Date of Submission

1-28-2004

Date of Award

1-28-2005

Institute Name (Publisher)

Indian Statistical Institute

Document Type

Doctoral Thesis

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Subject Name

Quantitative Economics

Department

Economic Research Unit (ERU-Kolkata)

Supervisor

Mukherjee, Robin (ERU-Kolkata; ISI)

Abstract (Summary of the Work)

The present dissertation is devoted to the analysis of some problems of economic growth in the framework of what has been called Disequilibrium model.Studies on economic growth have been mostly confined, with few exceptions, to the analysis of equilibrium models. But in reality there are cases where the concept of equilibrium may not be relevant and hence a disequilibrium approach is needed. The present thesis is concerned with analysing some theoretical and empirical aspects of the problem of economic growth in a disequilibrium framework. At the theoretical level, the objective has been to re-examine the conclusions of some existing equilibrium growth models in the context of disequilibrium situation. On the other hand, our empirical analysis consists in developing and estimating a disequilibrium model of the Indian industrial sector in order to explain certain aspects of the growth of the sector.Let us begin by defining in more precise terms what exactly a "disequilibrium model is and in what ways does it differ from an equilibrium modelDisequilibrium models" are concerned primarily with analysing situations where the actual behaviour of one or more groups of agents deviate from their corresponding planned or desired behaviour due to some constraints arising out of the failure of the Walrasian mechanism of instantaneous adjustment of the commodity and/or the factor prices leading to equilibrium. This class of models is also sometimes called models of “non-Walrasian equilibriumIn a Walrasian equilibrium situation all markets are cleared through instantaneous adjustments, that is, total demand equals total supply of each good or factor. This consistency of action of all agents is achieved by price movements in the following way: all agents receive a price signal (i.e., a price for every market) and assume that they will be able to exchange whatever they want to at the given prices. A Walrasian equilibrium price system is a set of prices at which total demand and total supply of goods or factors are equal. At such given prices actual transactions are equal to both desired demand and supply. Since the agents do not perceive any quantity constraint, they make rational quantity decisions with respect to the prices that they receive or pay. Walrasian model assume that prices contain all relevant information about the market conditions and hence the agents need only to consider the prevailing prices. Since equilibrium in all the markets is achieved through a mechanism of instantaneous and perfectly adjusting prices, a failure in its operation leads to a situation where some markets may not clear at prevailing level of prices resulting in quantity adjustments (e.g.; involuntary unemployment and unintended inventory accumulation / decumulation etc.). When quantity adjustments take place, consumers and producers become concerned with quantity signals in addition to price signals contrary to the Walrasian theory.

Comments

ProQuest Collection ID: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&res_dat=xri:pqm&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:28843723

Control Number

ISILib-TH144

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

http://dspace.isical.ac.in:8080/jspui/handle/10263/2146

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