When Egypt cutoff the world

by Sanjeev Gupta.At about 2215 UTC (that is GMT to you guys in the corner) on Thursday the 27th, the Egyptian Government pulled out its plug to the Internet. Here's the picture of google search traffic from Egypt:Without going into the bigger picture of discontent in the Arab world, some background. Throughout the Color Revolutions, outside support, from Human Rights campaigners to emigres, has been critical. The world is watching, the world will...

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Globalisation: the glass is half empty

One of the many fascinating facts that you see in Economic History and Modern India: Redefining the Link by Tirthankar Roy (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2002) is about India's trade/GDP ratio. The trade/GDP ratio rose dramatically from 1 to 2 per cent in 1800 to 20 per cent in 1914.By 1970, the trade/GDP ratio had dropped to 8 per cent. It was only in the mid 1990s, the trade/GDP ratio had got back to the 20 per cent value seen in 1914.Most people in India today are not aware of the pre-War...

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Interesting readings

One of the important mistakes that India is making, in terms of integration into the world economy, is in visa rules. A key element of progress there is the new `Visa on Demand' program, which has now been expanded. The list of lucky countries now stands at: Japan, Singapore, Finland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Philippines. This needs to now cover the G-20 countries. Another big frontier is setting up convenient access to work visas in order to support the burgeoning need for skilled foreigners who are needed ...

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Three new papers

The first is a href="http://nipfp.blogspot.com/2011/01/indias-financial-globalisation.html">an entry titled India which is forthcoming in Elseviers Encyclopaedia of Financial Globalisation, edited by Gerard Caprio. It's our attempt at a bird's eye view of what is known, and not known, about India's financial globalisation./aThe second is a treatment of exchange rates and monetary policy andinflation. There are two well understood phenomena: the `exchange ratepassthrough' (or how prices in India go up when the rupee depreciates)and the `monetary...

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Watch me talk about inflation today

L...

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Economics seminar announcements in Delhi

Please see http://delhi-econ-seminars.blogspot.comIf you are in the NCR region and like to get announcements of economics seminars in the region, this would be a useful one-stop source. You can subscribe to these announcements through twitter, RSS, email, etc.If you are in the NCR region and have organised a seminar or a conference of interest to serious academic and policy economics, please get in touch with Anurodh Sharma of NIPFP who can put up a posting with your announcement.&nb...

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Excitement in electronic payments

by Viral Shah.Frictionless payments are an important contributor to India's growthstory. Cashis costly for everyone in the system: for the central banker,banks, businesses, and individuals. Yet, we are far away from a massadoption of electronic payments.For electronic payments to take off, it is essential to have a bridgebetween the world of physical and electronic money, allowing seamlessconversion between the two. Until recently, this could only be done atbanks or ATMs. Various developments over the last year have greatlyexpanded the number of...

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Deciphering and solving the inflation crisis

India has an inflation crisis. From 2006 onwards, the yoy rise in CPI-IW seems to have gone unhinged:Why did this happen? We have a `Nobody killed Jessica' situation here. Sharad Pawar and D. Subbarao both insist that the problem cannot be laid on their doorstep. I would argue that it was the currency policy from 2003 onwards (large purchase of dollars with partial sterilisation) which gave us this mess, which was then compounded...

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Ruling out one explanation of the unhappy industrial production data

by Rudrani Bhattacharya.Today's data release showed y-o-y growth in the Index of Industrial Production: this was at +2.7% in November when compared with the previous value of 11.3%. Some analysts have conjectured that this was driven by seasonal fluctuations including the placement of Diwali, holidays related to Diwali and the reduced number of working days in November. In the jargon of seasonal adjustment, Diwali is termed a `moving holiday': it's a holiday which shows up in different months in different years.Our work on seasonal adjustment includes...

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Lord of the flies vs. 1984

Rick Bookstaber has an interesting post on facebook, which makes you think about the world. It reminded me of the lines: But there's gonna be a meter on your bed / That will disclose / What everybody knows. We used to think of that as a dystopian vision where we collapse into an authoritarian regime, where the liberal project fails. What is surprising is that people are wilfully walking into this surveillance arrangement. In all fairness, what's come about is closer to Lord of the Flies (monitoring by peers) than to 1984 (monitoring by the State)....

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Bombay vs. Mumbai

Many places in India have experienced name changes. I wondered: To what extent do these new names take over? Google gives us interesting bits of information about this question.ngrams.googlelabs.com gives us the ability to measure the extent to which a word occurs in the millions of books that google has digitised. For the Bombay vs. Mumbai question, it shows:The phrase `Bombay' vs `Mumbai' in booksThis suggests that the people who write...

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