Interesting readings

Sanjaya
Baru in the Business Standard on India's relationship
with Taiwan.

I added Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert D. Kaplan to my suggested
India
bookshelf. It is a truly fabulous book.

Sanjay
Banerji in Business World on how socialism went wrong
in Bengal.

Minxin Pei has an
excellent note on the CASI website titled Dangerous misperceptions:
Chinese views of India's rise.

On 16 May, I had written a collection of links titled href="http://ajayshahblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/new-low-for-indian-economic-policy.html">A
new low for Indian economic policy. This story has evolved
badly.
Today, the Economic Times has reported a set of accusations by K. M. Abraham.
SEBI's autonomy is under attack by Mobis Philipose in
Mint.
Mahua Venkatesh in the Hindustan Times.
Editorial, titled India's wobbly regulators in the Mint.
Govt
influencing selection of UTI AMC head, alleges T Rowe
by Shaji Vikraman and Sangita Mehta in the Economic Times and
Why North Block can't do without Omita Paul by Sruthijith KK, in the Economic Times.

A troubling upheaval in SEBI is in the works. After the departure
of C. B. Bhave, we are now facing the href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/SEBI-chief-Sinha-scouting-for-A-team/Article1-707650.aspx">departure
of K. M. Abraham, M. Sahoo, J. N. Gupta, K. N. Vaidyanathan,
J. Ranganayakulu and Pradnya Saravade. These individuals were of
essence to SEBI's remarkable performance in recent years, and will
be very hard to replace.

The Economic Times, the Hindustan Times and
the Mint are clearly winning on this story.

href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2007-03-03/news/27682983_1_new-piano-piano-world-piano-classes">Striking
the right keys by Vikram Doctor and Kalyan Parbat, in the
Economic Times.

`Coke Studio' is an impressive concept in innovative music that's
run by the American corporation, Coca Cola, in Pakistan. A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_Studio_(Pakistan)">precis
on Wikipedia, and here's their
web page. This is an interesting future for music: All the music
is freely downloadable. And now, href="http://www.indiainfoline.com/Markets/News/Coke-Studioat-the-rateMTV-debuts-In-India/5149027268">they
are bringing this to India.

href="http://online.wsj.com/article/BT-CO-20110526-704605.html">Google
street view will now come to India.

The uncommon experience of reading high quality thinking on Indian macro in
the press: Keerthik Sasidharan.

For all of us interested
in Satyam,
here's a fascinating story about
the fraud
at Longtop Financial Technologies, a Chinese firm, which was
similar to Satyam in many ways.

I did an interview for IFMR Blog on India's financial
architecture. Here is
the interview
in text
and the
audio.

Siddhartha
Deb has a fascinating profile of IIPM and Arindam Chaudhuri
in Caravan magazine.

href="http://www.financialexpress.com/news/where-have-all-the-investments-gone/784715/0">Mahesh
Vyas analyses the href="http://www.business-beacon.com/kommon/bin/sr.php?kall=winv">CMIE
Capex database for insights about emerging trends in investment
(in the Financial Express).

Martin
Feldstein evaluates the scary things that Greece has to now
pull off.

Tina
Rosenberg, in New York magazine, tells the story of the
world's first person who had AIDS and was cured.

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OECD-NIPFP Symposium

An interesting event, linked to the release of OECD's Economic Survey of India, 2011.

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Can we get back to track on corruption now?

India's corruption crisis

Somewhere in 2010 or so, I started getting much more gloomy about India's problem of corruption. For a snapshot of the zeitgeist, see this group of articles from August 2010. A large swathe of the economy operates in close contact with government. If government will not sensibly make rules, and then fail to impartially enforce rules, then the entire enterprise of the market economy is under threat.

In the months that followed, the topic of corruption exploded in the Indian public policy discourse. The two main events were the Commonwealth Games scandal and the 2G Spectrum scandal. But alongside these, many smaller events also played a role, such as the Adarsh Housing Society scandal.

