Business Analyst Journal

There is no single God but many Gods in Economics. It is said that there are at least 20 schools of economic thinking. Here is a nice little book of densely packed profound polythiestic writings that are an antidote to the monotheistic mainstream economics which has come under hard hitting attack, for example, by Radford (2017) which is worth reading at length as follows: “Many people are wasting far too much time talking about economists as if they study the economy. They don’t. They really and truly don’t. They live in a post-fact world…economists had been steadfastly denying fact, ignoring reality, and living in a wonderland of their own creation…Economists study economics. And economics is not the economy. It is a self-contained set of ideas, models, theories, mathematical intricacies, and axioms, that are designed to provide exciting intellectual sport for those so inclined to busy themselves with such activity.

The purpose of this study is to understand the nature and categories of (un)ethical behaviours that are displayed by educated youth in India. The rationale for the study is based on the fact that there is an increase in corporate crimes in the current area of globalisation. Since research studies have shown that a large number of global organisations hire managerial resource from business schools this study has examined the unethical and transgressive practices of, post-graduate students pursuing MBA- the resource pool for business organisations. Data was collected from 65 respondents doing master’s in business administration from one of the leading institutions of the country. The age of the participants was between 21-27 years, most of them were freshers but a few had work experience. Based on narratives of the (un)ethical conducts of their peer group described, content analysis was conducted to understand the transgressive behaviours of educated business school youth. The results showed that most of the stated conducts by the participants were unethical and very few were ethical. Three identified categories of major unethical conducts were: academic misconducts, rule breaking and lying. Under these categories various unethical themes were also identified. In all 54 kinds of unethical behaviours and themes were identified under 9 domains like classroom, public life and inter-personal relations. During the debriefing interviews it was found that the reported unethical conducts were linked to imitating behaviour of role models, goal-orientation due to competitiveness and learned cultural behaviours.

The paper intends to focus on the direction of Outward Foreign Direct Investment (OFDI) from India. It also analyses the competition for Indian overseas investment among different country groupings. In terms of direction of OFDI from India, the changes in ranks of FDI outflows to developing countries are more than that of developed countries. Ranking patterns reveals that there is high level of competition among developing countries to attract Indian overseas investors. Somewhat same results are depicted by Index of Rank Dominance (IRD) in case of all the countries of the world, where out of total 25 countries, 7 are developed countries and other are developing countries, majority of them are considered to be tax havens. Mobility and Turnover shows high competition for OFDI from India in developing countries than developed countries.

The idea of universal basic income (UBI) has been assuming great importance in today’s world because the existing welfare schemes have failed in addressing the problem of poverty effectively. The existing schemes are generally mired in red-tapism, data manipulation, exclusion error, corruption, high leakages and high administrative and implementation costs. The system of UBI overcomes above issues through (i) its feature of being un-conditional and universal, and (ii) through transfer of a guaranteed income directly to the beneficiaries. In this context, the paper concludes that UBI can be a good alternative to all the existing welfare schemes to reduce poverty in India. However, the introduction of UBI currently faces many practical difficulties and hence it should be implemented only in a gradual manner.

Economics and its applications are considered as an arcane, prosaic and an elusive science. It involves more sophisms than any other field of study known to man. It is not just about the numbers, it is also about commerce, business, politics, psychology, history, and so much more. Taylor (2012). Economists over the years have found it very difficult to explain the basic economic principles and how and why they affect a layman. Tirole (2017) says Economics is a lens that shapes how we look at the world. Understanding it does not require expert knowledge, Intellectual curiosity is just enough to break into the world of economics. Satish Y. Deodhar has also attempted to demystify the world of economics by writing this book.

