Economic and Environmental Policy Issues in Indian Textile and Apparel Industries

This book comprehensively reviews, as well as analyzes, various aspects related to the Indian textile and apparel industries. While the focus is on economic and environmental issues, the discussion covers a lot of policy elements. The approach is inter-disciplinary, with concepts drawn from economics, environmental science, history, chemistry, textile technology and quantitative methods/optimization literature. This book will appeal to several stakeholders such as, policy researchers, policy-makers in governmental and international agencies, academicians and students from all the disciplines mentioned above, industrialists, managers and consultants working on Indian textile and apparel sectors. It might also provoke interest among as well as agriculturalists, farm policy analysts and industrialists focusing on other products such as chemicals, plastics, machineries, etc., who are wholly or partly dependent on textile and apparel industry in India.

Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan is an economist with three affiliations: first, School of Environmental and Forestry Sciences, University of Washington Seattle; second, Mckinsey Global Institute; third, Infinite Sum Modelling Inc. He was working at the Center for Global Trade Analysis, Purdue Univeristy on the construction of GTAP database and model, its documentation, teaching courses and conducting research on various economic issues, particularly on international trade and industry-related issues using CGE and econometric models. His other areas of interests include Labour Economics, Productivity Analysis, Demand Analysis, Energy, Health and Environmental Economics. He holds a PhD from IGIDR (Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research), Mumbai.

His Dissertation was on 'Some Economic Issues in Indian Textile Sector'. Badri also holds a B.Tech. in Textile Technology and has a brief industrial experience as a production manager in a garment export firm in India. He participated in a Meeting with the Nobel Laureates in Economic Sciences in Lindau, Germany in 2004. He has many publications in peer-reviewed national and international journals and books. He has also presented many of his research papers in national and international conferences.