Credit Suisse has got a Permission to open One Branch in India. [also see] Some good news on IIP measurement in the offing. Also see this editorial in the Financial Express on this. Jessica Wallack in the Financial Express on the recent attempts at changing rules on education. Ashok Khemka in the Financial Express on subsidised petroleum products. Benchmark's exchange traded fund (ETF) on the Hang Seng index at NSE. Nirvikar Singh in Mint on the FSDC. In Mint, Manas Chakravarty has written...
Monday, 29 March 2010
Sunday, 28 March 2010
The macro/finance group at NIPFP has been maintaining a website titled Tracking and researching the Indian business cycle at http://www.mayin.org/cycle.in. At present, this has a dataset with seasonally adjusted monthly and quarterly data. This is a big step forward for tracking Indian macroeconomics, since month-on-month changes show what happened in the most recent data while year-on-year changes are (on average) 6 months late by virtue of averaging the latest 12 values of the month-on-month change.On this website, for each series, there is a...
When we look back at the sweep of history, the 20th century stands out. It stands out as a time of immense progress in our knowledge, a time of great carnage, and the time when the great debate about socialism and the market economy ended. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that one of two things will come next: either we will look back at the 20th century as the most amazing time when everything happened, or the pace of change will further accelerate thus making the 21st century even more incredible than the one that went...
Friday, 26 March 2010
Over the years, I have written quite a bit in the media, and all of it is up on my MEDIA page. I recently looked at the logs of my website and it shows 2534 reads in 5 days, or 21 reads an hour. The top 25 articles are as follows: 1 What should the financial stability and development council (FSDC) do?, 16th March 2010 107 2 How to control inflation?, 2nd April, 2008 107 3 India in the great recession, 15th April, 2009 55 4 Finding the right IPO...
Thursday, 25 March 2010
In recent months, the discussions that have sprung up around some of the posts on this blog have been quite interesting: Taxi companies in Bombay: an episode in India's urban transportation What does it mean when a million people apply for a thousand jobs? The joys of central planning Implications of ETF on the Hang Seng index that's traded in India How efficient is the traditional Indian family-run business? New sources of financing for microfinance assets by Nachiket Mor. On average, these posts...
Monday, 22 March 2010
The problemThe best thing that you can ask for, in getting around a city, is a comprehensive underground metro system, where a tube station is at worst 200m away from wherever you might be. There is no city in India that has this. While the Delhi Metro is very impressive, it is still not aiming to intensively criss-cross the city in this fashion (a walk of no more than 200m to the metro station from any point, i.e. a grid of lines which are no more than 400m apart).The next best thing you can ask for is: well functioning taxis. A good success story...
Sunday, 21 March 2010
Several economists have commented on the remarkable and relatively new phenomenon that's seen in India, where a government agency (or a state owned enterprise) advertises (say) 100 job openings and gets a million applications. This is generally interpreted as a problem, as a reflection of the very high extent of unemployment amongst the educated in India.At the same time, this is hard to reconcile with the picture one gets from private recruiters, who say that it's hard to recruit fairly minimal levels of skills when paying the market price.The...
Saturday, 20 March 2010
It has been fascinating, watching the FSDC evolve from a pre-budget recommendation, to a cryptic paragraph in the budget speech, to a few immediate responses focusing on the big picture, and then more detailed writing as the idea has sunk in. 22 March Nirvikar Singh in Mint. 19 March Jayanth Varma in the Financial Express. 16 March My column in the Financial Express. 11 March M. K. Venu in the Financial Express. 10 March Slideshow...
Friday, 19 March 2010
Jayanth Varma on what the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC) should emphasise. An editorial in Indian Express on inflation targeting for RBI. Ashish Rukhaiyar in the Business Standard on the footprint of Nifty. Akshay Bhawani Singh in the Business Standard on the difficulties that afflict India's attempt at opening up the business of container trains to the private sector. S. Subramanian on the controversy about the Indus script. Arun Venugopal in the Wall Street Journal on Bollywood...
RBI has just raised the repo and the reverse repo rate by 25 bps. Their statement is better written when compared with what has gone before. In this post, I use our seasonally adjusted data to think about what is going on.Output forecastsThe statement says: In the Third Quarter Review of Monetary Policy in January 2010, the Reserve Bank had raised the CRR by 75 basis points in two stages. This reflected the growing confidence in the economy and the risk of supply side inflation spilling over into a wider inflationary process. However, the...
Thursday, 18 March 2010
Another year, another messy situation with inflation: we continue to suffer the consequences of faulty economic policy institutions. To get a sense of what is going on, be sure to ignore the standard year-on-year inflation data (which shows what happened in the last 12 months), and instead use seasonally adjusted month-on-month price changes (which show what happened last month). And, see the column by Ila Patnaik in the Indian Express yesterd...
Monday, 15 March 2010
I have long collaborated with Achim Zeileis, Ila Patnaik, Anmol Sethy and Vimal Balasubramaniam on testing, dating and monitoring of structural change of the de facto exchange rate regime. A few weeks ago, Anmol Sethy had done a talk about the ZSP methodology in Singapore. In April, Achim Zeileis will do a talk about this in Chicago.Here's a quick status report of this work: The key methodology paper is forthcoming: Testing, Monitoring, and Dating Structural Changes in Exchange Rate Regimes, in Computational Statistics &...
Saturday, 13 March 2010
`Repec' is very nice public domain effort in economics which is building up a database of papers in economics. They have a series of email alerts for New Economics Papers (NEPs) where an editor examines the flow of papers and picks a few in a field. I am the editor for the NEP on international finance, so please do subscribe to this as a mechanism to track the literature in this field. They do both RSS and email alerts.You might also find it useful to setup an RSS or email subscription to the blog through which NIPFP working papers are announc...
Friday, 12 March 2010
When central planners take the outcome away from the self-organising system of the market economy, we often get strange outcomes. At the end of June 2009, 32 foreign banks were in India with 293 branches. In addition, 43 foreign banks were in India through `representative offices'. (Source: RBI Annual Report. Hat tip: Radhika Pandey).In a news item today, I saw Domino's say that they have 300 branches in India and will go up to roughly 500 in three years. With RBI giving out permissions for all foreign banks (put together) to...
Thursday, 11 March 2010
A few years ago, when Percy Mistry's committee was working on the MIFC report, I used to joke that of the two great industries in Bombay, movies will make it first to international customers. A few days ago in the New York Times, Anupama Chopra has a story showing that some action on that front is now visible. Winning on a global scale in finance and in movies has some common features : it involves raw materials like human capital, top end computer technology, freedom of speech, openness to other cultures, a large home market,...
Tuesday, 9 March 2010
Tuesday, 2 March 2010
Vikas Bajaj in the New York Times on privatisation in India. I had recently written a blog post on India's foolishness on visa rules for people coming into conferences. Siddharth Varadarajan has a great opinion piece on this in the Hindu. In sensible countries, there is no such thing as a `visa for the purpose of attending a conference'. It's just called a tourist visa. An editorial in the Wall Street Journal on India's success on establishing a private sector with competition in mobile phones. Swaminathan ...
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