The El Dorado for auto-didacts Salman Khan, a portfolio manager in California has created hundreds of free educational videos, available on his web site, the Khan Academy and on YouTube. These videos cover the basics of banking, finance and the current credit crisis — I saw a couple and they’re quite good. Even more importantly, [...]
Social entrepreneurship inching forward in India, albeit slowly and fitfully : India’s Spirit Of Business Booming Hygiene doesn’t make it too often to the media. However, as anyone who’s spent more than 24 hrs in India knows, the lack of adequate toilets is a huge, huge issue. Two links on that subject: Bloomberg – India [...]
India’s Underground & Hinterland seem to be the topics du jour :-) In the Wall Street Journal, Peter Wonacott says India Defies Slump, Powered by Growth in Poor Rural States. Rama Lakshmi of the Washington Post said as much last month: Vast Rural India Sparkles As an Expanding Market About 72 percent of India’s billion-plus [...]
After 26/11, Jack Welch pointed out that the attacks posed a question for India in terms of its ability to manage itself. China, although under authoritarian rule, had managed to pull off the Beijing Olympics, and assured safety for investors. India faced that question, post 26/11. Now, with the cancellation of the IPL tournament in [...]
Ila Patnaik and Lant Pritchett discuss the problems facing Indian policy makers
The Hidden Flaws In China And India Schools: Jay Mathews in the Washington Post says that “India and China, despite their economic successes, have public education systems that are, in many ways, a sham.” India: Toward High-End Outsourcing: Vivek Wadhwa in Business Week claims that “companies on the Subcontinent (are taking) the outsourcing industry to [...]
China threat to Indian IT: a piece in the FT talking about how China may well pose a threat to India’s outsourcing industry, esp given the incentives given by the Chinese government The blogs that barked: How the blogosphere outed the Stanford fraud (in the US and in the Caribbean) before the SEC or mainstream [...]
Are we going to see a sequel to Smoot-Hawley? Richard Fisher, President & CEO of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, tells it like it is. Commenting on C-Span about the “Buy America” provisions in the stimulus package: Protectionism is the crack cocaine of economics. It may provide a high. It’s addictive. And it leads [...]
Tying defence expenditure to GDP is no substitute for policy making. India’s defence expenditure this year is pegged at less than 2 per cent of the GDP which is lower than India’s defence spending in 1962 — 2.1 per cent of the GDP. After the Chinese debacle, it jumped to 4.5 per cent in 1964. [...]
Some links from the FT’s weekend special on India – Ambitions dimmed but not abandoned: the lead piece, which seems more optimistic than I would have expected – Foreign policy: Craving greater influence: on India’s foreign policy, which offers nothing new for readers of the Acorn. Most readers of the FT don’t read the Acorn. [...]
How does one differentiate between facts-based analysis and personal opinions? Uwe Reinhardt, an economics professor at Princeton says Matters are worse when, wittingly or unwittingly, economists infuse their analysis with their own (or a political client’s) preferred ideology. Consider, for example, President Bill Clinton’s 1993-94 health-reform plan. In this plan, President Clinton proposed a mandate [...]
Old Jungle Saying: “If you see India and China in the same article, it’s time to run for cover :-)” The entire China vs India debate is so overdone and (mostly) futile. Unfortunately, it seems to elicit the most number of comments on IEB – largely bakwaas, unfortunately – which we have to perforce edit [...]
@**&#!! (!*!)!##! And, in addition, dazed and confused :-) Here is the full text of Satyam CEO Ramalinga Raju’s resignation letter Reactions/ comments?
What does 2009 hold for India, given the global credit crisis and the aftermath of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks? Joe Nocera, one of my favorite business journalists, thinks that India’s banking sector has managed to avoid getting dragged down by the financial maelstrom. Do you agree? And what is the outlook for the rest [...]
Progressive critiques of India’s recent development prospects are often marked by schizophrenic worldviews – between what is and what ought to be. Mira Kamdar’s recent piece in the World Policy Journal illustrates this well. By Ms. Kamdar’s account Indians are heading down an inevitable path to doomsday. Malthusian population pressures, resource scarcity, global warming, environmental [...]
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