The two spoilers

I was, at first, hoping that this energy would be channeled into making progress on core issues of governance. But sadly, the first flush of interest in the field was wasted thanks to the Anna Hazare spoiler followed by the Baba Ramdev spoiler. These have provided comic relief, but more importantly they have taken the focus away from the genuine problem of corruption. They have helped increase an entrenched sense of pessimism that nothing can be done about corruption (given that these prominent efforts were irrelevant).

However, the lesson is not that nothing can be done about corruption. The lesson is that such spoilers are not the answer. Genuine institutional reform is. The problem of corruption will resist quick fixes proposed by people who only dimly understand it. Careful thinking in incentives and public administration is required, in diagnosing where corruption comes from and how it can be addressed. Now that the two spoilers seem to be getting out of the way, can we get back to this main quest?

The main quest

Under the topic of `sensibly making rules', we have had two kinds of problems. The first is the problem of old Indian thinking, where socialism and autarky have impeded good sense. But alongside the process of this obsolete economics being weaned out of the system, the new problem is that of hard-driving entrepreneurs rigging the system to make rules that favour themselves.

Under the topic of `impartially enforcing rules', the puzzle is: How do we get humble civil servants in enforcement agencies (CBI / Police / SEBI / RBI / TRAI) to go about doing their job? This task is under fire from three points of view. On one hand, humble civil servants are often outgunned by the sophistication of hard-driving entrepreneurs. When the civil servant is presented with a sufficiently complex scheme, he might just not have the energy to unravel it and pinpoint the skullduggery. It requires an exceptional capability in government, by Indian standards, to hammer down the details of the arrangements that firms might undertake [example]. The second problem is that politically powerful people might try to block investigations. The third problem is simple outright corruption, where the humble civil servant is bribed to not do an investigation properly. In the real world, all three elements are at work.

The Indian development project critically requires institution-building in order to address this. High quality rule making procedures are required, so that the rule-making process cannot be rigged. The hardest job is that of creating an organisational culture for enforcement, so that agencies like SEBI can write the top quality orders of the kind which came out in recent years.

And then, we need the surrounding infrastructure of courts such as SAT and the Supreme Court. These are required to play two kinds of roles. First, when a government agency tramples upon an innocent, the courts have to protect the innocent. Second, when these agencies smell an agency that is about to fold and not actually go through with an investigation or the following court process, they have to be tough about it, as the Supreme Court has been doing in recent months.

To make a difference to corruption, we have to go after these questions. This requires a slow careful process on three fronts:

1. Recruiting top quality individuals, who combine high competence with the highest ethical standards,


2. Modifying rules and procedures so as to make them more robust to corruption, and


3. Strengthening the courts.

There will be no quick results, but over time, this hard work will yield results. 

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India's privatisation problem

When the UPA came to power, the word privatisation was buried,
partly out of deference for the communist parties which were
supporting the UPA. The sale of shares did revive after the UPA-2
commenced [href="http://www.divest.nic.in/SummarySale.asp">history].

On a global scale, the experience with firms like British Airways
and AlItalia has done a lot to persuade people that government is a
terrible owner of firms. As a consequence, even though governments
worldwide took up ownership of many financial firms during the global
crisis of 2008 and 2009, there was never any question that this
`nationalisation' would be more than temporary. In OECD countries,
there is full clarity that even if government gets into a firm when
the firm is in trouble (for certain public policy reasons), this
ownership must only be temporary and government must get out of this
unpleasant state as soon as possible.

Given the lack of commitment to economic reform in the UPA,
expectations in India on the question of privatisation have been
low. But the problems of public sector firms are glaringly large and
the issue does not go away.

We are all used to Air India being a phenomenally bad use of public
money. But as href="http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/t-n-ninan-dogarage-sale/438639/">T. N. Ninan
points out in the Business Standard today, there are quite
a few other such breathtakingly large sinks for public resources. As
he says:

...it takes a special kind of government company to lose Rs 8 crore a day, while earning just Rs 10 crore as revenue -- and that in the booming field of telecommunications. That's Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) for you. Its big sister, the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL), also loses Rs 8 crore a day, though it earns much more revenue -- about Rs 90 crore daily. BSNL blames the jailed former minister A Raja for its troubles, but there must be more to the story. Now the two companies propose to merge; expect an Air India kind of situation, with staff from the two companies battling over pay and seniority many years into the future.

