UGC-NET (June 2025) · India · National Testing Agency
Original practice questions written to the published syllabus · not past papersUGC-NET (June 2025) is a PhD, fellowship and lectureship exam run by National Testing Agency, for candidates in India. CBT (since Dec 2018). Paper I 50 questions / 100 marks; Paper II 100 questions / 200 marks; 180 minutes total; +2, no negative marking.
Source: ugcnet.nta.ac.in.
Checked against the exam body's published information. Formats and fees change; confirm the current edition there before you book.
Consumer and producer theory with calculus, market structures and game theory, general equilibrium and welfare economics; derivations more than agricultural applications.
Consumer, producer and market theory at master's depth, with agricultural applications such as price floors and support prices. The core of the economic-theory unit in agricultural economics PhD entrance papers.
Our 16 UGC-NET questions in this subject: 0 easy, 6 medium, 10 hard, across 14 units.
Choose an answer, then open the working. Each explanation says why the right answer is right and why the others are not.
These 10 were written to UGC-NET and are not shown on any other exam's page.
Food takes 60 per cent of a household's budget and has an income elasticity of 0.5. By Engel aggregation, the budget-share-weighted average income elasticity of all other goods must be
B. 1.75
Engel aggregation: sum of (share x income elasticity) = 1. So 0.6 x 0.5 + 0.4 x E = 1, giving E = (1 - 0.3)/0.4 = 1.75. 0.7 forgets to divide by the 0.4 share; 1.0 wrongly assumes every good has unit elasticity.
Shephard's lemma in consumer theory states that
B. the partial derivative of the expenditure function with respect to a price equals the Hicksian demand for that good
Shephard's lemma: dE(P,U)/dPi = hi(P,U). Marshallian demand comes from the indirect utility function via Roy's identity, not from dV/dM alone. The Slutsky matrix is negative semi-definite, and only Hicksian demand is guaranteed to slope downward.
The weak axiom of revealed preference implies that
A. the compensated (Slutsky) substitution effect of a price change is non-positive
WARP delivers the law of compensated demand: when price rises and income is adjusted Slutsky-style, quantity demanded does not rise. It does not rule out Giffen behaviour in ordinary demand, which depends on the income effect.
A binding minimum wage in a competitive farm labour market is analytically the same as
A. a price floor, creating an excess supply of labour
A minimum wage sets a legal minimum price above equilibrium, so labour supplied exceeds labour demanded (unemployment). In a monopsony labour market the result can differ, because the floor flattens the marginal expenditure curve.
The Lerner index of monopoly power at the profit-maximising output equals
C. the reciprocal of the absolute price elasticity of demand
Lerner index L = (P - MC)/P, and at MR = MC this equals 1/|e|. It is zero under perfect competition. The concentration ratio measures market structure, not the price-cost margin.
Compared with perfect competition, the long-run equilibrium of monopolistic competition is
D. neither allocatively nor productively efficient, but offers product variety
P > MC means the last unit is valued above its cost (not allocatively efficient), and output below minimum AC means not productively efficient. The offsetting gain is variety, which consumers value.
If the supply of a factor is perfectly inelastic, the whole of its payment is
C. economic rent
With a vertical supply curve, the factor would be supplied in the same amount at any price, so its transfer earnings are zero and every unit of payment is economic rent - the basis of Henry George's case for taxing land values. With perfectly elastic supply, the whole payment is transfer earnings.
Pareto efficiency in exchange between two consumers requires that
A. their marginal rates of substitution between the two goods are equal
In the Edgeworth box, efficient allocations lie on the contract curve where indifference curves are tangent, i.e. MRS(A) = MRS(B). Efficiency says nothing about equal incomes or quantities.
The Kaldor compensation criterion judges a policy change an improvement if
D. the gainers could compensate the losers and still gain, even if no compensation is paid
Kaldor asks whether potential compensation is possible. Actual compensation turns the change into a Pareto improvement. The 'losers cannot bribe the gainers' test is Hicks's criterion; Scitovsky proposed applying both.
The theory of the second best (Lipsey and Lancaster) implies that
B. when one distortion cannot be removed, removing another distortion does not necessarily raise welfare
If one first-best condition cannot be met, the other conditions are generally no longer desirable, so piecemeal removal of distortions may reduce welfare. This is a caution for partial agricultural policy reform.
This plan follows where our questions actually fall, so the time goes where the marks are likely to be. It is our reading of the syllabus, not the exam body's weighting.
Read the manual chapters for these first and do every worked question you can find on them.
Aim for one sitting per unit, then mixed questions across them.
Learn the definitions, classifications and standard numbers; these units are more often recalled than worked.
Come back to these after a first pass, untimed, and read every explanation, including for the options you rejected.
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