Tag: in the service of the republic

Incentives Matter

A little hobby of mine, that I have managed to get my daughter hooked on to as well, is etymology.

I’ve long held that concepts become more interesting, more relatable and therefore more memorable – in the literal sense of the term – once you’re able to tell yourself a story about the underlying concept. Look up the etymology of the word “average”, for example, and it is likely to be a story you won’t forget in a hurry. By the way, here’s a fun question the daughter asked some months ago, and I’ve been kicking myself for not having thought of it first.

So what is the etymology of the word incentive?

From Medieval Latin incentīvus (“that strikes up or sets the tune”), from incinō (“to strike up”), from in- (“in, on”) + canō (“to sing”).

https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+the+etymology+of+incentive

I like words. I like stories that can be fashioned out of, and about, words. If you click around on the search result that I have linked to, you realize that you can go down quite a rabbit hole about the history of the word incentive. Words such as kindle, singing, and incendiary crop up, and the associations these words can conjure up in one’s mind can result in a very pleasant couple of hours. But the phrase that resonated the most with me was “sets the tune”. It fits nicely with what incentives actually do in real life – they do set the tune on which we are tempted to dance.

Now who sets the tune, for whom, and with what consequences – that’s a whole other story, and practitioners of public policy can tell this tale much better than most other folks. But even outside the always-fascinating drama that is always being staged in the theater of public policy, this story is at the heart of what plays out in applied economics. Who is incentivizing whom, towards what end, and do the incentives end up producing intended or unintended consequences, and at what cost – these are fascinating questions to answer.

My favorite story about getting incentives right comes from Marginal Revolution University:

And my favorite story about getting incentives wrong comes from Calvin and Hobbes:

https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Calvin%27s_Allowance

And that’s the tricky thing with incentives. Getting them right is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. The reason it is a surprisingly difficult thing to do is because of a variety of reasons, but it is possible to start to think about building a framework that one might use to design incentives.

Begin by asking yourself this question: Who is designing the incentive, and for whom?

Let’s begin with a simple example. Let’s say I am designing an incentive for myself. If, I say to myself, I can finish writing the blog post you’re reading right now without taking a break, I’ll reward myself by having a cup of coffee. In this case, I am designing an incentive for myself – I am setting a tune for myself to dance to.

Note two other things about this little incentive scheme:

  1. It is a positive incentive. I am not going to punish myself if I do not finish my designated task – that would be a negative incentive. I am, instead, going to reward myself if I finish my designated task. Think of the old English phrase “the carrot and the stick” to get a sense of what a positive and negative incentive mean.
  2. It is a non-monetary incentive. I am not going to reward (or punish) myself with money. There is no prize money, nor is there a fine. There is, instead, a non-monetary reward – a nice hot steaming cup of coffee. Incentives need not always be monetary!

So, a positive, non-monetary reward to finish a task. What could possibly go wrong? Consider the opening paragraph of Ch. 6 of a lovely little book called In The Service of the Republic:

In 1902 in Hanoi, under French rule, there was a rat problem. A bounty was set—one cent per rat—which could be claimed by submitting a rat’s tail to the municipal office. But for each individual who caught a rat, it was optimal to amputate the tail of a rat, and set the rat free, so as to bolster the rat population and make it easier to catch rats in the future. In addition, on the outskirts of Hanoi, farms came up, dedicated to breeding rats. In 1906, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague that killed over 250 people.

Kelkar, Vijay; Shah, Ajay. In Service of the Republic . Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Kindle Edition.

By the way, the footnote associated with this little tale contains the link to the fuller story, and is worth reading in its entirety. It would appear that the cobra story from India doesn’t have any corroborative evidence. For those who don’t know the background, there is a very similar story from India, only involving cobras isntead of rats. (If you will permit a slight digression: I was telling both of these stories to my daughter, and her only observation was to note that the cobra story was unlikely because “won’t cobras be an example of an apex predator? They can’t grow as quickly as rats, correct?”)

But what can go wrong is what the government in Hanoi discovered – that the person for whom the incentive has been designed may well end up hearing a completely different tune than the one that the designer of the incentive intended. That is, the designer would like you to do x, but you end up doing y instead.

