation. It also examines the view that the free play of the market mechanism can do away with the deficiencies of the earlier phase.

Mechanisms of Oligopoly Analysis of Cotton and Allied Textiles C P Chandrasekhar AS far back as the turn of of the century, acute observers of contemporary capitalism had pointed to a tendency, which in their view, was to significantly alter the character and movement of the economic system, viz, the growing monopolisation of economic activity in general and industrial capital in particular. Fuelled by the coalescence of banking and industrial capital, this process, it was clear even then, necessitated not only a reformulation of theoretical constructs on the functioning of capitalism, but also the explicit incorporation of an international perspective in understanding economic and political developments both in the developed centres of capitalism and in the colonial and semi-colonial periphery.