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Nidhi Aggarwal
Nidhi Aggarwal is an Associate Professor at the Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur. Her research focuses on market design, market regulation, derivatives markets, and impact evaluation. Currently, a significant part of her work is centred on agricultural markets in India. She has worked extensively on policy matters related to Indian equity and commodity markets. She has also served as a consultant for the Department of Economic Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Government of India. She obtained her Ph.D. and MSc in Economics from the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai.
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Unified agricultural markets: Where are the reforms lacking?
In April 2016, Modi government launched the e-National Agriculture Market (e-NAM) platform – a pan-India electronic marketplace for trading of agricultural commodities. However, rather than ushering in a revolution, concerns have been raised regarding lack of traded volumes on the platform. To understand the reluctant progress of e-NAM, this column analyses the experience of the state of Karnataka that embarked on agricultural market reforms in 2007.
How open is India's capital account?
Although India began opening up its capital account in the mid-1990s, the approach towards financial liberalisation has been cautious. Tracing changes in the de-facto openness of the country’s capital account over time, Aggarwal et al. contend that greater financial integration with global markets along with monetary policy autonomy to successfully pursue an inflation target, reduces the policy space available to the RBI to stabilise currency fluctuations.
Do exchange listings help ease financial constraints of SMEs?
Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are viewed as an engine of economic growth and source of job creation. In an attempt to ease their financial constraints, India and some other countries, have experimented with enabling SMEs to access public markets by listing their shares on exchanges with less stringent criteria. This column analyses the impact of listing on the fortunes of SMEs in India.
What did demonetisation do to domestic agricultural markets?
When the note ban was announced a year ago, many feared that it would hit agriculture and informal sectors the hardest given the widespread use of cash for transacting in these sectors. Based on analysis of data from 2,953 mandis across India for 35 major agricultural commodities for the period 2011-2017, this column finds that there are lingering impacts of demonetisation on farmers and adverse distributional consequences overall.
Demonetisation and agricultural markets
In this article, Aggarwal and Narayanan contend that demonetisation alone cannot turn agricultural markets cashless. Such a shift would require sustained and focussed effort to expand the reach of formal institutions, especially for credit and storage.
Assessing the impact of listing on access to finance for small and medium enterprises
Small and medium enterprises are globally viewed as an engine of economic growth. However, growth in this sector is often limited by access to external finance due, in part, to SMEs being informationally opaque.