The two-day 12th annual doctoral thesis conference, organised by the ICFAI Business School, Hyderabad, was inaugurated on April 18 at the ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education (IFHE). The conference was organised in collaboration with the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai.
The chief guest, Prof KL Krishna, Chairman, Madras Institute of Development Studies, spoke about recent advances in the measurement of production in the context of national accounts and extension of welfare. He said the per capita income is not a suitable measure of economic growth. Comparing overall productivity growth, he said India was performing better than China, and drew attention to developments in econometric practice in the last 25 years.
Way forward
Prof S Mahendra Dev, Director and Vice-Chancellor of IGIDR Mumbai, spoke on ‘Macroeconomy and finance’ and discussed new consensus macroeconomics and its limitation in predicting the 2008 global economic crisis.
Prof Dev said, “In spite of the problems that the global economy is facing — slowdown of world economy, trade war between the US and China, Brexit and crude oil price fluctuation, to name a few — growth in India and China may help the global economy achieve growth of 3.6 per cent by 2020.”
Decline in economic growth
About the challenges the Indian economy is facing, Prof Dev pointed out that there has been a decline in economic growth in the last two years. The other challenges are stagnation in exports and agricultural growth, more FII inflows than FDI, reduction in savings as a percentage of GDP, loss of over 11 million jobs, and growing unemployment.
Prof Dev said the finance and banking sector faced three disruptors — demonetisation, ,GST and the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. With growing NPAs, the write-offs by banks for the corporate sector also increased sharply in the last five years. He said the banking sector would witness lot of consolidation in the coming years, adding that digital technology would be a force to reckon with in the future. Human capital growth and sustainable job creation would create economic growth for India, he predicted.
190 research papers submitted
Research scholars working in various fields related to management studies and economics participated. The conference has received 190 research papers, of which 130 were accepted after review by an expert committee. Participants from IIMs, IITs, NITs, JNU, Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University, IFMR, BITS, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, and various central and state universities showcased their research papers during the conference.
Prof J Mahender Reddy, Vice-Chancellor of ICFAI Foundation for Higher Education, urged the participants to focus on quality of data and sources, and told them to use their discretion and logic in selecting appropriate models. He explained how this conference provided an avenue for research scholars to improve their study-methodology in order to make their findings more relevant to businesses and the government.