Development of village, micro and small enterprises in India has a special significance with regard to bridging up the disparities between urban and rural sectors of the economy on the one hand and the more industrialized and the less industrialized states on the other. It would also channelize...

This paper adopts a relative approach to the fulfillment of basic needs. It constructs a basic needs gap index (BNGI)to measure the performance of selected Muslim countries at three points of time 1987, 1991, and 1994

On many occasions we need to construct an index that represents a number of variables. Cost of living index, general price index, human development index, index of level of development, etc are some of the examples that are constructed by a weighted (linear) aggregation of a host of variables....

Professor Narmadeshwar Jha was a noted scholar on History of Economic Thought that took its shape under the influence of Alfred Marshall. His widely referred book - The Age of Marshall: Aspects of British Economic Thought, 1890-1915 – was written under the supervision of Professor A.J. Brown...

A high degree of multicollinearity among the explanatory variables severely impairs estimation of regression coefficients by the Ordinary Least Squares. Several methods have been suggested to ameliorate the deleterious effects of multicollinearity. In this paper we aim at comparing the...

This is a detailed comment on a discussion paper of Munawar Iqbal published in an earlier issue of the same journal.It argues that it is difficult to quantify israf (frivolous expenditure on consumption.Therefore, a better way of analysing the impact of israf would be to start with a no-israf...

Rank-ordering of individuals or objects on multiple criteria has many important practical applications. A reasonably representative composite rank ordering of multi-attribute objects/individuals or multi-dimensional points is often obtained by the Principal Component Analysis, although much...

This study is an investigation into the real wage rates of casual labourers in Shillong, the capital city of Meghalaya. First, trends in nominal wages during 1997-2000 have been studied. Then the consumption expenditure of casual labourers on wage goods is analysed and finally, changes in prices...

This paper demonstrates that if we intend to optimally rank order n objects (candidates) each of which has m attributes or rank scores awarded by m evaluators, then the ordinal ranking of objects by the conventional principal component based factor scores turns out to be suboptimal. Three...

This paper aims at comparing the performance of the Differential Evolution (DE) and the Repulsive Particle Swarm (RPS) methods of global optimization. To this end, some relatively difficult test functions have been chosen. Among these test functions, some are new while others are well known in...