Business Analyst Journal

The past few years has witnessed the phenomena of “internet shopping” grow in leaps and bounds. The term “online shopping” has become a buzzword and an ever growing trend among consumers even in a developing country like India. In fact, the market potential for e-commerce has a huge reservoir as explored through a sneak-peek into the exponential expansion of key players existing in the e-commerce industry. Moreover, online shopping has prodigiously influenced the lives of the modern day consumers, who have been observed to have a penchant towards it. The present research endeavour is aimed to probe into the perceptions of consumers towards e-shopping in the context of “Technology Acceptance Model” (TAM). For this purpose, a survey among 363 respondents in the metropolitan setting of Kolkata has been conducted and their responses were recorded. “Structural Equation Modeling” (SEM) has been used to examine and analyze the model fits and hypothesis testing. The findings reveal positive perception among the surveyed consumers towards online shopping.

This paper examines the growth trajectories of Indian states. We find that not only is the disparity among states increasing, there is evidence that the distribution of the per-capita income of states is becoming bimodal. We use the methodology of Phillips and Sul (2007) to identify convergence clubs among Indian states and find three clubs. Furthermore, in a novel application of this methodology we use the identified clubs to run separate growth regressions for different clubs of states and find significant differences in the regression coefficients. This vindicates our approach and shows that combining data from all states at the same time to study growth dynamics can be misleading in a heterogenous country like India.