Three fascinating new takes on Mumbai as an international financial centre: Mukul Asher and Azad Singh Bali in DNA a few weeks ago. In the February 2010 issue of Pragati released yesterday, there are two articles on this: by Percy Mistry himself, and by V. Anantha Nageswaran. A while ago, I had a blog post - http://tinyurl.com/mistry - which collected together the MIFC report and the immense outpouring of responses to it at the time.How do I think we are faring? Pretty much as expected: India has not yet moved towards a deeper...
Sunday, 31 January 2010
Saturday, 30 January 2010
There are two paths to nice cities: to take a messy old city and fix it, or to start from scratch.The process of solving the problems of an old city is hard. Some cities started over owing to the destruction caused by war, an earthquake, or a great fire. We wouldn't wish that on any city. So there is going to be no opportunity to start over.The other strategy consists of building new cities from scratch. This has traditionally been a troublesome problem. Cities like Chandigarh or Brasilia haven't worked out too well. The designers...
Friday, 22 January 2010
I wrote a column in Financial Express about Obama's left turn.Also see: The associated editorial in Financial Express. White House nightmare persists by Ed Luce in the Financial Times. Neil Irwin in The Washington Post on the difficulties that Bernanke is facing on getting a second term. Also, see this sharp drop in the price of the Bernanke contract at Intrade. Analysis by Michael Grunwald in Time magazine. Response by Viral Acharya and Matthew Richardson in the Financial Tim...
Tuesday, 19 January 2010
A perennial debate rages in India, about the merits of the traditional family-run business versus the knowledge of the fancy-pants consultant or MBA. A remarkable paper by a group of economists sheds new light on this question. I wrote a column in Financial Express today titled Are Indian family businesses well run? where I describe these results and interpret them. Also see this column by Nirvikar Singh in Mint on the same subje...
Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Friday, 8 January 2010
Barbara Crossette on the country that is the biggest pain in Asia. India is mired in a difficult process of learning how to achieve a well functioning liberal democracy. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Amol Sharma and Jessica E. Vascellaro look at the problems with freedom of speech in India. And, writing in the Financial Times, John Elliott on India's silliness in giving out visas. New years day reading: the trio of C. Raja Mohan, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Bibek Debroy in the Indian Express; Sunil Jain in Business...
I wrote a column in Financial Express today: How leftist is India?. This draws on the data shown in this previous blog post. I just noticed a piece in The Economist which dwells on related themes which is well worth reading.Many people wrote me email about this piece. An important criticism of this evidence is that individuals parse questions differently across countries. In India, it's easy to construct questions such as: The government must setup more PSUs so as to give jobs to the people where it will seem that there is overwhelming support...
Thursday, 7 January 2010
Tuesday, 5 January 2010
In recent years, an empirical literature has begun to prise apart the management process of universities, seeking to identify the features which cater to excellence. In a previous blog post I summarised five useful ingredients that enable successful universities, from a working paper by Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Caroline M. Hoxby, Andreu Mas-Colell and Andre Sapir: No government approval required for budget; budget-making happens at the university and university alone. Reduced government role in the core funding of...
Saturday, 2 January 2010
Many people believe that the exchange rate regime (i.e. the monetary policy regime) of each country is its own sovereign choice.In the Great Depression, we saw the harmful effects of the exchange rate mercantalism that is feasible with fiat money. This was a key motivation for Keynes and others in their design of the post-war order. The IMF was supposed to be a multilateral body that would help bring pressure on countries to move towards good sense through `ruthless truth-telling'. This didn't work out too well. The IMF got itself into a box where...
Friday, 1 January 2010
On 5 October 2007, I had written a blog post Does urban India favour liberal economics?, where I had used survey data released by the Pew Institute, which measures attitudes of roughly 45,000 people worldwide with roughly 2,000 in India. Their sampling mechanism has an urban bias.Today, I saw current information, and cross-country comparisons, on their website.Support for the free market The wording...
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