A key intuition of modern thinking in international trade and international finance is that distance matters much more than we think.We may like to believe that the world is becoming more flat. We may like to believe that for weightless things like services and financial flows, distance is irrelevant. But the research evidence is unambiguous: there is a `gravity model' in the affairs of men. The interactions between two countries tend to go up in proportion to the product of their GDP, and vary inversely with the squared distance between them.Traditional...
Thursday, 23 February 2012
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
a href="http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.in/2012/01/education-in-india-compact-reading-kit.html">India's education crisis is now high on our consciousness. In response to the recent developments, CNBC Awaaz did a four-hour symposium on national television (in Hindi/English) titled Kala Akshar: The Great Education Crisis. This brings together an interesting and diverse set of voices on the subject./a10:00 - 11:00 AM123411:00 - 12:00 PM567812:00 - 1:00 PM91011121:00 - 2:00 PM13141...
Thursday, 16 February 2012
Great insights into India's breakdown of governance, from N. Sundaresha Subramanian in the Business Standard.Jeff Glekin and Hugo Dixon have a great three-part rumination about India. Also see Jeff Glekin and Shaji Vikraman on the ruckus at UTI.Cullen Murphy has a great article about the Inquisition. His story is a troubling one for us in India, where we are at the point of transition from persecution by thugs to persecution by competent organisations.At the crossroads, an article on education by me in the February...
Sunday, 12 February 2012
by Naman Pugalia, Viral Shah and Ajay Shah.We decided to experience the spectacle of Indian democracy, by going to an election rally in the Uttar Pradesh (UP) assembly elections. Elections in Uttar Pradesh are unbelievably big - in 2007 there were 110,654 polling stations, which gathered up 471 votes each (on average) into electronic voting machines (EVMs), adding up to 52 million votes. (For a comparison, the US presidential election in 2008...
Friday, 10 February 2012
There are three ways in which a person can speak in today's Internet into the public domain: to write on twitter (140 bytes), to write a comment on a blog (~ 1000 bytes) or to write a blog post (~ 5000 bytes). The appetite of each person varies, reflecting a combination of having something to say and having the discipline of carefully constructing sentences and paragraphs. Each of these three choices comes with a different set of human factors which shapes who participates and how much.This blog started out in end-2005, and quickly built up thousands...
Wednesday, 8 February 2012
by ThomasLaubach and Ajay Shah.Economics is a rich and fascinating subject. But all too often, theteaching process forces young people in the field to look at the tailof the elephant, to think about macroeconomics as the game of solvingdynamic models. There is actually much more going on. (On a relatednote, you might like to see a href="http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/books-that-should-be-read-before.html">Booksthat should be read before starting a Ph.D. in economics onthis blog, 18 May 2011)./aIn this blog post, we walk through the...
Sunday, 5 February 2012
The JEE used to serve India wellMany years ago, high school education in India worked in a twin track system: There were those who studied for the IIT JEE and there was everyone else who didn't. The former studied good books like Resnick/Halliday, which is a college level book elsewhere in the world, solved physics problems from Irodov, etc.In contrast, studying for the 12th standard ("board examination") tended to emphasise rote memorisation, focusing on trivial questions where you had to plug numbers into a formula, emphasised accuracy...
Friday, 3 February 2012
Girish Sant, at New Rajendra Nagar in New Delhi, 10 January 2002Girish Sant died of a heart attack in a hotel in Delhi yesterday.`Bandya', as he was known to friends, could have chosen any career when he stepped out of IIT in 1986. He chose the less travelled path of taking interest in the public policy, and applying himself to a combination of technical mastery and the dogged persistence that is essential to making a difference. He founded a think...
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