governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
Is India a market maker or a market taker? In financial jargon, “takers” buy or sell at the price available in the market whilst “makers” actively buy and sell, thereby molding the market price and making it liquid. Applied to sovereigns, the United States is certainly a “market maker” as is the European Union and […]
Read More India’s infirm reforms pathHopeful as the title may sound, there is a sting in its tail, quite like the viral variants of Covid-19 which rise and strike just when our masks are down. Jobs continue to shrink in an economy that is shackled by fear and uncertainty — with holidays cancelled, work trips aborted, and the nature of […]
Read More The end is also a beginning- year end musingsThe dominant view is dire on the impact of the proposed roll back of the three Farm Laws, enacted in haste in 2020, even as the pandemic raged. Opinion is divided whether it is proof of the government’s shallow commitment to deep reform or that it proclaims doom for agriculture, which has committed Hara-kiri by […]
Read More The upside of farm laws repealIndia bought transition time at Glasgow by committing to net zero carbon emissions only by 2070. Advanced economies have mostly clustered around a nearer time frame of 2050, as befits their culpability, in depleting the global carbon envelop, and their enhanced technological and fiscal resources. China chose emissions peaking “before 2030” but a long transition […]
Read More Institutionalizing Net zeroCarole King, an American songwriter, recorded these lines in 1971: “I feel the earth move beneath my feet, I feel the sky tumbling down…”. King’s emotions were sentimentally human but in retrospect she seems to have been prescient. Back then, environmental activism was nascent. Greenpeace, the activist environmental organisation, was just being founded. Ignore Red […]
Read More Feel the Earth move beneath your feetIn the run up to the COP26 Summit in Glasgow on 31st October, enthusiasm bubbles over. This is as it should be. Preserving the world as we know it requires cutting back on the 34 giga tons (2018) of annual CO2 emissions, 37 percent of which is by the 16 percent of the global population in high-income economies. To […]
Read More Sharing the pain at GlasgowGovernments are habitually profligate and gladly eat into an ever-larger share of GDP growth. The United States, the richest, big country in 1990, spent 40.6 percent of GDP on government expenditure. By 2011 its government was spending even more at 43.7 percent of the GDP. Countries which went in the opposite direction were rare- such as […]
Read More To spend or not to spendIn the world of venture capital, market share matters more than profits because scaling-up builds investor expectations. By this metric, renewable energy is already the future. India’s renewables share in total generation doubled from 5.6 to 11 percent over the past six years since 2015. A share of 25 percent is targeted by 2030 primarily […]
Read More Renewing our future at GlasgowIn late June this year, Reliance Industries announced a US $10 billion investment for the production and use of hydrogen (H2). H2 is a colourless gas physically. But in the race to Net Zero Carbon, it comes in multiple colours, each representing a specific process. The many colors of H2 Grey is the cheapest at US […]
Read More If data is the new oil is hydrogen the new gas?Fifteen months down the road to economic recovery, the economy is still limping back to the normal circa 2019-20. GDP in the first quarter of the current fiscal year (April to June fiscal year 2021-22) at INR 32.4 trillion (constant terms) is 20.1 percent higher than the same quarter last year- that’s the good news. But it […]
Read More Indian economy – struggling to reach 2019-20 GDP levels
Opinion India 