Trade liberalization, poverty, and food security in India:

food security, Nutrition, Computable general equilibrium (CGE), Globalization, Markets, trade,

Trade Liberalization, Poverty and Food Security in India

This paper attempts to assess the impact of trade liberalization on growth, poverty, and food security in India with the help of a national level computable general equilibrium (CGE) model. It shows that GDP growth and income poverty reduction that might occur following trade liberalization need not necessarily result in an improvement in the food security / nutritional status of the poor. Evidence from simulations of (partial) trade reforms reflecting a possible Doha-like scenario show that the bottom 30% of the population in both rural and urban areas suffer a decline in calorie and protein intake, in contrast to the rest of the population, even as all households increase their intake of fats. Thus, the outcome on food security / status with regard to individual nutrients depends crucially on the movements in the relative prices of different commodities along with the change in income levels. These results show that trade policy analysis should consider indicators of food security in addition to overall growth and poverty traditionally considered in such studies.Doha negotiations, India trade policy, poverty, food security, CGE model

Putting the Horse Before the Cart:A Generator-Evaluator Framework for Question Generation from Text

Automatic question generation (QG) is a useful yet challenging task in NLP. Recent neural network-based approaches represent the state-of-the-art in this task. In this work, we attempt to strengthen them significantly by adopting a holistic and novel generator-evaluator framework that directly optimizes objectives that reward semantics and structure. The {\it generator} is a sequence-to-sequence model that incorporates the {\it structure} and {\it semantics} of the question being generated. The generator predicts an answer in the passage that the question can pivot on. Employing the copy and coverage mechanisms, it also acknowledges other contextually important (and possibly rare) keywords in the passage that the question needs to conform to, while not redundantly repeating words. The {\it evaluator} model evaluates and assigns a reward to each predicted question based on its conformity to the {\it structure} of ground-truth questions. We propose two novel QG-specific reward functions for text conformity and answer conformity of the generated question. The evaluator also employs structure-sensitive rewards based on evaluation measures such as BLEU, GLEU, and ROUGE-L, which are suitable for QG. In contrast, most of the previous works only optimize the cross-entropy loss, which can induce inconsistencies between training (objective) and testing (evaluation) measures. Our evaluation shows that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art systems on the widely-used SQuAD benchmark as per both automatic and human evaluation.Comment: 10 pages, The SIGNLL Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL 2019

Economic co-operation in South Asia: The Dilemma of SAFTA and beyond

This paper attempts to evaluate the Pareto optimality of SAFTA for all the member states. Besides, the welfare optimality of three other alternative sets of coordinated trade policies that go beyond SAFTA has also been studied here. These include (a) extended preferential trading between SAFTA and three other major trading blocs (ASEAN, NAFTA and EU27), (b) coordinated full trade liberalisation (carried out unilaterally or as part of a multilateral agreement) by South Asian countries, and (c) SAFTA plus a customs union (two variants with 5 and 10 CET). The analysis, using the standard static GTAP model, shows that the welfare basis for establishing SAFTA or for deeper trade policy coordination is not very strong. Nor is it obvious that cooperation among the South Asia would be forthcoming given the anticipated welfare impacts.

Development of a thermal and structural analysis procedure for cooled radial turbines

A procedure for computing the rotor temperature and stress distributions in a cooled radial turbine are considered. Existing codes for modeling the external mainstream flow and the internal cooling flow are used to compute boundary conditions for the heat transfer and stress analysis. The inviscid, quasi three dimensional code computes the external free stream velocity. The external velocity is then used in a boundary layer analysis to compute the external heat transfer coefficients. Coolant temperatures are computed by a viscous three dimensional internal flow cade for the momentum and energy equation. These boundary conditions are input to a three dimensional heat conduction code for the calculation of rotor temperatures. The rotor stress distribution may be determined for the given thermal, pressure and centrifugal loading. The procedure is applied to a cooled radial turbine which will be tested at the NASA Lewis Research Center. Representative results are given

Reforms in Indian Agro-processing and Agriculture Sectors in the Context of Unilateral and Multilateral Trade Agreements

In this paper, we explore the potential impacts of trade and investment-related policy reforms on Indias agro-processing sector. We consider the direct effects of policy reforms within the processing sector, and the indirect effects on agro-processing of policy reforms in the primary agriculture sector, in the Indian economy as a whole, and in a multilateral framework. Towards this, we develop a 22-sector, 16-region version of the GTAP computable general equilibrium (CGE), global model for our analysis. We find that trade and investment-related reforms in agro-processing together can help the sector to grow. Policy reforms that stimulate investment and help to improve productivity will be crucial in offsetting the contractionary pressures of trade reform alone on the production of processed agricultural products. We also find that indirect effects on agro-processing from Indias policy reforms in other sectors are more important than reforms in agro-processing itself. Our findings argue for an economy-wide perspective when targeting reform or development of the agro-processing sector in India. Compared to trade reform, comprehensive domestic reforms in the agro-processing and agriculture sectors relating to investment are critical for achieving growth in agro-processing. However, while the impacts of trade reform per se seem to be small, trade reform - by ushering in a higher degree of competition - could itself be a stimulus for investment and productivity gains in India. At present, unilateral reforms, especially those that improve productivity in agro-processing and in primary agriculture, are more important to agro-processing than multilateral trade reforms. Nevertheless, our findings also suggest the importance of pursuing a domestic reform agenda within a multilateral trading strategy that can accommodate the expected economic growth of India and its future role in global markets, with general equilibrium effects on agro-processingagriculture, Agro-processing, Trade agreements, CGE models

Reforming foodgrains management: Achieving food security with cost-effectiveness

This paper examines the efficacy of the current system of public foodgrains management and policies in promoting food security in the country. It argues that the system has outlived its usefulness, and that continuing with the same only stifles growth in foodgrains, with very little welfare benefits to the poor. The paper then presents a series of suggestions for reforming and modernizing the foodgrains management system in the country that would be welfare improving and also efficient, saving vast amounts of resources that can be used to invest in augmenting agricultural, especially foodgrains output.Food grains management, Food policy, Food security

Strengthening Pluralistic Agricultural Information Delivery Systems in India

The study on agricultural information flow has revealed that only 40 per cent farm households access information from one or the other source. The popular information sources among farmers have been reported to be fellow progressive farmers and input dealers, followed by mass media. The public extension system has been found to be accessed by only 5.7 per cent households. Only 4.8 per cent of the small farmers have access to public extension workers as compared to 12.4 per cent of large farmers. The sector-wise study on the type of information, sought has revealed that a majority of the farmers have sought information on seed (32-55%) in the cultivation sector; on health care (26-54 %) in animal husbandry; and on management and marketing (8-46 %) in fisheries. Regarding adoption of information by farmers, input dealers and other progressive farmers have depicted greater influence mainly due to easy and convenient access to these sources. The study has suggested promotion of farmers-led extension and strengthening of public extension services to improve coverage and efficiency of agricultural information delivery systems.Agricultural and Food Policy,