Air India, meanwhile, provides more proof that the government is a lousy shareholder. One minister destroyed the airline. Another now watches while the airline cuts flights because it has exhausted its credit and credibility, and therefore has to pay for fuel in cash. The staff, meanwhile, is not paid incentives that are equal to something like half their monthly salary in most cases -- and the government expects this de-motivated staff to fight and regain lost marketshare, to offer service with a smile to passengers.

And what about Prasar Bharati, the once supposedly autonomous broadcaster which is now once again little more than a government department? It employs 38,000 people, and loses Rs 2.5 crore a day, to earn about as much revenue. Someone should ask the obvious question: Why is the government in the business of running phone companies, airlines and news broadcasting when it is losing large dollops of money, when private providers are doing a reasonable job, and when there is no shortage of competition? For that matter, does the government need to make watches (at HMT), cement (at Cement Corporation of India), tyres (at Tyre Corporation of India), or shoes (at Bharat Leather)?

The UPA-2 made a big break with the pessimism by moving forward on
href="http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-05-20/news/29564768_1_scooters-india-sick-state-run-companies-extension-of-salary-support">selling
off href="http://www.business-beacon.com/kommon/bin/sr.php?kall=wcos&cocode=215448&type=s&tab=1010">Scooters
India. The long spell of zero privatisation may come to an end,
with the UPA-2 selling off Scooters India.

But how might one view the prospect of government selling off some
of the other public sector firms? I think a sound approach to this
question involves three elements.

1. Removing entry barriers

The first piece of the story is that it is essential to remove
entry barriers in various fields, which were once dominated by the
public sector. Our poster child in this regard is telecom. Private and
foreign firms came into Indian telecom; Indian users of telecom
services were huge beneficiaries. Whether MTNL / BSNL were privatised,
as VSNL was, was of second order importance. The most important thing
that is required for India to make progress is for government to not
get in the way of the private sector.

As an example, Indian banking is a place where there are steep
anti-competitive restrictions against private and foreign banks. While
I believe we should have strong rules about ownership and governance
for banks (just as we should in critical financial infrastructure), we
should not be blocking the rise of suitable private and foreign banks.
We should not be blocking the long-term decline in importance of PSU
banks. Getting out of the way of private and foreign banks is as
important, if not more important, as the task of selling PSU
banks.

2. Dispersed shareholding corporations rather than strategic
sales

If all PSUs were sold off, the top 500 families of India would
likely endup controlling all of them. This prospect makes one worry,
about the increased concentration of economic and thus political
power. It would be far better if India move towards privatisation by
creating dispersed shareholding (e.g. ICICI or HDFC) instead of
privatisation through strategic sales (e.g. VSNL).

This issue also links nicely to the problem of corruption. A
country where spectrum auctions can take place while requiring bids to
be placed in 45 minutes is a country where auctions that sell off PSUs
could be rigged. It is, hence, far better to setup a steady drip
whereby 0.1% of the shares of a PSU are sold every day into the
pre-opening href="http://econpapers.repec.org/paper/indigiwpp/2010-006.htm">call
auction at NSE and BSE, so that 25% is sold every year. Such a
procedure comprehensively eliminates the problems of government
process in the sale of shares. The government would merely put out an
advertisement, before the story began, saying that over the next 250
days, it will sell 0.1% of this firm on every single day into the NSE
and BSE call auctions.

Alongside this sale of shares, government would need to take
interest in establishing good quality corporate governance structures
for these companies, which are transiting out of government control
into becoming dispersed shareholding corporations.

Even in the case of Scooters India, suppose government decided to
sell off its ownership of 95.38% within 100 days. It is better to do
this without bringing any investment banker into the picture, by
selling 0.9538% into the call auction for every day in the coming 100
days, after making a public announcement to this effect. Alongside
this, government would need to setup a good quality board and then
allow ordinary corporate governance procedures to work.

