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The ‘End of Hunger’ one of the leading Sustaining Development Goals supported by the United Nations in 2015 focuses on promoting sustaining agriculture to ensure full implementation of sustainable food production system and resilient practices to double the agricultural productivity and income of smallscale food producers by 2030. Applications of technology have increased food production in real terms over the last six decades but its indiscriminate or inappropriate use have also produced negative consequences to the ecosystem and threaten the long- term viability of the enterprises and leads to the central issue of sustainability, i.e., stability under a given set of environmental and economic circumstances. Thus, orientation of future technology need to greatly influence the stability and productivity of agriculture through the environmental modeling combined with risk management algorithms.

Bihar is one of the prominent states of India, currently lying at the lower rung of the industrial index and highly dependent on agriculture, the riskiest business with substantial employment and income arising from subsistence farming. Hence, the goal of the agricultural production system is to maximize income of land owning and landless rural populace to improve their livelihoods through effective risk management strategies to cover potential losses and enhance income. It is thus, important to investigate how the range of agricultural technologies like mechanization, chemical technology, management practices and policies relating to cropping, as well as other agricultural infrastructures, could improve value addition to the gross domestic product besides the common factors of production like capital stock, labour force and land area. The main issues investigated in this study are : how are agricultural technologies linked to the agricultural production growth; and, what association of agricultural technologies should be deployed for sustaining the growth of the agricultural gross domestic production in Bihar. The study depends on the Cobb-Douglas production function to determine the influence of agricultural technologies on the growth of agricultural value-added over the last twenty seven years. The dataset supporting analysis comprises of one endogeneous variable (Agricultural value-added) and nine related exogeneous variables .The data were examined for stationary of time trend through the Augmented Dickey-Fuller Test and processed through suitably developed RProgramming. An analysis is made of the response of agricultural value-added growth over time following technological innovations or shocks and project them up to 2030, which bring up issues that provide insight to understand policy implication for Agricultural Production System.

Key words: Sustainable economic growth; Agricultural technology; Cobb-Douglas production function.

JEL classification: Q01 ; Q16; C67.

Extending Ram (1986, 1989), Goel, Payne and Ram (2008) and other studies, this paper finds that a higher government debt-to-GDP ratio reduces the growth rate of real GDP in the Philippines. In addition, a higher growth rate of employment or a higher investment-to-GDP ratio raises the growth rate of real GDP. Therefore, the debt threshold of 90% proposed by Reinhart-Rogoff does not apply to the Philippines.

Keywords: fiscal policy, government debt, Reinhart-Rogoff hypothesis.

JEL Classification: E62

The present study reveals that the Dalit woman labour households, on an average, earn Rs. 75682.14 annually in the rural areas of Punjab. This income is found to be the highest, i.e., Rs. 80113.53 in Doaba; and the lowest, i.e., Rs. 72919.62 in Majha. It is Rs. 75116.21 in Malwa. The annual per capita income of these households comes to Rs. 16445.70 in Punjab. It is Rs. 17843.81, 16543.45, and 15315.56 in Doaba, Malwa, and Majha respectively. However, when we work out per capita, per day income it comes to be Rs. 48.49, 45.32, and 41.96 in these regions respectively. It is too low to meet their basic needs. There are more disparities in the distribution of per capita income in comparison to that of household income among these Dalit woman labourers in all the three regions of Punjab.

Keywords: Dalit, woman labourers, rural Punjab, MGNREGA, informal sector, Lorenz curves.

The proliferate advancements in modern market economies created profuse global interlinks among international capital markets. Hence, the fluctuations in the foreign exchange rates have become very crucial in determining the stock returns. Thus, the purpose of this study is to examine the impact of exchange rate volatility on stock return volatility from a frontier markets perspective. The study analyzes the volatilities of daily market returns of All Share Price Index (ASPI) of Colombo Stock Exchange (CSE) against the exchange rates of US Dollars (USD) and Euros (EUR) over the period of January 2010 to December 2018. A trivariate BEKK-GARCH (1, 1) model employs to examine the transmission of volatilities between stock returns and exchange rates. The empirical evidence reveals the presence of a statistically significant spillover effect from USD to stock returns in the Sri Lankan context. Although the empirical results reject the existence of a spillover effect from EUR to stock returns,with respect to the overall shock spillovers, the estimated results indicate a statistically significant transmission of shocks from USD as well as EUR to ASPI.This indicates the impact of globalization and the introduction of open market economic policies on the Sri Lankan capital markets and it provides interesting insights for the policy makers when outlining the future monetary strategies.

Keywords: Exchange rates; GARCH model; Sri Lanka; Stock returns.

JEL Classification: C 22, G 15, F 31

Purpose - The study titled ‘insourcing and outsourcing for competitiveness’ holds that firms’ internal resources are fundamental to making strategic decisions on promoting competitiveness. The paper examines five firms resources; physical, human, financial, intangible resources and technology as insourcing or outsourcing and competitiveness. The choice to insource or outsource either a technology or manpower to manage those technology depends on the ultimate goal and the core competence of an organization. However, outsourcing as a business strategy offer variety of opportunities and attending challenges. Hence, the reason for this study.

Design/Method/Approach : The study adopted cross-sectional survey design, and targeted 384 sample from unknown population, because we could not exactly determine the number of registered companies within the region Northern Nigeria. The study personally administered structured questionnaires for data collection. The sample distribution was that; north-central zone, 29% of 384 questionnaires were administered to 112 firms’ high-ranking staff as it is proportionate to the cluster size, then north-east 94 (25%) questionnaires and finally north-west 178 (46%). The collected data were analyzed using SPSS package – version 20.

Finding : It is evident that this result provided substantial evidence to conclude that insourcing is a more useful and has positive effect onfirmsto predict competitiveness of firms than outsourcing in Northern Nigeria.

Limitation/Implication : Further studies should conduct similar studies at different geographical locations to examine the behaviour of the data as well as the measurements of the study variables. Firms should always hold on their core competencies, thereby differentiating their resources to that of competitors. To attain such, they should critically examine their controllable and uncontrollable environment for appropriate exploitation of industry players of these resources.

Originality : Review of the related literature as well as the data collected for this study were originally collected by the authors of this research paper. Also, the findings of this research could practically help managers at different levels in ensuring strategies to employed between insourcing and outsourcing to drive competitive advantage, especially in northern Nigeria.

Keywords: Insourcing, Outsourcing Competitiveness, Northern Nigeria.