Economic reform and productivity growth in Indian manufacturing industries: an interaction of technical change and scale economies

This paper studies the effects of the economic reforms of 1991 on the Indian manufacturing industries. A translog cost function was used to analyze the production structure in terms of biased technical change and economies of scale. A panel consisting of 121 Indian manufacturing industries from 1981 to 1998 was used in our estimation. We have shown that key industries have experienced capital-using technical change, and the scale effects have been exploited more intensively since the 1991 economic reforms. We also observe total factor productivity (TFP) improvements for most of the industries after the 1991 reform initiatives, which support the evidence of improvements in economic efficiency in key Indian manufacturing industries.