The ethical dimension in political market orientation: a framework for evaluating the impact of India’s Look East policy on regional income convergence

Choudhury, Homagni; Kopacsi, Zoltan Laszlo; Saxena, Gunjan; Mishra, Nishikant

Abstract

In this paper, we employ what we term as ‘the ethical dimension in political market orientation (PMO)’ framework to underline how an integration of information from relevant stakeholder groups can inform the formulation of market-oriented, yet ethical policies. Against the backdrop of India’s Look East Policy (LEP), we undertake a critical analysis of historic economic data from 1980 to 2014 in the states of Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, often termed as the Seven Sisters because of their interdependence. Our analysis of the data, using time-series methods, reveals that policy changes ensuing from the economic reforms of 1990s and the initiation of the LEP in 1991 have resulted in regional income convergence in North-Eastern India. A key contribution of our work emanates from the fact that we determine two structural breaks endogenously from long time-series data, thereby identifying three distinct policy regimes, rather than specifying exogenous breaks based on historic and theoretical conjectures. Overall, our work offers both conceptual insights into processes that enable ethical and inclusive policy making, as well as empirical evidence emerging from stochastic convergence of incomes per capita for the Seven Sister states in the North-Eastern region in India, to illustrate how regional economic inequality can be reduced through targeted market-oriented policies.

Citation

Choudhury, H., Kopacsi, Z. L., Saxena, G., & Mishra, N. (2021). The ethical dimension in political market orientation: a framework for evaluating the impact of India’s Look East policy on regional income convergence. Journal of Business Ethics, 168(2), 353–372. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04169-w

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Apr 26, 2019
• Online Publication Date: May 28, 2019
• Publication Date: 2021-01
• Deposit Date: Jun 6, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 10, 2019
• Journal: Journal of Business Ethics
• Print ISSN: 0167-4544
• Electronic ISSN: 1573-0697
• Publisher: Springer (part of Springer Nature)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 168
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 353–372
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04169-w
• Keywords: Look East policy; Ethical policy making; Political market orientation; Regional inequality; Stochastic convergence; Structural breaks
• Public URL: https://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/1949113
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10551-019-04169-w
• Additional Information: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
• Contract Date: Jun 10, 2019