Law and order: How to go from outrage to action

There is fresh rage on the bad state of law and order in Indiatoday. That rage is entirely appropriate.My father was born in 1926 and experienced British rule. One of thehigh points of his life was participation in the freedom movement. Heused to say to me with great regret that under British rule, the ShivSena would have never arisen. What has happened in India is adisgrace.The interesting and important question is: How can the problems besolved?Moral outrage does not lend itself to good policy analysis. As withthe problem of corruption, the problem...

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Next big development in the global market for the rupee

The next interesting development after ICE trading of rupee futures: CME will launch rupee futures soon also. See CME follows ICE into rupee futures by Tom Osborn on Financial News.ICE and CME are the world's top exchanges and they are serious rivals for the global rupee market. These recent developments add up to a substantial change in the outlook for the rupee as an internationally traded currency. The rupee will become more prominent as a globally traded and liquid market. And, ICE and CME are likely to do well, thus accelerating the decline...

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Trade misinvoicing as a channel for capital account openness

A recent literature has explored the effectiveness of capital controls (a href="http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Projects/BPEA/Fall%202012/2012%20fall%20klein.pdf">Klein, 2012, a href="http://voxeu.org/article/how-effective-were-2008-2011-capital-controls-brazil">Yothin, Noy and Zheng, 2012, a href="http://macrofinance.nipfp.org.in/releases/PS2012_CapitalControls.html">Patnaik and Shah, 2012). In a recent paper on trade flows, we find that unofficial capital flows through the channel of trade misinvoicing are an additional...

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10th Conference of the NIPFP-DEA Research Program

As part of the NIPFP-DEA Research Program, we have been running a conference series in the fields of macroeconomics and finance. The 10th of these conferences was a joint effort with Journal of International Money and Finance: a subset of the papers will appear as a special issue on the Macroeconomic and financial policy challenges of China and India. The materials of the conference are up on the website....

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Interesting readings

Ruminating over The Republic by Plato is the first step to thinking about politics and the State, and many angry young men that try to think about India do wrong by a href="http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.in/2011/06/can-we-get-back-to-track-on-corruption.html">skimping on their intellectual foundations. a href="http://www.livemint.com/Opinion/xlDkKDre1EI4JKKTm5pFgP/Arvind-Kejriwal-and-the-economic-illiteracy-in-public-life.html">Saugato Datta in Mint worries about similar problems in the domain of economics./a/aa href="http://ilapatnaikblog.blogspot.in/2012/12/identify-this.html">IlaPatnaik...

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International financial centres: Peering into the future

I did the SIGFIRM Quarterly Lecture at the University of California in Santa Cruz recently:Also see: Mumbai as an International Financial Centre, a project led by Percy Mistry.You may like to subscribe to the NIPFP MF channel on youtu...

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The problems of the economics profession

Ronald Coase has an interesting new piece titled Saving economics from the economics profession. You may like to see What is wrong with Economics on this blog.Last week, in the US, I heard that the number of Ph.D. graduates coming out vastly exceeds the number of academic job openings. Most economics Ph.Ds. are going to end up in non-academic jobs. In fields like Physics, the basic arithmetic became clear early on. Each academic in a research university produces 12 Ph.D. students, on average, over his or her life. In steady state, 11 of them...

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