3. GDP growth, not proceeds

Every now and then, these discussions get stuck on the issue of how
government can maximise the proceeds from selling off (say) Scooters
India. This is the wrong end of the puzzle. The really important story
is about how the labour and capital that's blocked inside Scooters
India can turn into greater output. Once that's done, government
collects the NPV of future taxation that this productive enterprise
will generate.

The focus should be on getting assets out of public control, while
avoiding the corruption or political complexity of strategic sales. As
long as these are achieved, the magnitude of the proceeds is not of
great importance.

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Freedom of speech in Pakistan and India

One of Pakistan's more remarkable journalists, href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syed_Saleem_Shahzad">Syed Saleem
Shahzad, was tortured and murdered, probably by Pakistan's
ISI.

• href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/ME27Df06.html">Part
  one of the article, in Asia Times Online that got him
  killed.
  
  
• href="http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/MF03Df02.html">Saleem
  in the shadow of Massoud by Chan Akya, also in Asia Times
  Online, tries to ask why this would make sense. And once you
  start thinking about this, was it coincidence that href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilyas_Kashmiri">Ilyas Kashmiri
  was killed shortly thereafter?
  
  
• I haven't yet read the book href="http://books.google.com/books?id=QpnmTgEACAAJ&dq=syed+saleem+shahzad&hl=en&ei=eVTsTajEA4bSrQfvqKXhBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC8Q6AEwAA">Inside
  Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, which was released only a few
  weeks ago.
  
  

In one view of the world, freedom of speech is something that you
are gifted by your founding fathers. As an example, if you have the
good fortune of having a well drafted Constitution, it would say
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of
speech, or of the press;. This would block the ability
of politicians to enact legislation that is inimical to freedom of
speech. Then, as long as rule of law prevails, we get freedom of
speech. This seems like a palace coup, it seems rather easy, as long
as you have the right intellectual capabilities in the hands of those
who draft the Constitution of a country.

We in India or Pakistan are not blessed thusly. The Indian
Constitution is not clear-headed about freedom of speech, and
anti-defamation law of colonial vintage continues to be on the
books. This is an important tool for harassment and intimidation. And
then, there is the question of rule of law. What is going on in
Pakistan is way beyond questions of how the Constitution should be
drafted.

It is, instead, more useful to think that democracy and freedom are
made of a million battles, small and large. Freedom of speech is won,
piece by piece, through a million mutinies. It is important to
constantly think, and speak, and write. Each little act of writing
about troublesome issues pushes the envelope of freedom of speech, and
creates a culture of honest discussion and discourse.

I feel the media in India has become
quite complacent
about the tawdry condition of free speech in India. All too often
journalists can be warned off a seamy story by a tiny exercise of
power or influence. All too often, the crooks are able to buy the
loyalty of a journalist quite easily. There isn't enough
intellectualism going around, among the men and women in the
media. Eshwar
Sundaresan, writing in Dawn, says that India badly needs
more journalists of the character of
Pakistan's Najam
Sethi. This is one of many areas where India's success in the
last 20 years is leading to an erosion of the very foundations of
that success.

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Recruiting the right MD for the IMF

The recruitment of the IMF MD has turned into quite a controversy. For an interesting set of views, see this page on the website of The Economist. In a remarkable development, the EDs of India, China, Russia, Brazil and South Africa came out with a clear joint statement on the silliness that is afoot.



There are four perspectives on this question which are worth noting:

1. There is an obvious gap between the power structure at the IMF, which reflects the structure of the world economy after the Second World War, as compared with the present reality. As an example, at present, the Netherlands has 2.08% of the votes while India has 2.35%. But Indian GDP is now $1.6 trillion while Netherlands is at half that.
   
