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 [...]
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 I [...]
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 [...]
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 be against [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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