The Indian Economy Blog

Archive for the 'Trade' Category

Surely, FT Can Find Better Columnists On India

Friday, April 20th, 2007

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 […]

Selling The Family Ore To China

Friday, December 8th, 2006

Contemplating a ban on iron-ore exports is absurd

The bulk of India’s iron-ore exports last year went to China. This is being bandied as something sinister by those who dislike China because of geopolitical reasons and by those who dislike selling ‘our’ ore to ‘them’ instead of letting ‘our’ manufacturers have it.

1. So why do Indian […]

China, India And The Global Economy

Tuesday, September 19th, 2006

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. […]

How Nehru And Shastri Made Dubai Rich

Saturday, July 15th, 2006

Bhavya Khanna relates a fascinating explanation:
Nehru in his often stated brilliance imposed severe restrictions on the trade and price of Gold in India. The sheik of Dubai had free trade in Gold, and was well, a smuggler’s paradise. Combine the two and you have possibly the largest movement of illegal gold trade in the 20th […]

India’s Intellectual Property Rights: A Beacon Of Hope?

Monday, May 8th, 2006

In an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required), Richard Wilder & Pravin Anand claim that
India is rapidly evolving into Asia’s innovation center, leaving China in the dust. Its secret weapon? Intellectual property-rights protection. In recent years, New Delhi has taken big steps to protect these rights, and the results have been dramatic.
[…]
… […]

No Bang, Not Even A Whimper…

Monday, April 24th, 2006

The media “controversy” over offshore outsourcing subsides
Angry rants and dismal laments about offshore outsourcing are joining over-excited Internet revolution articles from 1999 in the dust-bin.
As we’d predicted.
Greg Mankiw , who’s experienced the outsourcing sturm und drang first-hand, points us to this David Leonhardt article in the New York Times:
A few years ago, stories […]

So That You Don’t Miss Us Too Much

Tuesday, April 11th, 2006

Back soon folks.
Till then, links to some great reading
- Larry Summers’ speech at the Reserve Bank of India on 24 March, 2006
- Edward Leamer’s review of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat
- Our friend, Joydeep Mukherji’s paper for the Center for the Advanced Study of India at U. Penn, titled Economic Growth […]

The March of The Indian Mango

Tuesday, February 28th, 2006

Make way for the king
It has already made its way to China. President George W Bush will announce its re-entry into the United States after a long time. The Indian government is making headway opening the doors to Australia, and even hard-to-reach Japan. The Indian mango is beginning to go places.
India is the world’s […]

Biased Import Tariffs?

Thursday, February 16th, 2006

Kaushik Das points out the bias in import tariffs, focussing on the automobile sector.
The import duty on foreign vehicles still attracts a 103.39 percent duty, which is unheard of in any developed country.
The steel sector currently has an import duty of 5 percent, which was 45 percent just a decade ago. Despite the reduction, Indian […]

Rule Of Law In India And Its Economic Implications

Friday, February 3rd, 2006

If one were to look at the factors of production (land, labour, capital and enterprise) and look at the corresponding cases pending in Indian courts, one can have a very good understanding of the performance of the institutions arranged around these factors. It is no wonder that any task of economic reforms will have to […]

Sense Prevails

Thursday, February 2nd, 2006

The Indian government permits IIMs to set up overseas campuses

The Case For A Robust India-Taiwan Economic Partnership

Saturday, January 28th, 2006

Japan fell through the cracks. Relations with Taiwan, in comparison, remain in India’s diplomatic blind spot. Though its wisdom is debatable, there is an argument against pursuing closer open political relations with Taiwan for fear of offending China. There is no reason, however, for neglecting greater economic intercourse with Taiwan, one of Asia’s top economies. […]

India & America: Natural Allies?

Friday, January 6th, 2006

“What’s good for General Motors is good for America” said the the auto-makers’ executives during its heyday, in the 1960s. Not necessarily true — then, and now.
However, is it possible that what’s good for India is good for the US?
Charles Wheelan, in his Naked Economist column on Yahoo, thinks so and cites […]

A Shaky Start For SAFTA

Sunday, January 1st, 2006

Pakistan and Sri Lanka develop cold feet
It remained on the back burner since it was first mooted in 1995. And then suddenly two years ago, subcontinental summiteers announced that they too, like everyone else in the alphabet soup business, would form a free trade zone. And within two years. That is a blistering pace for […]

Rice, Roads and Regulations

Thursday, December 29th, 2005

A key factor that can make markets work better is integration of various sub-markets. And it doesn’t happen simply by constructing tarred roads (even that is needed) but by demolishing regulations. Roading is the technical part of integrating markets, the political and more onerous part is the regulatory part. But why integration? Because deregulated common […]

It’s In Our Hands

Saturday, December 17th, 2005

Tim Harford writes in the New York Times:
The Group of 20, composed of developing countries like Argentina, Brazil, China and India, has been pushing hardest of all for an end to rich countries’ agricultural subsidies and tariffs. Paradoxically, some of the most vocal members of the group impose regulatory barriers that are just as crippling […]

Why We Reformed What We Did

Tuesday, December 6th, 2005

It is a rare occurrence when someone agrees with me, so I might as well record it when it happens. Ramnath and I have managed to agree that privatization is not the most important reform measure. We also managed to agree on which one it would be. We both say that product market liberalization is […]

A Picture Is Worth….

Saturday, October 15th, 2005

A visual treat for you, dear reader. The India - China comparison in pictures, courtesy Deutsche Bank
Hat tip: The World Bank Blog, which in turn got it from New Economist…
Sidebar: I sometimes wonder if this China-India comparison is a tad overdone. However, given that we’re talking about 2.3 billion people, or more […]

Is The Indian Rupee Overvalued?

Thursday, October 13th, 2005

As per the India Stock Blog
The Rupee is fundamentally weak, but has been propped up by overly positive sentiments of Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), which are now moderating…
Factors weighing on the Rupee:
Trade and Current Account Deficit
On the surface it would appear that oil would be the cause of the widening trade deficit. But non-oil imports […]

Korea Is Numero Uno

Thursday, September 15th, 2005

Guess which country’s the single largest foreign investor in India?
It’s not any of the usual suspects — the US, the UK or even Japan .
(Via reader Rasul Sharif)Newsweek reports
In one whopping megadeal, South Korea has become the largest foreign investor in Asia’s second emerging giant, India. On Aug. 31, Korean steelmaker […]

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