Teachers may set up assignments to incentivize learning, but students are playing a different game. They are looking to minimize efforts in order to maximize marks. Ditto for managers and members on a team in the corporate world. Ditto, as I and my wife have been discovering to our chagrin, for parents and kids! That last bit has been a particularly aggravating discovery, since both my wife and I are economists.

But this phenomenon of incentives not working out as envisaged has an entire “law” of its own, called Goodhart’s Law. This is what it says:

“Any measure that becomes a target stops being a measure”

You’ll find different phrasings of the same idea online, but that’s the simplest way to express the idea. If the measure (to stop the culling of the rat population) is rat’s tails that have been cut off, and you make this the target – well, they stop being a measure of the culling of the rat population!

And that’s why designing incentives is so very tricky. The Indian government found this out to its cost in the aftermath of demonetisation, for example, but rather than look for examples elsewhere, I think you learn about incentives best when you try to think of examples from your own life.

But you cannot – simply cannot – be a student of economics without appreciating both what incentives are, and how difficult it is to design and implement them. The study of this facet of economics will last for your entire life, and you will always find something interesting to learn about it, every single time.

Incentives matter.

Now, if you will remember, I had promised myself a cup of coffee if I finished writing this blog post without taking a break. Goodhart’s law would imply that I would indeed finish writing this blog post without taking a break, but presumably at the cost of either its length, or its quality, or possibly both. I leave it to you to judge if that has been the case.

Me?

I’ll go brew that cuppa.

Were The Farm Laws a “1991 Moment”?

As with everything that happens in the world today, so also with the farm laws: a lot of heat, and hardly any light. Reams have been written about how the farm laws were good (or bad), about their introduction being a much needed thing (or not), and their withdrawal being a disaster for take-your-pick-from-Modi-BJP-India (or not).

I have neither the desire nor the energy to get into any of these debates. Here’s my simple take as a student of economics: markets almost always work. Where they don’t work, identify the reasons why they don’t work, and either correct those causal factors, or have the government step in until (and only until) those factors are corrected.

Things get tricky when you begin to ask pesky questions along these lines:

  • How do you define markets not working? Bench-marked against what standard? Who decides?
  • How do you correct these causal factors? How do you judge that they have been corrected? Are you sure they won’t return? On what basis?
  • To what extent should government step in? How are you sure this will make things better in all markets at all points of time? Using what framework?

But that is precisely what makes the study of India’s political economy so very interesting! And this is true of agriculture as well, not just in India, but in other places too.

For the moment, let’s take as a given the fact that government had to be present in agricultural markets in India these past decades. That may or may not be true, but for the purposes of this blog post, let us assume that there was a confluence of factors in India’s agricultural markets that necessitated the active presence of the government as a participant, not just as a regulator.

Now, if markets almost always work, and if government was present in agriculture, then we have to figure out a way for government to eventually not be present in agriculture. (Note, again, that your opinion may be different from mine. But play along with me for the moment, please.)

Yamini Aiyar and Mekhala Krishnamurthy argue in an HT article that in the case of the three farm laws, what the government missed out on was the word “eventually”. They argue that it was the suddenness of the move that was problematic, not the move itself.

There’s a political angle to the sudden withdrawal, and the authors refer to it in their piece. There’s a regulatory angle to the sudden withdrawal, and that is also covered by the authors. But there also is an institutional (and therefore economic) angle to it, and that is what I would like to focus on:

Consider this. The protesting farmers from Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh are locked into a system where State intervention, driven by the logic of Minimum Support Prices (MSP) and the Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) mandis, dominates. The State is not a benign actor. It has created and sustained local elites with vested interests – traders, middlemen and moneylenders, each of whom extracts to control market power. This undermines competition and compromises farmer interests in different ways. But farmers have learnt to negotiate these relationships of extraction. And the state through MSP and mandis has served as insurance that gives them bargaining power. Any attempt to break this system will inevitably, as the protests amply demonstrate, unleash anxieties.
In this context, the move towards genuine competition will not be viable without the State demonstrating its willingness to protect farmers interests and gain their trust.

https://twitter.com/AiyarYamini/status/1464452741325996032/photo/1

What is the point? The point is that the current system isn’t perfect, and it isn’t sustainable. As the authors point out, the farming sector isn’t competitive.

