These days, good news on the liberalisation front is hard to come by, so I am posting whatever scrap I can find. India’s policy makers have ambitious plans for the telecom sector, with the number of subscribers expected to grow to 250 million+ in the next couple of years, up from 110 million now. Trouble [...]
It’s stale news by now that India is a favourite of the large global private equity firms. The recent announcements by Blackstone and Draper Fisher Jurvetson (of Hotmail fame) to invest $1 billion and $200 million respectively in India confirms this trend. Those who have followed this trend know that a good part of the [...]
A New York Times article (hat tip: Suhit) of Oct 4th, starts off with What is happiness? In the United States and in many other industrialized countries, it is often equated with money. Economists measure consumer confidence on the assumption that the resulting figure says something about progress and public welfare. The gross domestic product, [...]
Private educational institutions are desirable. Fraud is not. The Acorn had argued that one public policy issue in the ongoing IIPM saga is the regulation of the use of official sounding words in the of naming private organisations. While there is no case for preventing organisations from assuming official sounding names, like the ‘Indian Institutes’ [...]
Vir Sanghvi writes in the Hindustan Times: The general view among politicians is that the media are accountable to nobody. This is plain wrong. Individual journalists are constantly being held accountable by editors and most newspapers are far more concerned about accuracy in reporting than they were, say, ten years ago. The reason for this [...]
(Note: I had written this post more than a week back when the High Court had decided to block the development of mangroves. I didn’t post it because the IIPM fracas was consuming the blogosphere. Now that the High Court has gone and blocked the sale of mill lands too, I thought it would be [...]
A visual treat for you, dear reader. The India – China comparison in pictures, courtesy Deutsche Bank Hat tip: The World Bank Blog, which in turn got it from New Economist… Sidebar: I sometimes wonder if this China-India comparison is a tad overdone. However, given that we’re talking about 2.3 billion people, or more than [...]
As per the India Stock Blog The Rupee is fundamentally weak, but has been propped up by overly positive sentiments of Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), which are now moderating… Factors weighing on the Rupee: Trade and Current Account Deficit On the surface it would appear that oil would be the cause of the widening trade [...]
This seems like stating the obvious, but some fundamental truths of economics elude so many people, especially in the Indian government, that it is necessary to keep repeating them. Referring to the shortage of LPG, the Indian Express writes: Before the disease of price and quantity controls spreads to other sectors, the PM must step [...]
An earthquake rocked Pakistan, India and Afghanistan Sunday — read more about it here For more information, and if you want to help, this is a good place to start
Growing up in India in the 1980s, India’s population “problem” was never too far away from the public arena. Textbooks, newspapers and the chatterati constantly pointed out that a) India was overpopulated and b) this overpopulation was a significant reason for our economic backwardness. Gary Becker dispels this guff …particularly in modern knowledge-based economies, on [...]
Reader AC writes in: Just read your Wall Street Journal article, “The Kidnapping of India.” What is more incredible is here in the USA we have many academics, and other “intellectuals,” usually very rich and prominent, that still dream of the return of the workers paradise, except this time, in the USA. The actual, real [...]
Gandhiji had said something about the four stages that an idea whose time has come goes through. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, and then you win”. Dear friends, I too have four stages for you. But unlike Gandhiji, I do not offer any hope at the end, [...]
A version of this piece was first published today in the Asian Wall Street Journal (subscription link). Imagine this scenario: someone kidnaps a child and, for decades, maims and exploits him. Then, in a sudden revelation, we learn that the kidnapper was once under the pay of a branch of the mafia that is now [...]
Robert Frank, a professor at Cornell describes the “economic naturalist” writing assignment in his introductory economics course. The specific assignment is “to use a principle, or principles, discussed in the course to pose and answer an interesting question about some pattern of events or behavior that you personally have observed.” “Your space limit is 500 [...]
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