Integrating the power sector in India: Reflections and suggestions
Abstract The historical development of the power generation industry in India shows a steady trend towards complete integration: ‘… The aim is to connect all the power-regions by the end of the Seventh Plan. The desirability of having a single organization to own and to operate the essential elements of the national grid needs to be urgently considered …’ ([4], p 335). This paper seeks to verify the actual desirability of integration, through economic as well as technical aspects; and to emphasize the deviations induced by a strengthened concentration and suggest corrective directions to a second-best equilibrium.
Dual v uniform prices — an application
Abstract The economic literature on non-linear pricing schemes mainly considers the case where average price decreases with quantity — indeed this pricing strategy is often referred to, especially by firms displaying non-convex production sets. However, such a price schedule seems inadequate to cope with the ‘endowments’ of most developing countries, viz severe income inequalities and binding capacity constraints. Thus, we design here an increasing-blocks tariff and show, as an illustration, how it can improve the distribution pattern of low-voltage electricity in India without depressing the producer's profit. Shadow income transfers automatically flow within the sector, without requiring the heavy informational and operational background necessary for lump-sum transfers, as advocated by second-best theory.
The development of biological systematics : Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, nature, and the natural system
A reevaluation of the history of biological systematics that discusses the formative years of the so-called natural system of classification in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shows how classifications came to be treated as conventions; systematic practice was not linked to clearly articulated theory; there was general confusion over the "shape" of nature; botany, elements of natural history, and systematics were conflated; and systematics took a position near the bottom of the hierarchy of sciences.