In theory, that should mean, to a student of economics, that they are not efficient. That, in turn, means that we should expect that producers aren’t producing as much as they could have, and whatever they produce is being produced at a higher cost than would otherwise have been the case. We should expect that procurement, storage and distribution are also potentially riddled with inefficiencies. We should expect divergent quality of produce, and we should expect consumers to be paying higher prices, potentially for a lower variety of goods.

We should also anticipate a whole host of things due to the fact that the farming sector isn’t competitive: prices aren’t transparently determined, there isn’t free entry and exit, certain sellers are likely to get a better deal, transaction and search costs are high, and on and on and on. This is microeconomics 101 in practice.

(A quick note to students of economics: ask yourself if you’re able to relate what you’re learning in your microeconomics courses to the two paragraphs above. If you disagree with my assessment, ask yourself what is it that is causing you to disagree. Can you frame your disagreement in the context of microeconomic theory? Secondly, irrespective of whether you agree or not, can you think of what data points you might need to empirically verify or disprove my arguments? Where might these data points be available? What models (economic and econometric) can we use to settle this debate? Finally, why stop at agricultural markets – which other markets can you analyze this way?)

And for all of these reasons and more, reform is needed. It cannot possibly be anybody’s argument that the status quo in India’s agriculture must persist forever.

Which then, in turn, gives rise to two separate questions:

  1. If reforms are to be introduced, how?
  2. However they are to be introduced, how fast should we proceed with their implementation?

Again, the question isn’t one of the desirability of reforms, or their appropriateness. Rather, the question is about whether the reforms should be a top-down, one-size-fits-all initiative, or a more locally driven approach. And second, should reforms be introduced all at once, or slowly and gradually, one step at a time.

And I would like to argue that at least in this one regard, we should be looking at China. Not for the specifics of their reform and a CTRL-C CTRL-V hit job. But for their approach, beginning in the late 1970’s.

When I first proposed the household responsibility system (HRS), I was criticized as follows: Chairman Mao had been dead only a few years. Supporting the HRS, a system he opposed, meant forsaking his principles. This was the severe environment that reform faced at first. Our support of the HRS, of institutional innovation, and of transformation of the agents of the rural microeconomy would inevitably involve adjusting a number of interests. To avoid risk, it was necessary to carry out trials first. Also, the HRS could not move ahead on its own. It had do so in connection with other institutions and be realized in the course of reforming the institutional environment as a whole. But this institutional reform is not something that could be accomplished in one fell swoop. To carry out reform, a strategy of gradual advance was unavoidable.

http://ebrary.ifpri.org/utils/getfile/collection/p15738coll2/id/125214/filename/125215.pdf (Emphasis added)

That’s Du Runsheng, the author of a short publication called The Course of China’s Rural Reform. He did, um, some other things besides.

In the publication that I have excerpted from above, there are some points that I am going to summarize that I think help me make my point better:

  1. Resistance to the introduction of market based reforms was anticipated in China back then, and was in some sense inevitable. Three measures were conceived of to reduce this resistance:
    1. “First, the reform would not initially call for abandoning the people’s communes, but rather would implement a production responsibility system within them. This approach enabled many who would have opposed the change to accept it.”
    2. “Second, the responsibility system could take a number of forms, among which the populace could choose. One did not impose one’s own subjective preference on the populace but respected its choice.”
    3. “Third, the reform began in a limited region, where it received popular support, and then widened step by step.” (Emphasis added)
  2. “In 1980, after the central leadership was reorganized on a collective basis, the top central leaders, including Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, consistently supported allowing different areas to adopt different forms of the agricultural production responsibility system. It was then proposed to divide them into three types of areas: impoverished areas would carry out the HRS; advanced ones would adopt specialized contracts with wages linked to output; and intermediate regions could freely choose.”
  3. Or, as Ajay Shah and Vijay Kelkar put it in their book:
    “The heterogeneity of economic and social development, across the regions of India, generates heterogeneity in the public policy pathways desired by different groups of people. A policy position that is well liked in Uttar Pradesh may not be liked in Kerala, and vice versa. This creates conflict in a centralized public policy process.”
    Kelkar, Vijay; Shah, Ajay. In Service of the Republic . Penguin Random House India Private Limited. Kindle Edition.
  4. Finally, there’s a lot to pick at and think about here when we get down to the specifics. I’m not suggesting that China in the late 1970’s had the exact same problems that India does today. Nor am I suggesting that India do today exactly what China did back then. I am making three points:
    1. I agree with Yamini Aiyar and Mekhala Krishnamurthy when they say that one of the problems was the suddenness of the proposed reforms, both in terms of their scope, and in terms of their geographical spread. I also agree with them when they say that the introduction of the reforms ignored the ground realities of the both the sociology of agricultural markets, and their institutional complexity (note that I am paraphrasing here, these are not their words).
    2. But having read their article, one must ask: if not the pathway that we have now left behind us, what else? That is, for better or for worse, the three farm laws now stand withdrawn. Is the status quo desirable? Should we seek to perpetuate it, or change it for “the better”? (Inverted quotes because better means different things to different people.) My opinion is that we should seek to change it for the better, and maybe yours is the same.
    3. But that gives rise to the next question: how? And that is where Du Runsheng and his write-up is of limited help. Learning how other nations did it is a good place to start if you are a student of economics, India or public policy, and post-Mao China holds some valuable lessons for us.

