  We have employed the first-principles approach to compute the effective
response of composites of graded spherical particles of arbitrary conductivity
profiles. We solve the boundary-value problem for the polarizability of the
graded particles and obtain the dipole moment as well as the multipole moments.
We provide a rigorous proof of an {\em ad hoc} approximate method based on the
differential effective multipole moment approximation (DEMMA) in which the
differential effective dipole approximation (DEDA) is a special case. The
method will be applied to an exactly solvable graded profile. We show that DEDA
and DEMMA are indeed exact for graded spherical particles.
