I have the pleasure of introducing the first issue of ‘Decision’ for 2017. The journal saw impressive growth in the year 2016 with the number of manuscript submissions on the increase and the manuscript acceptance rate dropping to below 20%. This Volume 44, Issue 1 as usual brings together a wide range of research articles. For the year 2017, in addition to the three regular issues, we have dedicated the June issue as a Special Issue on ‘Urban Management in Developing Economies: Challenges for Public Policy’ that focusses on the challenge for urbanization and urban policies in developing countries, and the need to make them smart, sustainable and socially inclusive.

This March 2017 issue, we have listed five research articles. The article by C. Mangala Gowri and Venkataramanaiah Malepati title ‘Evaluation of financial performance of selected banks’ attempts to evaluate the financial performance of selected private and public sector banks at individual level as well as at all-India level through management efficiency ratios. They draw their conclusion by using several management efficiency ratios such as gross profit to total assets; net profit to total assets; interest income to total assets; net interest income to total assets; other income to total assets; interest expended to total assets; and operating expenses to total assets.

The second article by Sanjay Sehgal and Payal Jain titled ‘Information linkages among emerging equity markets—an empirical study’ examines the price discovery and volatility spillovers among equity markets of eight emerging market economies—Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Turkey—from 2003 to 2014. Employing asymmetric dynamic conditional correlation and BEKK-GARCH models, they conclude that volatility spillovers reduced among the sample markets over time. The empirical results suggest that the information linkages among the sample emerging market economies’ equity markets weakened during the global financial crisis and did not revert to stable period levels after the crisis.

Subir Bhattacharya and Rahul Roy’s paper on ‘IT for managers: journey of a core MBA course over 10 years’ narrates their experience with a course on Information Technology that is part of the MBA core of a premier management school in India. While acknowledging the trend world over of dropping IT-related courses from the core MBA curriculum, they argue that with IT becoming omnipresent, every line manager needs to be aware of its possibilities. They urge for an IT course whose content should be dynamic as emerging IT concepts of yesteryears become entrenched, and newer ones emerge. They narrate their experience of turning around a core course that was once disliked, to one which was now considered to add significant value. They urge every school, given its forte and target students’ profile, the need to discover its own IT-related core course through a similar journey.

In their article, Mininath Raosaheb Bendre, Ramchandra Manthalkar, Vijaya Ravindra Thool attempt ‘Modeling and predicting weather in agro-climatic scarcity zone using iterative approach’. The iterative approach based on linear methods is applied and designed to predict future conditions for farming and management. The prediction accuracy of the maximum and minimum temperature, humidity and rainfall at the 95% confidence level was tested. The results of proposed approach demonstrate the visualization, accuracy and suitability for the managing decisions in the agricultural products and livestock.

Ramendra Singh and Apoorva Bharadwaj in their review article titled ‘BOP research meets macromarketing: content analysis of BOP-related research in the Journal of Macromarketing’ focus on understanding how research in the domain of bottom/base of the pyramid has progressed in the macromarketing domain with focus on the macromarketing journal—Journal of Macromarketing. The article also suggests directions for future research at the intersection of BOP and macromarketing.

Finally, the issue is completed with an interesting book review of Imrana Qadeer’s edited book: ‘India social development report 2014: challenges of public health’ (Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2015) by Manish Thakur.

I wish to put on record our deep gratitude and acknowledge the significant contribution of all the anonymous reviewers who helped maintain the quality of the journal and the Editors on putting together the four issues of 2016.

R Rajesh Babu

Editor-in-Chief