Learn Macro by Reading the Paper

Macro, and I’ve said this before, is hard.

But a useful way to start understanding it, at least in an Indian context, is by:

  • carefully reading a well written article
  • understanding and noting for oneself key concepts within that article
  • recreating the charts from that article
    • That includes figuring out the source of the data…
    • … as well as acquiring the ability to build out these charts
  • And most important of all, creating a piece of your own (could be a YouTube video/short, a blog, an Instagram story, a Twitter thread) that helps simplify the article you’ve read.((Skipping this last point is missing the point altogether, rascalla!))

Now, Arvind Subramanian and Josh Felman have generously obliged us by writing a well written article. I’ll oblige you by carefully reading it and annotating it, including pointing out key concepts, sources for data and recommendations for building out the charts.

That just leaves the last point for you, dear reader. We’ll call that homework.

Now, the well written article:

For more than a decade, India’s fiscal problem has been on the back-burner, acknowledged as a concern, but excluded from the ranks of pressing issues. Now, however, the problem is back with a vengeance. COVID has upended the fiscal position, and fixing it will require considerable time and effort, even if the economy recovers. This worrisome prospect has prompted calls for the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBM) to be dusted off, reintroduced, and implemented — this time, strictly and faithfully. But before we heed them, we need to understand why the previous FRBM strategy failed and how to prevent a repeat. We argue below that the new strategy will look nothing like the current FRBM.

https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/coronanvirus-india-economy-gdp-growth-post-covid-7261915/

First things first, what is FRBM?

The Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003 (FRBMA) is an Act of the Parliament of India to institutionalize financial discipline, reduce India’s fiscal deficit, improve macroeconomic management and the overall management of the public funds by moving towards a balanced budget and strengthen fiscal prudence. The main purpose was to eliminate revenue deficit of the country (building revenue surplus thereafter) and bring down the fiscal deficit to a manageable 3% of the GDP by March 2008.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiscal_Responsibility_and_Budget_Management_Act,_2003

Think of it as a one-person Alcoholic’s Anonymous club. It is of the government, for the government and by the government, and the idea is to wean the government off a dangerous addiction that it is hopelessly affixed to: debt.

By the way, there are many reasons this is a good essay, not the least of which is how well structured it is. The first three sentences in the very first paragraph, excerpted above, point out the problem that is going to be addressed, without using any difficult words or jargon. Then they point out the tool that will be used to address the problem. Then they point out the tool itself has problems. Finally, the explain that the essay is about fixing those problems. And then the essay follows. You might want to keep this in mind when writing your own essays (or indeed creating your own podcasts/videos etc.)

Now, back to the essay:

