There is an interesting article in the Financial Times today about a delay in the plans to launch the Asian Currency Unit (Acu). Not unsurprisingly the delays have been caused by “political and technical arguments over which currencies to include and how the weighting system would work” (this according, as they say, to ‘sources’ familiar [...]
Indian Express reports: In a bid to encourage private investment, including from abroad, in the country’s ambitious nuclear power programme, the Department of Atomic Energy is amending a law which prohibits such activities. “We have been working on the possible amendments to the Indian Atomic Energy Act 1962 for the last five years and now [...]
Much policy reform debate in India is often focused on the BIG issues like macro-stability, privatization and capital markets. These are only the tip of the iceberg of desirable policy reforms. The real action of enabling markets is often at the microeconomic policy level. The report Industry -level Analysis: The way to identify the binding [...]
Raghuram Rajan and Arvind Subramanian of the IMF have written an excellent op-ed in the Financial Times in which they diagnose a new problem, one they call the Bangalore Bug, and one whose symptoms have been addressed several times on this blog. I’ve reproduced the piece almost in full since I figured most of you [...]
The South Asia Business Association (SABA) at Columbia Business School is organizing a conference on April 14th, titled Investing in India: A 20/20 Perspective. The keynote speeches are by Sam Pitroda and Kanwal Rekhi of TiE. Other speakers include Jagdish Bhagwati, Rajesh Hukku of Iflex, Joydeep Mukherji of S&P, Sanjeev Sanyal of Deutsche Bank, Anjali [...]
Read Building Wealth by the Penny for a snapshot of Hindustan Lever’s efforts in rural India. It will be engaging to see which rural parts of India emerge the most viable ones for companies targeting BOP segments. More importantly, the sequence of businesses that develop profitably in these markets will hold lessons for policy-makers in [...]
In a superb post titled “The New Yorker and the Beatles,” Don Boudreaux writes: [C]reative human insights are the driving force of our prosperity. By allowing xenophobia and protectionist rent-seekers to restrict the number of people who contribute their ideas to the market process, we inevitably reduce — and perhaps even reverse — the rate [...]
Ajay Shah analyses the government wages and compares them with the prevalent market rates in Revising the wages of civil servants. The bottomline is captured below. The main story is simultaneously that while GOI employees at the top are incredibly underpaid – by market standards – the bulk of GOI employees (roughly 98% of them) [...]
Triumph of hype and hyperbole over honest reporting. ABCNews has a report titled India Rising: One Billion Reasons to Care which is a study in scare mongering. I am sure that some Indians will misinterpret the report as high praise, instead of the scare mongering it really is. Take for instance their claim that if [...]
Here’s a fantastic piece about Walmart efficiencies. Titled, Wal-Mart’s Shelf-Correcting System Is Model for Government, argues that the government (of USA) does two things well. …Anyone who’s ever filed a tax return or visited the Department of Motor Vehicles understands that government does two things well: spends our money and wastes our time… The piece [...]
India, like many other parts of the world is zooming away in the face of a real estate boom. In India there is a real estate boom in any direction you wish to see. Whether it is Bangalore, Pune, Calcutta or Chennai or Hyderabad or even already sky high Mumbai – the story is the [...]
Well I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person around who believes in India. There’s Fareed Zakaria for one: Even the here and now is impressive. Indian companies are growing at an extraordinary pace, posting yearly gains of 15, 20 and 25 percent. The Tata group, the country’s largest business house, is a [...]
Hello, after a short work-enforced absence I’m back. I have not been completely idle these last weeks (and here). Also Atanu and I have cut a podcast together for James Reese on Radio Economics which will go online on Sunday. Meantime this is really just a short ‘warm-up post’. One of the topics which Atanu [...]
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