   


2. The world would benefit from a competent and capable IMF. The best man (or woman) for the job will not be obtained by having any restrictions on nationality. As an example, in today's world, a name that leaps out to me is Stan Fischer. But he's not European, and hence was never even considered for the top job in the last decade. (As with Montek, he is now over age 65 and is hence not eligible for the job today). Given that a large fraction of the top economists of the world are not European, this rule yields a less capable IMF.
   
   


3. A quota system where the IMF MD must now be from an emerging market is as bad as a quota system where the IMF MD is only recruited from a European country. The key is to get away from all these restrictions, and to only recruit the best person for the job. The emphasis should be on technical capability. As an example, see how in the UK, they recruited an American into their Monetary Policy Committee.
   
   


4. In the standard narrative, one hears the idea that in this crisis in Europe, the Europeans are gaining from their control of the IMF. I disagree. In the Asian crisis, it was good for Asia that the IMF was not conflicted by considerations of domestic Asian politics. Similarly, the IMF program in India in 1981 and 1991 was uncontaminated by domestic Indian political considerations. This helped produce technically sound programs, which helped in jumpstarting India's growth. It is not accidental that we see structural breaks in India's GDP growth around these two dates.
   
   What Europe needs most is a tough IMF, which will be a stern taskmaster, which will force difficult political choices so as to heal the economy. Economic policy in Europe today needs to be cruel to be kind. Instead, by placing a string of career politicians from France into the IMF MD's job, the valuable role which the IMF could have played in solving the European Crisis is being negated. This damages Europe. The wise thing for Europe today is to say: Give us a tough and competent taskmaster, recruited through global search, where European politicans are not allowed to apply. The biggest loser from the present arrangement is Europe.

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Opportunities in the Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP

The Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP has opportunities in several roles.

Economists

We require individuals with a Ph.D. in economics or finance, with an interest in original research in our fields. These would be contractual appointments for a period of one or two years. One or more publications in international journals would be helpful, as would be the ability to carry research from inception all the way to publication.

Policy research associates

We require people who can participate in large complex research projects in the field of public policy. As you will see at the URL above, the Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP offers many opportunities for a meaningful engagement with government in the ground realities of India's economic reform.



Policy work is highly inter-disciplinary. The policy group at NIPFP draws together people with a knowledge of public economics, public administration, financial regulation and law. We welcome interest in these positions by people with strong capabilities in one or two of these areas, and curiosity about the others. The ideal candidates would have read the Percy Mistry and Raghuram Rajan reports, and have familiarity with the things being talked about in this blog.

Quantitative research associates

We require individuals with a Masters degree in economics, finance, public policy or statistics. The work involves participating in academic research projects in the fields of macroeconomics and finance, and practical macroeconomic policy analysis. Desirable features include: domain knowledge; knowledge of computer programming, ideally in R; experience with CMIE databases and datastream.

Research programmers

We require a senior person who would play a dual role. On one hand, he would be responsible for an existing system which includes linux desktops, linux servers, and a project management system based on redmine and svn. This is expected to take up roughly 20% of effort. The prime focus will be participating in development work of complex analysis of economic and financial data. This development work is primarily in R. It includes building internal tools and also some packages released as open source.



We also require a junior person who will primarily work on systems administration for an existing system which includes linux desktops, linux servers and a project management system which uses redmine and svn. Some Microsoft windows knowledge is also required. On a second priority, there would be development in R.



The Macro/Finance group at NIPFP is a research environment: non-hierarchical, low political complexity, high IQ people, high intensity and involvement. Such work could be particularly appropriate for a person who is at present a computer engineer but desires knowledge of economics and finance.

Administrator

We require an experienced program manager who would be able to handle budgets, financial reporting, deadlines and deliverables, and client interactions. Experience with government procedure would be a positive.

Generic features

The Macro/Finance Group at NIPFP is a conducive research environment including a modern office. Compensation is generally superior to that seen in government academic institutions. The policy and the quantitative teams are strongly interconnected with significant spillovers of knowledge.







If any of these interest you, please contact Anurodh Sharma (anurodh54 at gmail.com) with your resume by 31 May 2011, where you clearly identify which of these roles is of interest to you.

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