  1. What is general government debt? Where can I access the data?
    Note the second hyperlink above: I’ve linked to the Fred St Louis page about India’s debt, which itself gets the data from the IMF. Here is the page from the Ministry of Finance’s own website titled Public Finance Statistics. It has not been updated since September 2015. Here is a Motilal Oswal report on the subject that pegs general government debt at INR 157,227 billion. (Exhibit 1 in the report). If you read footnote 3 of that exhibit, two things happen. The first thing that happens is that you realize that tracking down general government debt might take a while. The second thing that happens is you feel a rather large twinge of sympathy for the folks who have tried to do this exercise.
    Figure 1 in the well-written article that we are analyzing in today’s post doesn’t mention a source, unfortunately. So recreating that chart will involve a rather large part of our day – but I would strongly recommend that you do the exercise. If you want to analyze Indian macroeconomic data for a living, this will be a good initiation. And indeed, a write-up about this exercise alone is a worthy addition to your CV!
  2. Second r-g: what is r, and what is g?
    1. “r” is the policy rate, which in our case will be the repo rate. This is available on the homepage of the RBI, top-left, under current rates.
    2. Time series data? Available on the DBIE page, under key rates.
    3. “g” is the nominal growth rate of the economy, and can be found at MOSPI.
    4. A useful thing to do as a student is to try and recreate the chart in the well-written article.
    5. Pts 1 and 2 here will help you get most of the data, and try and use either Microsoft Excel or Datawrapper to recreate the chart.((Document your learnings as you go along.))
  3. Next, what is primary balance?((Read the whole article, please. It’s a good way to clear your understanding of this topic, and it is free)) Where does one get that data in India?((The Excel link under Deficit Statistics was down when I tried to access the data. Your mileage may vary.))
  4. Next, this sentence from the article: “Simple fiscal arithmetic shows that debt does not explode when the former (primary balance) is greater than the latter (interest-growth differential)”. What is this “simple fiscal arithmetic”? They’ve explained it in equations 1 and 2 in this paper.((Page 3))
  5. The next three paragraphs after Figure 1 in the article point out how precarious India’s situation is when it comes to government debt, and why. It is one thing to read about the equation in a textbook, it is quite another to “run” the numbers in practice. Give it a shot, please, and see if it makes sense.
  6. Next, this paragraph from the article:
    “First, India should abandon multiple fiscal criteria for guiding fiscal policy. The current FRBM sets targets for the overall deficit, the revenue deficit and debt. This proliferation of targets impedes the objective of ensuring sustainability, since the targets can conflict with each other, creating confusion about which one to follow and thereby obfuscating accountability.”
    This paragraph is a good way to understand the importance of reading In The Service of the Republic, by Kelkar and Shah (and also to read up about the Tinbergen Rule).
  7. The next three paragraphs after that are a good way to understand what Goodhart’s Law means in practice.
  8. And finally, see if you can explain to yourself why targeting the primary balance is better than other options. Personally, I agree that it is a better target, and I agree that rather than setting down a concrete number to reach, averaging out half a percentage point worth of reduction is better. In essence, what they’re saying is that you shouldn’t try to reach x kilos of weight on a diet, but lose x% body weight every month. As our ex-captain might have put it, process over results. One of our gods advocates this too, as Navin Kabra points out.
    My reservation comes from the fact that sticking to a diet is hard, and that is true whether you’re targeting a process or a target. In other words, it is the ongoing implementation of the plan that is the challenge, not it’s design!
  9. One last point: without creating something that you are willing to put up for public consumption, and highlighting on your CV as an exercise you have done – you haven’t really learnt. Reading either that article or this blog is the easy part – explaining it somebody else is the much more difficult (and causally speaking, therefore meaningful) bit.
  10. Please, do it!

Notes on “India’s Footwear Industry: A Reality Check”

Gulzar Natarajan has an excellent, excellent blogpost up on this blog, Urbanomics, titled “India’s Footwear Industry: A Reality Check“. In what follows, I make notes for myself about the post in terms of what it reminds me of, what I did not understand, and additional links or resources I learnt about while reading the post.

