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The paper examines the impact of import of technology on productivity of the organised manufacturing sector of India using firm level panel data for the period of 1995-2010. The estimation of an augmented Cobb-Douglas production function using the Levinsohn and Petrin econometric technique suggests that both embodied as well as disembodied forms of technology import have a positive and significant effect on aggregate manufacturing productivity. However, the sectoral estimation results based on technology intensive classification of firms reveal that the embodied technology purchases have a relatively more significant and positive impact across sectors, whereas the disembodied technology imports have positive effect on the productivity of medium technology intensive sectors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A measure of relative importance of variables is often desired by researchers when the explanatory aspects of econometric methods are of interest. To this end, the author briefly reviews the limitations of conventional econometrics in constructing a reliable measure of variable importance. The author highlights the relative stature of explanatory and predictive analysis in economics and the emergence of fruitful collaborations between econometrics and computer science. Learning lessons from both, the author proposes a hybrid approach based on conventional econometrics and advanced machine learning (ML) algorithms, which are otherwise, used in predictive analytics. The purpose of this article is two-fold: to propose a hybrid approach to assess relative importance and demonstrate its applicability in addressing policy priority issues with an example of food inflation in India, followed by a broader aim to introduce the possibility of conflation of ML and conventional econometrics to an audience of researchers in economics and social sciences, in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of Professor Rangaswamy Narasimhan is presented. He was born in Madras, currently known as Chennai, India on April 17, 1926. Narasimhan has been considered as founder of the computer science and technology across the country, particularly the emergence of the Computer Society of India (CSI). On Narasimhan's retirement in 1990, he accepted the invitation to be a Computer Maintenance Corp. (CMC) National Fellow in Information Technology.