Tim Harford writes in the New York Times:
The Group of 20, composed of developing countries like Argentina, Brazil, China and India, has been pushing hardest of all for an end to rich countries’ agricultural subsidies and tariffs. Paradoxically, some of the most vocal members of the group impose regulatory barriers that are just as crippling […]
Gautam Chikermane writes in the Indian Express:
The villager in Nu, about 100 km off Delhi, is unconcerned with anything beyond his crop and capital. As and when he generates a surplus, if it is large enough, he buys land; if it is smaller, gold. Now, there are more than 150,000 post offices, four out of […]
Speaking about FDI in retail, the Indian Express writes:
Plenty has been said—and an awful lot written—about mom and pop shops shutting down and taking with them the friendly, smiling, simple shop assistants who apparently define a part of our culture. That’s what, with different details, America’s “liberal” and anti-free trade conservatives say about outsourcing to […]
The Hindustan Times reports:
India contributes 28 per cent to the total talent pool of knowledge workers in the world. This has helped it corner 65 per cent of the information technology business and 46 per cent of the ITES market. But the greatest challenge staring the software services exports in the face is skill shortage. […]
What are the perils of the government being in business? When the state is in the business of running businesses, perverse incentives take hold. That is the question that Rahul Gaitonde asks and responds that India’s biggest problem today is an interventionist state.
He studies the role of the government in the telecommunications sector […]
Jayesh Lalwani points me to an interview of Ashish Bose, a demographer, in which Bose talks about why “[s]tates such as Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh and Delhi now have fewer than 900 girls per 1,000 boys.” He explains:
The phenomenon of declining sex ratio that showed up in Census 2001 is worst in […]
“It is the opium of the people.”
Marx was referring to religion and why it was necessary. Opium is a powerful narcotic and painkiller. According to him – and I agree with his analysis – religion to the vast majority of the people is a comforting illusion made a necessity by their real miseries. He […]
Can China build proficiency in English faster than India can build infrastructure?
Sonia Faleiro writes in her superb article on Vidarbha’s farmers of something an activist there said to her:
Women tell me that each evening, they stand at the door terrified that their husband may not return.
Read the full thing.
Would any of the readers or fellow contributors of this blog like to offer a diagnosis and a […]
Johan Norberg, in a follow up to the post I discussed here, writes:
On the Indian highways we made 40 kilometers/hour when we were lucky. In China that is called a traffic jam.
Now they are investing more in this [infrastructure], but it´s not about money as such, the problem is the lack of accountability and incentives. […]
The government will be spending Rs 2500 crores (apprx. US$ 5.4 billion US$ 540 million) of taxpayers’ money — our money — into breaking down dilapidated buildings in Mumbai and building new ones in their place. So why is the rent-control act to blame? Well, consider why the owners of these buildings have no incentive […]
Tim Harford brings my attention to a post by Johan Norberg, the author of “In Defense of Global Capitalism,” about China and India. Norberg writes:
China has an advantage since it begun liberalising its economy 13 years before India. But China´s hidden weakness is the massive and often centrally planned investments, which are often less productive […]
In the previous post, Eswaran points me to this article which claims that labour laws are the least of India’s worries. The reasoning given there is so bad that I was left wondering how anyone in his right senses could advance it. Just as I was preparing to write a response, I remembered that […]
It is a rare occurrence when someone agrees with me, so I might as well record it when it happens. Ramnath and I have managed to agree that privatization is not the most important reform measure. We also managed to agree on which one it would be. We both say that product market liberalization is […]
Nitin Pai directs me to an Op-Ed in the Washington Post by Sebastian Mallaby in which he writes:
The next wave of globalization is swelling here, in this southern Indian city that was battered by a real wave during last year’s tsunami. This new wave is not about Gap T-shirts or Dell laptops, the poster children […]
So plastic bags are clogging up our drains. How do we solve the problem?
One way is to ban plastic bags. That is the typical solution we come up with for many problems. The thinking that informs such decision making is Bush-style “for us or against us”. The only reason why anyone would […]
Ramesh Venkataraman writes in the Indian Express:
Liberalisation’s children are less aggrieved than upwardly mobile. Along with Bunty aur Babli (but thankfully in more conventional ways), they are eager to get in on the economic action they see around them and on their TV sets. What they are demanding from their politicians are effective public services […]
PublicGyan got that one right
Analysts like JP Morgan did not get it right. But PublicGyan did. IN-GDP-805 (Indian Economy will grow over 8% in Q2/FY05) was trading at 90 moolers on the PublicGyan Exchange; implying that traders were 90% confident that it would grow at 8% or higher. Even with a small number of traders, […]
For the longest time, most analysts simply assumed that India had lost the manufacturing race to China and should therefore concentrate on developing its service sector, where it retained a competitive edge. In fact, there were those, like Stephen Roach, who argued that India would shoot itself in the foot by concentrating on building a […]