  • “The footwear industry makes 2 billion pairs, of which 286 million pairs were exported last year. It employs 2-4 million people, the vast majority as informal and contract labour and/or hired through manpower agencies and at very low salaries in the range of Rs 6000-10000.”
    ..
    ..
    Reading more about this helped me land up on a website called worldfootwear.com, and I learnt of the existence of the 2019 World Footwear Yearbook. In 2018, the world manufactured 24.2 billion pairs of footwear, and the industry grows at about 3% a year in normal circumstances – give or take a few points.
    ..
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    90% of all shoes manufactured in the world come from Asia. That makes sense, as Asia is responsible for 54% of the world’s demand for footwear on an annual basis.
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    China alone was responsible in the year 2018 for about 70% of the world’s exports.
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    All of these snippets come from this page.
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  • “As a summary, the current state of the Indian footwear industry is characterised by small scale, very low productivity, low automation, stagnant growth, and pervasive informality.”
    ..
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    One of the reasons I liked reading this blogpost so much is because while I get to learn a lot about the footwear industry in India, I also get to reflect on how so much of what is true for the footwear industry is also true of other industries in India. The inability to break out of the small scale (about which much more below), the low levels of automation and the pervasive informality are to be seen in almost all industries in India. There is, perhaps, a sociological point to be made about whether the causality runs from the inability to scale to informality or the other way around (or indeed, both!), but we’ll save that for another day.
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  • “The highest value market segment is the mainstream global branded manufacturing in non-leather footwear. But this is a segment that has proved elusive even to the Chinese manufacturers, especially in the global market. It may well be outside the reach of Indian manufacturers, unless some particular brand breaks out due to a combination of exceptional entrepreneurship and even more exceptional good fortune.”
    ..
    ..
    As you will learn later on in this blogpost, Gulzar Natarajn seems to be as big a fan of “How Asia Works” as I am, and perhaps a bigger one. One of my favorite questions to ask in class as a consequence of reading that book is this one “Name one globally recognized brand from ASEAN nations”. This applies to India, and to a lesser extent to China as well – that’s basically the point that is being made here. Being a manufacturing and export powerhouse is not the same as building globally recognized brands.
    ..
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    This brings to mind both the “manufacturing smile” as well as Peter Thiel’s distinction between technology and globalization. It also raises important questions about what paths India should choose between for the next two decades when it comes to manufacturing policy, but again, more on that later.
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  • “The next best alternatives may be to increase their share of the Indian branded manufacturing segment and become large scale contract manufacturers for global brands. This is the playbook of the Chinese footwear industry.”
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    Have you read Shoe Dog, by Phil Knight? Don’t know who Phil Knight is? Well, have you heard of Nike? Read especially the bits about his travels in Japan, in search of contract manufacturers.
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  • Gulzar Natarajan’s first recommendation when it comes to the footwear industry in India is to be a contract manufacturing hub. Easier said than done! (To be clear, that is not a criticism of the point he makes – it is a reinforcing of his message, and also a reminder to readers that India is not quite ready to this just yet, for a variety of reasons).
    ..
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    One of these reasons is actually mentioned in a more recent post by the same author, regarding Vietnam’s recent agreement with Europe about tariffs on Vietnam’s exports.
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    What about India and the EU, you ask?
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    “Negotiations for a comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (FTA) between the EU and India were launched in 2007 and suspended in 2013 due to a gap in the level of ambition between the EU and India.”
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  • The last bullet point was about India making for the world. Gulzar Natarajan goes on to point that we must also think about India making footwear for India.
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    “Any strategy to increase local branded manufacturing to capture this market has to focus on Make for India (and not Make in India for the world). This does not mean skimping on quality, but competing with the imported manufacturers by gradually improving productivity. This can be done only by efficiency gains to cut costs – improving labour productivity, local component manufacturing, greater automation (not full automation, but enough to enhance labour productivity), and economies of scale.”
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    He speaks about each of these four points: improving labor productivity, local component manufacturing, greater automation and economies of scale in his blogpost, click here to read those specific parts of the post.
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  • Gulzar Natarajan speaks about manufacturers having no incentive to train workers:
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    “In order to train the workers, the manufacturers have to incur the cost of trainings as well as bear their salaries. They have no incentive to bear this cost, even if a couple of months trainings can suffice.”
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    Well, maybe so. But this does remind me of an excellent excerpt from one of my favorite books to recommend to students about macroeconomics – Tim Harford’s “The Undercover Economist Strikes Back“
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    The section on Ford and superior wages is especially worth reading. Perhaps I am missing an obvious point (which is all too possible), but I can’t help but wonder why Ford’s strategy cannot work in India – whether on footwear or elsewhere.
