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
in the Indian labour force.

Russell
K. Nieli on the power of meritocracy as seen in Caltech. The
IITs are similar to Caltech in two respects: No concern for how
`well rounded' the background of an applicant is, and no concern
in the admissions process for parentage or donations. The IITs do
care about caste to some extent in the admissions process, while
Caltech cares about nothing other than brainpower.

Materials
of the 2010 Neemrana conference organised by NCAER, NBER and ICRIER.

Sigh. Building
a clean environment is hard!

Materials
from the recent IGIDR finance conference.

Annie
Lowrey on Slate on the role of prizes in public funding
for research.

Mobis
Philipose on competition against Nifty options at NSE by Nifty
options at SGX,
and on
the problem of transaction taxes and exchange competition.

A
household survey by CMIE tells us something about how ordinary
households see the debate about the Bimal Jalan committee.

Sindhu
Bhattacharya has an article in DNA about foreign
airlines who are being prevented from operating in India. We need
a treaty framework that would render such things unlawful.

A. D. Miller
in the Guardian on why Western authors like Mother Russia.

Interesting
developments in the freedom of speech.

I
guess they noticed that if you take the first word on every
seventeenth page, it spells out "Death to the Shah". That's
nothing, I have a blog that is banned in China!

A great story about
how grain and oil led to the collapse of the USSR. By Yegor Gaidar.

Joe
Keohane on boston.com on the odd feature of forecasting: The
guy who gets the huge event right is often likely to fare badly in
ordinary times.

Lant
Pritchett says that the notion of an `ethics code' for
economists is a silly idea.