Practical Economic Analysis and Computation: A Festschrift in Honor of Professor Kirit Parikh

This book pays tribute to Professor Kirit Parikh through contemporary essays from experts on energy, climate change including mitigation and adaptation, agriculture, food procurement, water resources, and public health. The chapters use statistical methods and mathematical models to analyse questions of policy formulation and effectiveness.

The book picks up important SDG topics such as – current issues and policy making in the infrastructure sector of power and their relationship to India’s climate commitments; computable models of the growth and absorption of renewable generation as the focal point of policy interventions in the power sector; increasing efficiency of national grids and to support integration of renewables in South Asia; natural gas pricing policy; achieving, nutrition, self-sufficiency and foodgrains surplus; welfare implications of the minimum support price (MSP) policy for food grains; evaluating epidemiological performance of strategies against COVID-19; critical examination of economic growth; methodological issues in policy formulation; modeling the Social Accounting Matrix; algorithms for solving convex optimization models; and fossil fuel power plant operations.

The studies especially bring into focus the latest developments in climate change, the switch to renewable energy sources, and the public health crisis due to COVID-19. This collection will be of great value to policymakers and researchers, especially from a developing economy perspective.

Probal Pratap Ghosh is an economist with Integrated Research and Action for Development (IRADe), New Delhi. He was awarded his PhD in Economics from University of Mumbai, India, and specializes in applied economic research in energy, macroeconomics, international trade and developmental, using econometrics, time series and optimisation techniques. Currently, Dr. Ghosh is working on modelling the impact of energy policies like low carbon policies and energy pricing on energy demand and its impact on the economy. His work has been published as articles in international journals and chapters in edited volumes. 

Rajbans Talwar is an operations research practitioner. He has successfully applied optimization techniques for over 30 years to solve end-to-end business problems in a variety of industries such as supply chain planning and optimization, production planning and scheduling, and transportation & logistics.  In particular, he has a wide-ranging expertise in modeling and developing decision-support systems based on linear and integer programming. He is currently working on decision support systems for power stations that must operate under conditions of increasing penetration of variable renewable energy sources.

Sureshbabu Syamasundar Velagapudi is an independent researcher working in California, USA, and specializes in internet-scale mixed integer nonconvex global optimization techniques for machine learning. He has a BTech in Aeronautical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Madras, Chennai, India, a two-year research training in economics from Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Planning Unit, Delhi, and an MS and a PhD in Computer Science and Automation from Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bengaluru. His current interests include developing a computable general equilibrium model for India's transition to green economy