Let’s have unilateral trade liberalisation Abi is right. Dweep didn’t go far enough. What India needs to do is to say “to hell with the WTO” and unilaterally, completely, dismantle trade barriers. For that matter, so does everyone else. Here’s Sauvik Chakraverti on the topic on TCS Daily: Unilateral free trade is a very good [...]
In today’s DNA Mukul Asher & Amarendu Nandy argue that the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is ill-equipped to fulfil its mandate of providing retirement income security. The EPFO is an unusual national provident fund in combining the features of a defined benefit scheme (Employees Pension Scheme or EPS, introduced in 1995) with those of [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
And in the process, discover your Inner Economist Tyler Cowen wants to give merit-based gifts to Indians. Yes, this involves economics professors and free-market fundamentals. He has made an announcement on his blog, and it may be worth your time to check it out. With your email, send a one sentence proposal of how the [...]
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 the Indian [...]
The ADB has just released a report titled “Key Indicators 2007: Inequality in Asia” (covered in IHT and BBC). The report concludes that the gini index, a measure of relative inequality had grown in all 15 countries studied, since the 1990s. More alarmingly, absolute inequality had grown even more. The bank identified the trend as [...]
Pragati – The Indian National Interest Review is a monthly magazine on strategic affairs and public policy; and is devoted to promoting economic freedom, an open society and realism in international relations. It regularly features articles and essays from many IEB bloggers. You can download and subscribe to the free digital community edition of the [...]
This week’s issue of The Economist has a report on how (and why) Japanese investment into China is declining. But the appeal of China as a manufacturing hub and a huge new market is not universally shared among Japanese businesses. Some companies are moving operations to other countries instead, and others are keeping business back [...]
Economists frequently cite economic growth as the surest way out of poverty for the developing world. In this context, China is an often mentioned example, where double digit growth has brought over 300 million people out of extreme poverty over the past few decades. But closely tied to growth is the question of equality – [...]
What should Indian governments do to help citizens get jobs? The central government clearly has wrong ideas—it intends to impose job quotas in the private sector for ‘backward’ communities/classes, which is perhaps the second worst thing it can do (the worst being “creating” more government jobs before giving them away). And we are not even [...]
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 [...]
The share of the global economy belonging to emerging markets is increasing. According to Yahoo! Finance, Goldman Sachs has a new report indicating that the BRIC countries’ share of the global energy industry is now higher than that of the U.S.: At the end of the first Gulf War in 1991, 55 percent of the [...]
Following my previous post on climate change, Nitin pointed me to a paper in the EPW on mitigating climate change in India (also available at GDNet). The authors analyze the impact of economic instruments such as a carbon tax on carbon emissions to conclude that, “the amount of reduction of carbon emissions is not substantial enough [...]
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 [...]
Powered by WordPress