Earlier in the week Naveen drew our attention to a recent article in the Economist, Too hot to handle: Why the sizzling Indian economy is more at risk than China’s?. Now the article is an interesting one, but it does revisit a theme which we have already discussed a number of times on this blog, [...]
So Walmart is officially in India now. The Indian Left has predictably started making noise. I suspect a lot of left-leaning-human-face commentators will also shed barrels of tears bemoaning the imminent death of the small Indian shopkeeper. They will write about how Walmart got a “backdoor entry” into India. But is this tie-up, which has [...]
If you havent already come across it, read Too hot to handle: Why the sizzling Indian economy is more at risk than China’s? India cannot grow as fast as China without igniting inflation because of its lower investment rate, particularly in infrastructure, and labour bottlenecks. Link thanks to Prashant Kothari.
Some time back there was a question regarding good books that shed useful light on India and various aspects of it. Read Ten Best Books on India? Nobody mentioned Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana. Admittedly I dont hold it in high regard but definitely it is an important piece of travel writing in its [...]
Jo Johnson has a very readable post Engaging India: Demographic dividend or disaster? It focuses on the consequences of not adopting sound economic policies “a good investment climate, in terms of regulation, law and order, physical infrastructure and availability of skilled human capital” in the face of the demographic boom. Quoted below is the part [...]
While pursuing research projects in various parts of India it became clear that official data is far and away from reality. When I asked other senior researchers how they could go by such bad quality of data, they replied, “when the government is the sole maker of cars and watches all you possess is Ambassadors [...]
Came across this interesting report on a study done by a Harvard institute run by Michael Porter (Institute for Strategy and Competitiveness) which ranks the business competitiveness of nations. The US comes out on top, but of interest is that India is 37 places ahead of China. India comes in at 27, while China has been [...]
Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman has died. For me his most impressive facet was the ability to combine empirical research and communicate sharp insights, especially in the domain of free markets. A succint encapsulation of his works is here and here. For those who know about him and those who dont know about him, here are [...]
Check out a Rediff article Why is the South doing well? It argues that “we need to look no further for the South’s rise: it is its very Indian-ness that has been its competitive advantage.” I dont buy that. In fact, I am linking to the article based only on Rediff’s credibility. I have a [...]
Anthony, the third member of the Amar-Akbar-Anthony gang watched the remake of Don recently and came away with the following thoughts: In 1978, Vijay earned 11.75 rupee after singing the whole day. In 2006, he earns 3,000 rupee in three days — that’s 1,000 rupee a day. This is an 85-fold (or 8,411%) increase. According [...]
Of late there have been a couple of scathing posts on Swaminomics articles, one related to demographic dividend in India and the other on advantages of poverty. To indicate my disagreement with the stand taken I would like to provide four points. Atanu’s points on numeracy are well taken. However they miss the context of [...]
My favorite village idiot joke goes – please stop me if you have heard this one – this way. Once upon a time, in a particular village, when offered a choice between a dime and a nickel, the village idiot would invariably grin and pick up the nickel and everyone would have a hearty laugh [...]
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