15 June 2011: Services Growth and Convergence: Getting India’s States Together

Anirudh Shingal
University of Bern

Abstract:
India’s success story in services is well documented at the national level, but similar literature does not exist for India’s states. In this paper, we bridge this gap in research by looking at India’s services growth at the sub-national level and in doing so, also challenge existing literature by arguing that this growth has positive implications for income distribution. The first interesting finding is that even as per capita income is not converging across India’s states, per capita services are and we provide evidence for this both in terms of traditional measures of sigma- and beta-convergence and more recent panel unit root tests. Secondly, not only is external demand an important determinant of services value added at the state level, but this demand also emanates from all over the country rather than being concentrated in the neighbouring or richer states. This suggests that the benefits from services growth are being distributed more widely than may be perceived.

Date: June 15, 2011
Time: 03:30 P.M.

Venue:
Committee Room
National Council of Applied Economic Research
Parisila Bhawan, 11, Indraprastha Estate
New Delhi-110002(INDIA)

Location:
View Larger Map