The present study is in the context of the new Model Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) Act 2003, which aims at freedom of farmers to sell their products to the large private firms and bringing reforms in the wholesale ‘cash and carry’ and retail markets in India. The most important suggestions have remarked in the Economic survey 2014–2015 and outlined that state governments should be specially persuaded by the central government to provide policy support for alternative or special markets in the large private sector. Many states, including West Bengal, accepted the proposal and had opened the market for agricultural commodities for the large private sector. In this paper, we study a model of vertical restraints in the case of small farmers in West Bengal, India considering multilayer of fixed costs and monopoly power of the small as well as large traders in the vertical structure. JEL: D8, D43, L13
The paper puts forth a notion and derives a special type of production function where labour is an indivisible factor and is in the integer space. Thus, Newtonian calculus is not an appropriate method of deriving the marginal value because limit point does not exist. This shows that indivisibility determines the output elasticity. In the first part, the paper propounds a notion regarding how indivisibility determines curvature of the production function. In the second part, the paper incorporates the findings within a production function and derives a new type accordingly. Moreover, it formally derives the standard wage equation considering all the entitlements of labour, namely (a) normal wages, (b) interest and (c) rent of ability. So far, no such mathematical proof is there to support this wage composition. This paper, for the first time, derives this wage equation considering indivisibility of labour. JEL Classifications: J23, J24, J31, D24, C61, E24, L8
This article considers an example of a vertical competition where downstream firms purchase agricultural food products from the consolidators (i.e. small traders) and the consolidators buy their saleable commodities from the small farmers. Here, the author identifies and explains a vertical model used by the large traders to collect the agricultural food products in India from the small farmers. The author tries to resolve the question whether it is possible to collect agricultural food products by the large traders at lower prices or not and to understand the competition between the small and large traders in agricultural food commodities in wholesale, as well as in the retail market in India.
This paper derives a method of measuring the degree of collusion among the bidders in an open ascending repetitive price auction in agricultural commodity markets in India. This paper first derives the bidders’ behaviour’s theoretical structure and then a measure of collusion formation. Finally, the degree of the cartel has been computed using time series wholesale price data of potato and onion crops. This research’s findings are helpful for the study of the link between the supply of the agriculture commodity and the degree of collusion. Using the proposed method in this research, if the Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) measures cartel for each market and publish periodically, it will help farmers choose the right market to sell the produce. The farmers would select the market where the degree of collusion is relatively lower. Identifying different small cartel groups at different times with respective to the supply of the agriculture commodity would help avoid the incidence of distress selling by farmers, which is the main hindrance in developing the farming community in India. JEL Classification: C7,D44,L1,L4,Q1
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