One underhanded way to scare a neoclassical economist out of his wits is to creep up on him and shout “monopoly power.” Economists regard monopolies with the same mixture of dread, contempt and fascination as biologists regard cancer. They recognize the awesome virulent power of monopolies to wreak havoc on their world of mutually beneficial […]
The absence of universal basic literacy and education is a constraint on present economic performance and future growth. Doubtless, education is costly but the opportunity cost of not having an education is even higher. The old adage about a stitch in time saving nine holds with special force in the case of basic literacy. Here’s […]
Recently the West Bengal West Bengal State Marketing Board chairman Naren Chatterjee had to say this about Metro’s entry into the state, “have heard that they will sell directly to the trade then what will happen to the people in the chain, they will become jobless. We will not allow any one who disturbs the […]
The education system is embedded in the bigger socio-political order of the economy. To a large degree, the larger system dictates the characteristics of its subsystems. In the broadest terms, the government of India is an extractive and exploitative system created specifically for that purpose during the nearly one hundred years of its existence as […]
Education matters immensely when it comes to the health of an economy. There is a positive correlation between years of schooling and the GDP per capita. Let’s look at the numbers that are indicative of the generalization. In 2001, “school-life expectancy” and the ppp GDP per capita for Ethiopia were (4.3 years, and $675); for […]
Think Big
There is something in the nature of the world that it is sometimes paradoxically more difficult to make small changes than to make big ones. Logically consistent big changes are more likely to succeed because of the interconnectedness of the world.
At times, big changes are forced on the system from external shocks which make […]
The Indian Economy Blog is looking for new contributors
IEB has become the most popular blog on Indian economic issues in the short time it’s been around, and our posts manage to find their way to all sorts of interesting places.
Not bad for an all-volunteer effort, even if we say so ourselves.
Currently, we’re […]
Flashback
The year is 2020. For nearly 12 years, India has seen an average annual GDP growth rate of over 12 percent more than quadrupling the per capita GDP from US$500 in 2008 to $2000, placing India in the league of middle-income economies. Stark poverty is a thing of the past. In much less than a […]
This news story has got buried, for some reason, with few people I know being aware of it. According to Business Standard, the net addition to the GSM subscriber base has dropped from 6.13 million subscribers in March to 4.13 million subs in April. What gives?
1. As the story suggests, there has been an […]
“Pune DeCi” is a designer city started in 2010 and completed by 2016. Just 30 kilometers outside the old city of Pune, about 100 square kilometers of land was acquired. The government of Maharashtra, the state where Pune is located, was a partner in the “Pune DeCi Development Authority” and had a stake of 20 […]
When I first moved to the US, I was struck by the phenomenon of shopping malls located far away from the city, about an hour along some highway. Land, it occurred to me, was cheap outside the city and what they did was to build these huge malls that were in some sense islands of […]
Alan Blinder claims that “Free Trade’s Great, but Offshoring Rattles Me” in a Washintonpost.com article. He has dug up an old 2004 US election issue. He begins with
I’m a free trader down to my toes. Always have been. Yet lately, I’m being treated as a heretic by many of my fellow economists. Why? Because […]
Incentives are greatly aligned when the Beneficiary is also the Payer and the Chooser of a product. The greater the social distance between the three entities of the P-C-B, the weaker is the alignment of incentives to have effective markets. The best case is that of private spending for a car where the P-C-B entities […]
Cities are engines of growth because they “manufacture” wealth. That is why rich economies are predominantly urban, and those economies that are largely rural are poor. Therefore the transition from a poor economy to a rich one depends on the transition of the majority of the population from being rural to urban. The scale and […]
During a guest lecture at IIM Bangalore a couple of years back, Arun Shourie had asked a rhetorical question as to why oil distribution should be termed “strategic” and hence the oil PSUs should be tightly in control of the government. He didn’t pause to answer it, for maybe he knew that a majority already […]
…doesnt win elections, says Swami Aiyar. Read the piece, for some data that will throw light on how prosperity is spreading, albeit slowly, to the rural areas.
Agricultural growth has been very slow, and rural areas without connectivity have grown less than globally-connected cities. English-speaking urbanites have got high paid jobs while rural folks have […]
“If you believe that the money exists for building amazing futuristic cities in India, you must be certifiably insane.” That is the standard reaction to my scheme for building 600 cities for the 700 million Indians currently trapped in 600,000 villages. Where will the money come from? My answer is simple: out of thin air. […]
I have a little game going on with some of my friends to place bets on which Indian airline will go out of business first. Given the cutbacks on routes and redeployment of airplanes, most of us came to the conclusion that Jeh Wadia’s Go Air would be the first to exit the ruthlessly competitive […]
Responding to our Mint op-ed, a couple of readers wrote to me asking what exactly Dr Ambedkar had said about villages and life in villages. Well, Dr Ambedkar said a lot of things about villages and those who glorified it, including Mahatma Gandhi, but I did some quick digging around and found some of the […]
Planning is uniquely human. Planning shapes not just human institutions and artifacts but indeed creates the future that is unknown and unknowable. Granted, the best laid schemes of mice and men, often go awry, as the poet lamented. When it comes to central planning, or planning by an all-powerful government bureaucracy, you can say that […]