Rajat Gupta, speaking to the UN general assembly on September 14, said: [E]conomic growth, and our ambitions for the eradication of poverty, depend upon the energy and drive of business and commerce. In fact, I cannot envision an effective development strategy that is absent of — or uninformed by — the private sector. Yet when [...]
I am not surprised but it is still news to me that the KGB attempted to steer the Indian ship of state. I grew up hearing rumors of the CIA doing all sorts of nasty things around the world, of course. The KGB, as the other spy in the real life adaptation of the Mad [...]
Responding to two of my pieces in the AWSJ (“The myth of India’s liberalization” and “Good intentions, bad ideas“), Karthik Narasimhan sends me an email which is worth quoting in full, so, with his permission, here goes: My wife and I are in Malaysia now on a short term assignment for our company, and every [...]
It is common knowledge that the Indian economy which was securely imprisoned since independence in 1947 has undergone a radical transformation and has seen a departure from its dismal 3 percent “Nehru Growth” to a more respectable 6 percent and more since the 1980s. There is little room for debate on that fact. What observers [...]
Guess which country’s the single largest foreign investor in India? It’s not any of the usual suspects — the US, the UK or even Japan . (Via reader Rasul Sharif)Newsweek reports In one whopping megadeal, South Korea has become the largest foreign investor in Asia’s second emerging giant, India. On Aug. 31, Korean steelmaker Posco [...]
A version of this piece was first published in the Asian Wall Street Journal (subscription link). The road to hell is paved with good intentions—and nobody knows that better than India’s poor. There can be no better intention than removing poverty but, for more than half a century, a well-intentioned and bloated state has only [...]
And write code every day?! The computer programmers arrived in the United States unknown to each other but united in their quest to rock. On the surface, they were not unlike many others who have left India over the past decade on the H-1B visa, a guest worker program for highly skilled professionals. They wore [...]
In a superb post, Primary Red of Secular-Right India writes: [W]elfare states create dependency, not wealth. They sustain poverty, not eliminate it. In effect, they pay people to remain poor. [...] When the Great Society debate was raging in the 60s, Daniel Patrick Moynihan (an early neo-conservative and later Ambassador to India) pointed out the [...]
Ramesh Venkataraman feels that “[t]he problem with reforms is not with the Left,” but with the Right. He writes in the Indian Express: Liberal economics must shed the taint of being the “dogma of the rich” that the Left has attached to it and liberalisation shown to be in the best interests of the broader [...]
Brahma Chellaney writes in the Wall Street Journal(subscription required) China is driving Japan and India closer together. Tokyo, as if to make up for decades of neglect, is enthusiastically recognizing India’s potential as an investment destination and strategic partner. Reversing a long-standing pattern, Tokyo now provides more development loans to India than to China. Japan’s [...]
So India’s the next superpower, eh? TN Ninan gives us a reality check: The inescapable fact is that even today India accounts for only 2 per cent of the world’s GDP, less than 1 per cent of world trade, less than 1 per cent of global investment flows and an even smaller share of global [...]
Suresh Venkatasubramanian of The Geomblog writes in to me and, as a tangential aside to another discussion, says: I’d make the claim that the libertarian point of view makes far more sense in India [than in the USA], where we’ve had 60 years of a paternalistic socialistic regime and desperately need a free-market swing, and [...]
“Fears that liberalisation will destroy our companies were proved wrong,” points out the Indian Express. “Now we fear FDI in retail.” We need not, of course. No more than we need fear the sun.
Speaking out in favour of retail FDI, Nandan Nilekani writes: Over a decade ago, we did some far-reaching things that put the sparkle back in the eyes of our educated urban youngsters. What right do we have to deny to the millions of kids growing up today, the same opportunity in our fields, factories and [...]
I am sure all of you are are cognizant of the disaster unfolding in New Orleans and elsewhere in Louisiana and Mississipi. If you happen to live or work in North America and havent done so already, I would urge you to take a few minutes of your online time out and donate to a [...]
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