Subjective / Written Questions (25)
1. A consumer faces a budget constraint. Explain how Hicksian and Slutsky decompositions separate the substitution and income effects of a price change, and discuss the economic meaning of the difference.
2. A firm changes its production scale while input proportions also adjust. Distinguish returns to scale from elasticity of substitution and explain why they answer different questions.
3. Critically compare the law of demand with a change in quantity demanded, and explain how income and substitution effects underpin the usual downward-sloping demand curve.
4. Explain consumer equilibrium using indifference curves and the budget line, including the tangency condition and the role of convex preferences.
5. Discuss revealed preference theory as an alternative route to analysing consumer choice and explain what rationality restrictions it imposes on observed choices.
6. Explain the producer’s equilibrium condition and distinguish the short-run law of variable proportions from long-run returns to scale.
7. Evaluate the use of HDI and related development indicators for judging India’s development, noting what monetary income alone can miss.
8. Analyse the structural challenges of India’s energy and power sector and discuss why capacity expansion alone may not eliminate supply-side constraints.
9. Discuss changing agrarian structure, mechanisation and rural unemployment together, highlighting possible employment trade-offs.
10. Explain India’s rural credit structure and compare the roles of commercial banks, RRBs, cooperatives, LDBs, PACS and NABARD.
11. Explain why different measures of central tendency can lead to different policy conclusions when income data are highly skewed.
12. Compare standard deviation and coefficient of variation and explain why the latter is useful when comparing dispersion across series with different means.
13. Discuss Pearson and Spearman correlation, including the type of information each uses and situations where rank correlation is preferable.
14. Explain the construction logic of index numbers and the practical problems that make a price index imperfect.
15. Explain Lorenz curves and the interpretation of their departure from the line of perfect equality.
16. Explain consumer surplus and show why a change in price can alter both the transfer of surplus and the quantity consumed.
17. Assess the significance of rural unemployment as a socio-economic problem and distinguish open, seasonal and disguised unemployment.
18. Explain the relative merits of arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means and identify settings in which each is conceptually appropriate.
19. Critically discuss the role of rural financial institutions in reducing credit constraints and the risk of informal high-cost borrowing.
20. Explain price, income and substitution effects for a normal good and contrast the Slutsky compensation with Hicksian compensation.
21. Discuss the principal features of Indian agriculture and the policy issues created by fragmented holdings, dependence on monsoon conditions and productivity gaps.
22. Explain skewness and kurtosis and distinguish asymmetry from the concentration/tailedness properties measured by kurtosis.
23. Analyse the relationship among marginal product, average product and the law of variable proportions.
24. Evaluate the policy significance of structural transformation in post-Independence India and the movement of labour and output across sectors.
25. Explain the logic of tabulation, graphical representation and ogives in economic data analysis and identify what an ogive can reveal directly.