The idea behind a bad bank is to clean the balance sheets of the banks and financial institutions of an economy. Currently, the Indian economy is under a lot of pressure because of increasing NPAs in the banking sector particularly from the time when RBI started conducting asset quality review of the banks to get a clearer picture of the situation and this problem is going to escalate further because of the surge in COVID 19 cases and lockdowns due to the pandemic. This pandemic hits the Indian economy very hard, leading to a fall in growth rate, increasing unemployment, and providing uncertainty to all the sectors of the economy. Amidst this pandemic, the government proposed to setup a 'Bad Bank' in Union Budget 2021-22 to handle the stress in the banking sector of our economy. This study explores the idea of a bad bank in the Indian economy and analyse the positive and negative implications of it and this paper also attempts to understand the evolution of the regulations related to ARCs and see the performance of the present ARCs in India by looking into its shareholding pattern, size of non performing assets (NPAs) acquisition, recoveries in comparison with other resolution options, etc. the study revealed that the acquisition and the rate of recoveries of ARCs are growing but it is not sufficient to handle the entire NPAs crisis.

The study of citizenship is not only topical but also a large, variegated, everchanging subject. The truth in this regard is that there is no consensus on the idea of citizenship in terms of rights and duties, feelings, status, identities, etc. and for large numbers of people throughout the world the idea of citizenship is still hollow and empty and meaningless, deprived as they are of virtually all of its amenities (Heater, 2002). In this milieu, it is very heartening that the Centre for Civil Society as an NGO involved in bringing about social change through public policy, has taken initiative to bring out this study that gives the reader the empirical flavour about amenities to the Delhi citizens.

In present scenario, marketers are interested to know more about consumers' purchase intention in order to increase their sales volume and market share. Purchase intention is related to the behaviour, perception and attitude of consumers. The information pertaining to consumers' purchase intention can be important in marketing decision making. The present study examines factors influencing purchase intention of consumers for toiletries products. The data has been collected from 500 respondents (sample size) of Haryana (universe of the study). The data, thus generated, has been analyzed with the help of Factor Analysis and ANOVA(one way).The results revealed that commendation, assessment, advertisement, and familiarity with the brand are main factors influencing the purchase intention of consumers for toiletries products. No significant difference, except one, has been observed in these factors across demographic variables (age, gender, education, occupation, marital status, residential status, and income).

The global economy is passing through the worst economic crisis of modern times since the beginning of 2020 due to the outbreak of an unprecedented pandemic resulting from the spread of novel Corona or Covid-19 virus. The abruptness with which this pandemic erupted and the fast pace at which its disruptive and disastrous impact spread across more than 220 countries of the world makes it a serious area of concern. The emerging challenges are even more daunting in the case of Indian economy owing to the huge population base, high population density and grossly deficient health infrastructure in India. It is against this backdrop that the present paper goes deeper into the important lessons that can be learnt from the unprecedented pandemic and analyses them from the perspective of an economist. In particular, the significance of contingency planning, building-up of reserve capacity, overcoming institutional rigidities and infrastructural bottlenecks, gradualism and cautious optimism are brought to the fore. Besides, issues relating to the demandside as well as supply-side management of an economy as also resource mobilisation for effectively tackling the pandemic are also discussed. The whole discussion provides useful insights for public policy-making that can be reasonably expected to go a long way in improving the policy environment in the times to come.

Sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) refer to government owned investment vehicles that mostly invest abroad to meet some pre-determined macroeconomic objectives. Over the past few years, the number of SWFs and their assets have multiplied. In India too, SWFs have taken several big stakes during the Covid-19 pandemic and become the fourth largest category of foreign portfolio investors (FPIs) among thirty-two categories of FPIs investing in India. They have also expanded their footprint into debt and real estate markets. Despite this, not much is known about their investment activities, primarily owing to lack of data. By analysing multiple resources and databases, this paper seeks to give an overview of SWFs, their evolution, investment activities and associated challenges. We find that commodity exporting nations have been the pioneer of these funds and almost all SWFs have a strong preference for investing in real estate and finance, especially in high-income developed countries. We also discuss the characteristics of Indian SWF, NIIF and how it is different from conventional SWFs. Our paper concludes with a brief discussion on the presence of foreign SWFs in India and the need to further explore the issue in detail.