The Reserve Bank of India is considering launching a Sovereign Wealth Fund which will effectively allow it to invest its excess reserves in higher yielding assets that are off-limits to it right now. This is on the back of the $5 bn set aside in the 2007 budget for the India Infrastructure Finance Corporation. Critics […]
A new research paper titled Trading Population for Productivity: Theory and Evidence by Oded Galor and Andrew Mountford focuses on a novel Unified Growth Theory. The paper argues that the -
differential effect of international trade on the demand for human capital across countries has been a major determinant of the distribution of income and population […]
Raj Chetty, an associate professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is the winner of the The American magazine’s 2008 Young Economist Award, a research grant of $100,000 provided by the Searle Freedom Trust.
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To be eligible for the award, economists have to be featured in the magazine’s bimonthly column entitled “The Young Economist,” […]
As another year draws to an end, extracts from two speeches delivered this year — one by an ex-finance minister (who happens to be the current Prime Minister) and another by the current Finance Minister. Both the speeches were delivered to a foreign audience and the extracts reproduced here cover only the hard facts, […]
Demolishing the myth of “historical ties” and “strategic partnership that has stood the test of time”.
Noted defence analyst Ajai Shukla, in his column for the Business Standard (reproduced on his blog Broadsword ), has highlighted the changing paradigm of the Indo-Russian relationship. He also suggests that India has been unable to come to terms with […]
Praising Dweep’s post, Pragmatic asks “Where will the demagogues [sic] of right and left seek refuge? Bravo!”
I don’t know about the demagogues of the right or left, but this ideologue of the right seeks refuge in logic and data - and he doesn’t cherrypick data to find what suits him.
First, Dweep has managed to confuse economic […]
Tajikistan, under the Russian influence, has repudiated the Indian proposal for an air base in the strategically important Central Asian republic. The Russians have pressed the Tajikis for this eviction to pressurise the Indians into favouring the Russians while signing the lucrative multi-billion dollar defence deals. The Russian insistence comes as no surprise as […]
Chris Zook, director of global strategy at consulting firm Bain & Co., highlights certain facts from Bain’s analysis of Fortune 500 companies over last two decades. He contends that only one-in-three from the Fortune 500 companies in 1994 survived intact, i.e., without bankruptcy, without acquisition by or integration into another company, or without fundamental changes […]
Bongop’o’ndit rips apart another Pankaj Mishra article:
Pankaj Mishra writes an opinion piece for Outlook’s India at 60 issue , seemingly cautioning on excessive championing of and reveling in India’s current resurgence at the cost of insensitivity to myriad problem that still plague the country. I say seemingly because that’s how he starts, and then meanders […]
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 […]
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 […]
Budgeting- ‘Guns versus Butter’
The Indian budgeted defence expenditure (DE) for the current year (2007-08) is Rs. 96,000 crore and the Indian Army’s share of this pie is approximately 47%. The DE is 2.07% of the GDP; the corresponding figures for Pakistan and China are 3.4% and 2.8 % respectively. But there is a […]
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 […]
Anyone who writes about there being “two Indias” is necessarily wrong. Anyone who describes India’s jettisoning of the licence raj in 1991 using words like “neo-liberal” is necessarily confused. And anyone who writes about Indian agriculture quoting P Sainath and no one else is necessarily unbalanced. Rajinder Sahota, writing in the Financial Times (they actually […]
Niranjan Rajadhyaksha of Mint (and a good friend of IEB) meets Bill Emmott, the former editor of the Economist for a drink. An interesting conversation evolves on the rise of Asia, journalism, and the reasons for the success of the Economist.
For those of you who haven’t picked up Mint yet, I would strongly recommend […]
A lot of bandwidth has been used up to discuss what model of development India should adopt: the Chinese model, the American model, the French model etc. I myself have sucked up quite a bit of bandwidth on this issue. However, I was reading an Indian business magazine (I apologize, I cannot remember which one) […]
Back in the late 1990s, economists were trying to figure out what it was that led to the secular acceleration of economic growth in the United States: the longest and largest peace-time economic expansion in the 20th century (see footnotes). How was it that a country could grow so much and for so long without causing inflation and […]
Ever since I first read about the Singur controversy, a bee has been buzzing in my bonnet. It finally bit. Six months ago, I had written a post about how the TATA Motors decision to set up a plant in West Bengal was disastrous. However I wrote that post merely from the labour trouble perspective. […]
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 to […]
Ajay Shah alerts us to a draft volume published by the World Bank (free download) titled Dancing with Giants: China, India and the global economy.
Drawing upon the latest research, this volume analyzes the influences on the rapid future development of these two countries and examines how their growth is likely to impinge upon other countries. […]