The Four Seasons launches in Mumbai.
This bit is stunning -
Bureaucracy and a shortage of skilled workers make building hotels difficult - the opening of the Four Seasons was delayed by at least two years. The hotel needed 165 government permits - including a special licence for the vegetable weighing scale in the kitchen and one […]
There was a post on IEB in December 2006, on whether there was a bubble in Indian real estate (Link), courtesy IEB reader Annamalai Veerapan.
16 months later, Annamalai is back with a follow up post on the real estate bubble. It is reproduced below in full –
______________________________________________________________
Who owns real estate loans in India?
I’ve been waiting […]
When Tata Motors launched the Nano it was probably the most globally high-profile move by an Indian auto company. We examined some implications then. We now look at some implications of another equally high-profile event - the Jaguar-Land Rover takeover.
While the Nano was good for brand Tata, getting it noticed all over the world, the […]
In an interesting article on Forbes titled ‘The Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur’ , Sramana Mitra profiles Sridhar Vembu, the founder and CEO of an Indian firm called AdventNet. The firm today, is a ‘100%, bootstrapped, $40-millio-a-year revenue business that sends $ 1 million to the bank every month in profits’.
The whole piece is worth […]
Chandra Kochar, joint managing director and chief financial officer of India’s largest privately owned bank, $80 billion ICICI Bank, is bullish on India growth story. She contends that the growth in India is shifting from consumerism to manufacturing and infrastructure.
In the last five to seven years, India has grown on the basis of its knowledge […]
The Tata Nano has been one of those products you just cannot ignore. While it got media coverage around the world, the reactions, though mixed, flowed easily. On the one hand there has been pride in the “World’s cheapest” tag, as a great achievement for Indian industry. The “People’s Car” tag has been well received […]
How much lower are prices because of the new retailers?
Are clothes and shoes at the malls and new retail stores in India much more expensive than in the United States? It seems that way, to me at least. For instance, during my last visit to Chennai, I bought a pair of Reebok sneakers […]
How many jobs have the new retailers actually created?
The Wall Street Journal, in an article last month, writes that jobs in India’s booming retail industry are a ticket out of the slums for many. The article, titled Humble Jobs at the Mall Are Lifting Legions of Indians Out of Poverty and told from […]
Well my advice on this one - the galloping elephant part (you know, we’ve had the Tigers, the Lynxes, and the Giant Panda, and now its the turn of the Thundering Elephant to lead the global economy onwards and upward) - is not to try it. The very least that could happen is you get […]
Well, here I am, hard at it trying to write a review for this blog of the latest Economist Intelligence Unit country risk report on India (which, worry not, will follow in due course) and what I find myself doing is revving-up on all cylinders to come back and point out some of the facts […]
Removing corruption in India entails a look at ultimate reasons, not proximate causes
Here’s a supposedly novel approach to corruption, the legalization of bribery, courtesy Ajay Shankar Pandey, the Municipal Commissioner of Ghaziabad [Chicago Tribune].
Today, contractors being paid after finishing long-delayed construction projects write the municipality a check for the 15 percent bribe that once […]
…to counter the rising rupee.
Professor Kaushik Basu of the Cornell University believes that the rise of the rupee against the dollar is inevitable in the mid-term. He also believes that the sudden collapse of the dollar is unlikely but there is not much that India can do to alter the current dynamics of exchange rates.
[…]
The site has been moved to the new server, and comments are once again open on all entries. If you spot any weirdness, please send an email to madman@madmanweb.com
We have been lamenting quite a bit about how Indian laws do not protect property rights. The reality has been worse than that. The Indian government does not even record property ownership properly. Unclear land titles have been the bane of India’s property market.
Now it turns out that a small step towards recording land titles […]
In a series of seven short posts over at The Acorn I show how Tehelka juggled facts and figures in order to poke holes into the “Vibrant Gujarat” story. I’m posting the concluding piece of the series here, to summarise where we are at the end of our examination of Shivam Vij’s article.
There is no […]
Tim Harford poses a question, perhaps we can answer it?
Just wanted to ask if there is an economic explanation for the fact that real estate in cities in third world countries like India is often more expensive than in cities in the US. (Except for New York,and a few cities in California.)
I did not have […]
Lalita Aloor Amuthan, who blogs on entrepreneurship at Business World sent us this guest post:
I was at the New York aquarium last week, which was somewhat unusual, given that the only fish I like are the ones that come with chips. Even more unusual: I stood in line for thirty minutes to transform […]
Amit Varma, occasional contributor to this blog, India’s foremost blogger and free market fundamentalist, has won the 2007 Bastiat prize in journalism. Most hearty congratulations on winning the golden candlestick!
Update (from Prashant): If you’re in the New York city area, SAJA is organizing a casual chilling session with Amit. Try to make […]
Uttar Pradesh has fallen in line with the rest of India and implemented VAT. Subhomoy Bhattacharjee writes in the Indian Express on “the biggest success story of Indian public finance“.
Got this link from Tim Harfords blog, named, what else, The Undercover Economist.
This world bank funded site, aptly named Doing Business, is a guide for evaluating regulations that directly impact economic growth, underlying laws, making cross-country comparisons, and identifying good practice reforms.
The site has a lot of downloadable reports, interactive maps, ranking simulators […]