Indian Agriculture in the New Economic Regime, 1971-2003: Empirics based on the Cobb Douglas Production Function

This paper reviews the trends in Indian Agriculture before and after the introduction of the economic reforms, and the advent of WTO regime. We employ the Cobb Douglas Production Function using the OLS specification to investigate the determinants of agricultural gross domestic product for the period 1970-71 to 2002-03, during pre and post-economic reforms to document the impact of policy change (post-1992) and India’s membership of the WTO (post-1995). Our empirical findings reveal that Indian agriculture sector has witnessed Decreasing Returns to Scale after the introduction of economic reforms, indicating that the input availability is under strain during the same period.