While many people in India think that we have freedom of speech, things are actually quite bad.There are two well-respected global rankings in this field: Reporters Without Borders has a `Press Freedom Index'. For 2010, they show India at rank 122 out 178 countries. In their ranking, Nepal and Jordan and Qatar are more free than India. The other prominent ranking is by Freedom House. For 2010, they place India at rank 72 out of 196. In their ranking, Hong Kong, Benin and Tonga are more free than India.Why are things so bad? The Constitution...
Thursday, 28 April 2011
by Ashish Kumar.Inflation measurement is a critical component of macroeconomicpolicy. In a recent paper, a href="http://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc:npf:wpaper:11/83">Patnaiket. al. have argued that while the CPI-IW has many problems, thesedifficulties are not first order, and that the CPI-IW can yield areasonable measure of inflation today./aOn 18 February 2011, CSO released a new CPI with base year 2010(Jan-Dec =100). This new CPI has five important new features: It is disaggregated at the rural and urban levels. The new overall all India CPI...
Thursday, 21 April 2011
Freedom House measures freedom of speech online, and finds that India is only `partly free'. The score of unfreedom worsened from 34 in 2009 to 36 in 2011. Here is some reportage on The Register.The challenge for a new order in West Bengal will be daunting by Swapan Dasgupta in The Telegraph.Is this what we are doing with the JEE: abstract of this paper reads: a more severe control of the quality of the output will improve the overall quality of the education. This paper shows a somehow counterintuitive result: an increase in...
Friday, 15 April 2011
Ila Patnaik and I wrote a paper titled Did the Indian capital controls work as a tool of macroeconomic policy?The abstract of this paper reads: In 2010 and 2011, there has been a fresh wave of interest in capital controls. India is one of the few large countries with a complex system of capital controls, and hence offers an opportunity to assess the extent to which these help achieve goals of macroeconomic and financial policy. We find that the capital controls were associated with poor governance, were unable to sustain the erstwhile...
by Shubho Roy and Deepaloke Chatterjee.Rule-making process: A critical component of the rule of lawA despotic king has absolute power. When a society matures, therule of law emerges in two stages. First, the despotic ruler writesdown a set of rules, and the main body of government implements thelaw. So the interface between citizen and State is now governed bylaw, but a despotic king has the god-given power to enact new law.The next stage of the evolution of the rule of law is where thevery law-making process is enveloped in checks and balances....
Sunday, 10 April 2011
Pratap Bhanu Mehta reminds that that while Elephantiasis is a nasty problem, elephant dung is not the cure. Just because we're convinced that corruption is a serious problem, it doesn't mean that any vaguely proximate remedy is going to work. Mere moral outrage does not solve problems. Complex problems require cold thinking and sophisticated analys...
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
This blog post is joint work with Mana Shah.What is economic freedom?An index of economic freedom should measure the extent to which rightly acquired property is protected and individuals are able to engage in voluntary transactions. James Gwartney and Robert Lawson have proposed a definition where individuals have economic freedom when property they acquire without the use of force, fraud, or theft is protected from physical invasions by others...
Sunday, 3 April 2011
As Vijay Kelkar has long emphasised, India's privatisation question should be viewed as a question about the portfolio of the State. For each Rs.10,000 crore of shares of Air India that the government owns, it is forgoing 2,000 kilometres of highways. The State needs to ask itself whether it is better to own 2,000 kilometres of highways as opposed to owning the same shares of Air India. On this subject, also see Section 4.3 of this paper.The second key dimension that should shape the discussion on privatisation is that of improving GDP growth....
Saturday, 2 April 2011
Sadly, India abstained.In India, we're quite gloomy about the place that has been given toorganised labour. But these questions are not closed elsewhere in theworld. See ahref="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704150604576166011983939364.html?mod=rss_opinion_main">RobertBarro on the appropriate place of trade unions, and a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/27/magazine/27christie-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all">Matt Bai in the New York Times magazine on a politician taking on public sector trade unions./a/aManoj...
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