IEB wishes all its readers a happy 2006…. peace and happiness and more… Sidebar: While we may all be Gregorians now (to paraphrase Nixon), here’s a few other calendars for those interested: the Hindu, Islamic, Jain and Zoroastrian calendars.
Fast Company, erstwhile New Economy uber-mag lists a few blogs, among them IEB, for a “virtual voyage to the subcontinent and its emerging economy”.
A key factor that can make markets work better is integration of various sub-markets. And it doesn’t happen simply by constructing tarred roads (even that is needed) but by demolishing regulations. Roading is the technical part of integrating markets, the political and more onerous part is the regulatory part. But why integration? Because deregulated common [...]
The answer: an inadequate and outdated educational system. Ajay Shah writes One of the key reasons why India is doing well today is the revolution in services exports, where white collar staff in India are plugged into globalisation, thanks to improvements in telecom. Today, there are probably a million people working in export-oriented IT and [...]
Question: how fast can the Indian economy grow? Answer: just as fast as it can get its population (and in particular its female population) educated. See New Economist and Brad DeLong. Why the female population? Well, let’s go back to my last post, and to a quote from the linked article about the Lutz-Scherbov projections: [...]
Consulting firm A T Kearney’s annual survey of FDI destinations reveals that For the first time in the history of the Index, which began tracking the FDI intentions of global executives in 1998, emerging market countries are ranked first and second as the most attractive FDI locations in the world. … China and India took [...]
I’ve just noticed that the autumn edition of Options Magazine (published by the Vienna-based IIASA, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis) is entitled Asia’s Future: What Research Reveals. The whole edition is interesting, but especially interesting for readers of this weblog is the section: India’s Window Of Opportunity. This is a rerun of many of [...]
Shekhar Gupta writes in the Indian Express: Have you sometimes wondered why reform in some areas of our infrastructure proceeds much faster than in others? You will see a clear pattern there. Anything that does not involve real estate, moves much faster. Telecom is a good example. Anything that involves land takes much longer. One [...]
The recent performance of India’s private sector has underlined an important economics lesson, that competitive markets work where too often the command and control system founders. Within your arm’s reach is a device which is a miracle of modern technology—the cell phone. It took the government telecom monopoly 45 years—from 1951 to 1996—to install around [...]
Competitive consumption, Indian ishtyle… Indian weddings are now by far the biggest social industry, conceived, planned and executed as mammoth entertainments to beat any plaster-and-plywood epic that the film industry can imagine. The age of guilt (with government restrictions on the number of guests or consumption of liquor) has been replaced by pure unabashed gilt. [...]
Sun Bin has a very interesting series of maps on World Population and GDP. Dave Altig at MacroBlog picks up on one of the maps, the sevices sector share as a % of GDP. Since one mark of economic development is the services share this is indeed revealing. As Dave points out China has clearly [...]
Ok, it’s bizarro time. Kenichi Ohmae, a “management guru” who is apparently known as “Mr Strategy,” tells Business Standard: Indians are not good at manufacturing. Even if they do what we tell them to do, they always need to understand why they are doing it that way. They are more inquisitive than the Chinese. Maybe [...]
You could have one or more of the four kinds of accountability in education.
1. Bureaucratic accountability (sarkar will take care through rules and regulations)
2. Professional accountability (teachers and principals are educated and they will take care)
3. Performance-based accountability (the sarkar will take care through measurements of performance in tests)
4. Market accountability (if you don’t take care, I will take to somebody who cares)
{The first part of this series is here.} Reading Lee Kuan Yew’s lecture is edifying at various levels. As an observer, he is incomparable. But he did not merely observe; he hinted at solutions and did so without being rude. You know the Hindi saying, samajhdar ko eshara kafi hota hai (to the intelligent, a [...]
Over the last few years, there’ve been an increasing slew of proclamations about America’s “decline” as an economic power — for instance, check this Fortune cover story by Geoff Colvin. A key figure cited by the “declinistas” as evidence of America’s decline is the huge imbalance of engineering graduates between the US and those two [...]
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