The Military Balance 2007 estimates world military expenditure in 2005 to have been approximately $1.2 trillion. A plausible estimate for current world spending is $1.35 trillion. By contrast, the SIPRI yearbook estimates 2006 world expenditure to have been around $1.2 trillion. The estimates differ largely because The Military Balance relies more heavily on Purchasing Power […]
We wish all our readers a happy Independence Day.
IEB was launched formally two years ago this day, and we’ve come some ways since. A few changes to the list of contributors but our focus hasn’t — we remain, then and always, a forum to discuss issues facing the Indian economy.
The readership […]
Not quite, says our friend and erstwhile guest blogger, Blue Sky (sent via email).
“It is an article of religious faith amongst Indian and Western leftists that pro-market policies are destroying India by making it a horribly unequal place, the rich getting richer and the poor even poorer. The article linked to, from […]
INSEAD Affiliate Professor Patrick Turner surmises that the speed of entrepreneurship development in China is likely to erase the lead that India currently enjoys in entrepreneurship over its northern neighbour. In his view, the entrepreneurship bandwagon in both the countries has been fueled by a combination of a number of overseas residents returning to […]
George Akerlof’s seminal contribution to economic theory is in the area of information imperfection and how it affects markets. Information asymmetry between the buyers and sellers of used cars (very poor quality used cars are the lemons that Akerlof talks about) leads to that specific market failure. The role of expectations is critical in that […]
This week’s Economist carries a letter from a certain Murali Reddy of Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey.
SIR – So, Krishnan Ganesh, one of the proud products of India’s higher-education system, is busy developing tools to help improve the quality of primary education in America by outsourcing teaching over the internet (Face value, June 23rd). Meanwhile, precious […]
The term itself is a misnomer in many ways. Which transport system in India is not public? The ubiquitous auto rickshaw is used as a “hop-in and hop-out” coach in many parts of India, operating with a fixed tariff rate on predetermined routes. In Udaipur (Rajasthan), a parterre and rear vomitory has been added to […]
Res ipsa loquitur
The official figure for the shortage of officers in the Indian army is 24.1%, a shortfall of 11238 officers against an authorization of 46615.
Imagine the impact on the army budget, if all the deficiencies in the officer cadre were to be suddenly made up. The current revenue to capital expenditure ratio of […]
Safety in numbers
Indian Army’s record has many parallels with that of the Indian cricket team; one unmitigated disaster (1962), one unqualified success (1971), two stalemates (1948 and 1965), a cataclysmic foreign policy blunder (IPKF in Sri Lanka) and a pyrrhic PR victory in Kargil (1999). The pusillanimous display by the top brass and their strategic […]
Economist Luis Angeles suggests (in his paper Income inequality and Colonialism) that we can lay part of the blame for income inequality in the new world on colonialism:
Our paper’s main point is that colonial history is a major explanatory factor behind today’s large differences in inequality among the world’s countries. We have reviewed the different […]
The Fundamental Questions
The Indian armed forces, in the broadest sense, comprise the three defence services – the army, navy and the air force; the federal or central police or paramilitary forces; and the state police forces. These categories are very broad and many defence organisations fall in either-or / both categories. The most glaring examples […]
But India needs to renew its love for rights and freedoms
Jerry Rao’s op-ed in today’s Mint is a must read.
That is why we are forced to ask ourselves: should we not have a political party that is a khullam-khulla defender of markets and an opponent of an intrusive state?
S.V. Raju of the Indian Liberal Group […]
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 […]
“Can India Afford its Villages?” is the title of an opinion piece in today’s livemint.com (a joint HT and WSJ newspaper). The subtext says, “The answer to the problems of our rural economy paradoxically lies in urban development.” If you are familiar with my obsessions, you would suspect that I had something to do with […]
Greg Mankiw has a lively discussion on his blog about the best non-textbook book on economics. Some great recommendations, there.
This got me thinking about my college education in India, in the 1980s. The economics textbooks we used then (Dutt & Sundaram, KK Dewett and such like) were so terrible that just thinking […]
Hopeless ignorant masses need some sort of refuge. In many materially and culturally impoverished parts of that world, religious fanaticism affords that refuge. Monotheistic intolerant faiths such as Christianity and Islam are a necessary but not a sufficient condition for evoking the fanatical response. Combine a dangerous belief in a homicidal cruel monomaniacal god with […]
It always intrigued me that noone, especially in academia, had bothered to do robust research on the downstream multiplier effects of the IT-ITES industry. Anyone who has looked at the industry in any seriousness knows there have to be serious multipliers involved. All of those cab drivers, construction workers, caterers etc are the multiplier at […]
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 […]
We haven’t really commented on the TATA-Corus deal, partly because the news media was saturated with coverage and there’s nothing really to add. Suffice to say that from a strategic standpoint, it makes perfect sense given Tata’s ability to produce low-cost steel. I’d say both sides got a good deal with Corus shareholders getting a […]
People who don’t practice what they preach are not necessarily hypocritical. Perhaps they are merely not sufficiently intelligent to realize that what they do is inconsistent with the logical implications of what they preach. This gap between what they insist to be true while doing something which reveals their words to be false can be […]