Arthshastra Indian Journal of Economics and Research
Arthshastra Indian Journal of Economics and Research is a quarterly, double-blind peer-reviewed economics journal published from New Delhi by Associated Management Consultants Private Limited. Launched in 2012, with ISSN 2278-1811, it was created to disseminate and advance research across all areas of economics and to give professionals, researchers and academicians a platform on which alternative paradigms in economics could be presented and debated. Its name deliberately invokes the Arthshastra, the classical Indian tradition of statecraft and economic administration, signalling an ambition to connect modern economic research with questions of public policy and national development that have deep roots in Indian thought. It is listed in UGC CARE Group I, and forms part of one of India's longest-running private families of management and social science journals.
Origins Within the Associated Management Consultants Family
The journal's publisher states its origin directly: the overwhelming response to three established sister titles — the Indian Journal of Marketing, the Indian Journal of Finance, and Prabandhan: Indian Journal of Management — paved the way for Arthshastra. That sequence matters. Associated Management Consultants first built monthly journals in marketing, finance and management, and only then added a dedicated economics title, extending the family from business functions to the underlying discipline that informs them all. EconBiz, the economics portal maintained by the ZBW, records the journal as beginning with Volume 1 in 2012 from New Delhi, and library holdings confirm continuous publication through the following decade, including the run of bimonthly-dated volumes in 2014 and 2015 held by university libraries. Today the publisher presents Arthshastra as its quarterly economics title within a portfolio of eight double-blind peer-reviewed journals.
The Publisher: Six Decades of Management Work
Associated Management Consultants Private Limited traces its history to 1964, when Jagdish Chander Gilani founded Associated Management Corporation, the firm that became AMCPL. The company built its reputation first in consulting and training rather than publishing, running management development programmes, office management programmes, programmes on Indian labour laws for supervisors, managers and executives, and salesmanship programmes for sales staff. The publisher reports that more than 200,000 professionals from India and abroad attended those programmes. Its consulting work covered organisational studies and related advisory areas over more than four decades. That background explains the character of its journals: they are published by a house rooted in professional practice, and they consistently aim at research that carries implications beyond the academy for business and public decision-making.
Aims: Alternative Paradigms and Policy Relevance
Arthshastra's stated aims are broader than a purely technical economics journal. Alongside disseminating research in all areas of economics, it explicitly promotes interdisciplinary studies of issues of theoretical, practical and historical importance, and it seeks papers whose findings have practical implications for public policy, business policy or individual decision-making. The invitation to present and debate alternative paradigms is significant in the Indian context, where questions of development strategy, agricultural transformation, informal labour and public provision are contested between competing schools of thought. The journal therefore positions itself as a scholastic platform for the worldwide economics community, but one edited from New Delhi and attentive to the problems of a large developing economy.
Scope Across the Whole of Economics
The journal invites original, empirical and conceptual papers, applied research with direct relevance to industry, case studies and book reviews. Its published subject list runs to more than twenty areas: agricultural and natural resource economics; applied econometrics and labour economics; business economics; econometrics; economic development, technological change and growth; economic history; economic systems; environmental and ecological economics; game theory; general economics; health, education and welfare economics; industrial economics; intellectual property; information economics; international economics and trade; labour and demographic economics; law and economics; macroeconomics; microeconomics; monetary policy economics; public policy economics; and urban, rural and regional economics. Read together, that list covers the standard architecture of the discipline — theory, econometric method, macroeconomic and monetary questions — alongside the applied fields most relevant to India, including agriculture, development, labour, health and education, and regional and rural economies.
Peer Review and Editorial Standards
Arthshastra is a double-blind peer-reviewed, refereed journal: authors and reviewers are not identified to each other during assessment. The publisher groups it with its seven sister titles as journals that have maintained high standards through rigorous but fair blind peer review procedures, and it maintains a formal publication ethics framework across the family, based on recognised editorial best practice, covering the duties of editors, reviewers and authors in matters such as fair evaluation, confidentiality and conflicts of interest. For contributors, that structure is the journal's main quality signal: acceptance depends on anonymous scholarly assessment rather than on institutional affiliation, and the process is shared with long-established titles such as the Indian Journal of Marketing, which has been published since 1968.
Indexing, UGC CARE Status and Identification
The journal carries ISSN 2278-1811 for its print edition. Journal directories record it as UGC CARE approved, with CARE coverage continuing to the present, and subscription listings identify it specifically as a UGC CARE Group I title — the category of journals vetted through the UGC's own protocols. It is catalogued internationally through EconBiz and the ZDB journal database, which records its 2012 start, its New Delhi publisher and its English language of publication. For Indian academics, CARE listing is not a formality: under India's university regulations, publications in CARE-listed journals count towards academic performance assessment, which makes a quarterly, CARE-listed economics title a practical publishing destination for faculty and doctoral researchers who must publish in recognised outlets.
Frequency, Format and Subscription
The publisher lists Arthshastra as a quarterly, producing four issues a year. Subscription is print-based and handled directly by the publisher and through journal subscription services: a one-year subscription of four issues is priced at Rs. 3,000 with free shipping, with two-year and three-year options at Rs. 6,000 and Rs. 9,000 respectively, and bulk rates available for institutions on request. The publisher emphasises its pan-India reach for the journal family, describing a subscriber base extending from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from the North East to Gujarat — a distribution claim consistent with the journals' presence in university library catalogues across the country, where individual volumes are recorded on periodical display and in stacks.
Readership and Contributors
The journal addresses three overlapping audiences named in its own aims: professionals, researchers and academicians associated with economics around the world. In practice, its core contributors are university and college economics faculty, research scholars working on Indian economic problems, and analysts in policy and business settings whose work has an economic research component. The combination of empirical papers, conceptual papers, industry-relevant applied research, case studies and book reviews lets a single issue serve readers differently: a doctoral student may use its econometric and development studies, a teacher its conceptual and history papers, and a policy reader its public policy and monetary economics contributions. That mixed format is characteristic of the AMCPL journals, which were designed from the start to sit between the purely academic journal and the professional magazine.
Position Among Indian Economics Journals
India has a small number of economics journals with national reach, and Arthshastra occupies the segment defined by frequency, accessibility and breadth rather than by a single specialism. Specialist titles dominate fields such as agricultural economics or monetary research; Arthshastra instead offers a generalist quarterly in which a paper on trade can appear alongside work on welfare economics or economic history. Its generalism is a considered response to the structure of Indian economics teaching, where most departments teach across the whole discipline and need outlets that do the same. Sitting alongside its sister journals, it also lets interdisciplinary work — on the economics of marketing, finance or management — find a home within a single publishing family whose editors and readers already cross those boundaries.
Continuing Publication
More than a decade after its 2012 launch, Arthshastra Indian Journal of Economics and Research continues as the economics anchor of the Associated Management Consultants portfolio: quarterly, double-blind peer-reviewed, UGC CARE Group I listed, and identified by ISSN 2278-1811 in national and international catalogues. Its endurance is best understood as a family achievement — it rests on a publishing house founded in 1964, on sister journals with decades of subscriber loyalty, and on a steady demand from Indian economics departments for a recognised, broad-scope research outlet. For researchers seeking a New Delhi-published journal that welcomes empirical, conceptual and policy-relevant work across the full range of economics, it remains an established option.
