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Rural households in India are often confronted by various types of risks — covariate (e.g. natural disasters, economic or political crisis) and idiosyncratic (e.g. illness or job-loss) shocks. When faced with such risks even non-poor members of society can be vulnerable if they have ineffective or constrained coping instruments. This study analyses the relationship between shock types and coping decisions of rural households, and the impact of these coping strategies on consumption using the ARIS/REDS panel survey data. We find that rural households will be more vulnerable in time of covariate shocks. Social networks help to get borrowings from friends and relatives during shocks periods. The results indicate that rural government programs contribute significantly to manage distress shocks. We find that coping strategies such as savings, getting help from the government, technological up-gradation and selling assets increase the chance of consumption growth of households. Other coping strategies such as obtaining alternative wage employment, getting help from relatives, and starvation are risky coping strategies and decline the chance of consumption growth of households.

Overall, the results suggest that shocks experienced by rural households are likely to negatively affect their future welfare and more effective social risk management strategies are needed. An important policy implication of our analysis is that the government should provide readily accessible and well targeted public safety nets. The existing informal strategy is not very effective as a consumption insurance mechanism. Although the government coping program is found to reduce vulnerability, access to such program is constrained. Expansion of government sponsored coping program is likely to protect households effectively from negative shocks.

The study examine the mobility of households with respect to time-independence, positional movement, and directional income, consumption and assets movement using transition matrices. Transition matrices are most intuitive tools to comprehend mobility and are based on Shorrock’s (1978) measures of mobility.  Economic mobility is a significant consequence of income inequality and growth. In this paper, the study have used a unique ARIS/ REDS surveys 1999 and 2007 data set for rural India to determine the reasons and magnitude of income, consumption and income mobility. The economic mobility has estimated for the land classes, ICRISAT agro-climate zones, different region such as east, south west and north, consumption classes, income quintiles, agricultural profit classes, assets classes, caste groups and gender groups. There exists wide income, consumption and asset diversity among different classes.

The main objective of this paper is to estimate the technical, economic and allocative efficiency of Indian agricultural farmers in both cross section and panel years of 1982, 1999 and 2007 using the production and cost frontier model.  This has been estimated for crops such as paddy, wheat, serials, pulses, oil seeds and other crops by appropriate seasons and for all across crops. The factors affecting the production efficiencies have been identified. These include household characteristics like age and education level of the households, land characteristics like land reforms, land size, land fragmentation and share of modern area to total village area, infrastructure variables like distance to pucca roads and wholesale markets, proportion of irrigated area covered by canals, tanks and wells, government agricultural prices to market prices, government agriculture extension services, rainfalls andgovernance variables like participation in gram sabha meetings, agricultural expenditure by local government and women reservations. These factors assist in further identifying the policy and investment priorities that will accelerate sustainable agricultural productivity and efficiencies.

This paper models the behavior of states in a federal country wising to attract foreign firms to locate within their own individual jurisdictions. The essential intertemporal character of this decision is modeled as a multi-stage game to attract such foreign investment in these states. It is found that, when states with unequal political or economic infrastructure compete, the resulting Nash equilibrium profiles are inefficient. Under certain conditions, states that have won once, can “allow” a rival to win in a subsequent stage. The resulting Nash Equilibrium is more efficient. If the option of “allowing” a rival to win is not available, then states may resort to “suicide” strategies defined as outcomes created by history of losses.