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  • “While capital investment subsidies are in general not a very desirable thing, some form of fiscal incentives may be necessary to encourage the smaller and medium sized manufacturers to increase their level of automation. Though targeting and tailoring these subsidies will be challenging, the government could consider a subsidy that is linked to some performance, either exports or on higher productivity growth.”
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    For those of you who have read the book, the reference is unmistakable. And for those of you who haven’t, I’ll say it again: How Asia Works is mandatory reading.
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  • “The Government of India already has specialised institutions on footwear design and leather research. There is a need to have them play a much more proactive role in supporting with supply of trained and quality designers. There may also be a need for an arrangement to access good quality designers at a reasonable cost. An incentive compatible subsidy mechanism may be required here too. This should be complemented with colour and fashion forecasting support.”
    ..
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    I actually find myself in disagreement here with Gulzar Natarajan. Reading this post made me aware of the Best Footwear Design and Development Institute (yes, it really exists), but isn’t this an example of government overreach? Facilitating a college like this is one thing, actually having government run it is quite another, no?
    ..
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    But the solution is in the quote above: incentive compatible subsidy mechanism. Another recommendation in this regard: please read In The Service of the Republic, by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. My notes on this book can be found here. Providing subsidies that are designed to keep incentives (preferably for both parties) in mind is a surprisingly powerful idea!
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  • “For sure, the industry will not collapse, but will meander along business as usual. There may even be the occasional mutant success. But there cannot be a sectoral exit out of the current low productivity and stagnation trap.”
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    It is oddly depressing to have Gulzar Natarajan be pessimistic about the growth prospects for this sector, particularly because it is so hard to disagree with him on this account.
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  • He is against tax breaks, particularly because of the inevitable equilibrium in terms of the lobbying that will take place.
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  • “The conventional wisdom in this regard blames poor quality of infrastructure, restrictive labour laws, difficulty in assembling large land parcels, high cost of capital, and pervasive red-tape. These are all, in general, factors of concern.”
    ..
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    My favorite book to recommend to students in this regard is Bhagwati and Panagariya’s book “Tryst with Destiny“. And of course, in terms of policy prescriptions, Gulzar Natarjan’s own book “Can India Grow?“
    ..
    ..
  • Gulzar Natarajan has an extended section on the “innate charactersitics of entrepreneurs“. It is too long to excerpt, but it did remind me of an excellent paper on why productivity in India is so very low. Worth reading, especially if you are a student of micro, IO or India.
    ..
    ..
  • “The impact of reforms like GST, while certainly beneficial in the long-run, may have ended up squeezing the vast majority of the small manufacturers. For a start, for these small manufacturers, the compliance costs in terms of hiring accountants and IT requirements are a non-trivial share of their profits. Then there is the structure of the GST tariffs – 18% for the components and 5% for the final product. This means that the manufacturers capital gets locked up as receivables for a long time. For small manufacturers, these costs are prohibitive.”
    ..
    ..
    This point is a little weird. Let me explain what I mean when I say “weird”. I think almost every economist is aware of this issue, and has spoken about it repeatedly. But the level of awareness otherwise is very, very low. Again, the GST is a great idea with poor implementation. The unique nature of India’s economy (a blend of formal and informal along the supply chain for many, many things) makes the implementation worse.
    ..
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  • And perhaps the coda to this excellent blog post, and for me the most important part:
    “It is important for the Government to play an important role if the footwear industry can move significantly forward. The market by itself is unlikely to have the incentives or the capacity to manage that.”
    ..
    ..
    This is a classically Studwellian recommendation. The problem is that the “no but markets will work if you let them” brigade will never accept this line of reasoning. Additionally, there are far too many people in India (especially within government) who will interpret this to mean that government needs to actively participate in the actual ecosystem by getting into manufacturing and allied activities.
    ..
    ..
    And hardly anybody will get what I think is the actual Studwellian message. Government needs to carefully design incentive compatible subsidy mechanisms and make it clear to producers that it (the government) carries a very, very big stick – and that it is not afraid to use it. And well, if push comes to shove, actually use it. Please, read How Asia Works!

Authoritarianism in times of the corona virus

An anonymous reader muses upon the following question, and asks that I do so as well:

“This pandemic also brings out a clear cut difference between an authoritarian state and democratic state. For Authoritarian states, it is much easier to control the pandemic for they have surveillance over every movement of their citizens, which can’t be in a democratic state
So, this might also lead to states assuming more power and control after the pandemic gets over”

First things first, let me tease out two separate aspects of this question:

  1. Is there a case to be made for a state to be authoritarian while tackling the crisis?
  2. If the answer to the first question is in the affirmative, might it be likely that said authority will want to remain in power after the crisis is over?

Let’s consider the evidence at hand in terms of authoritarian governments being better at tackling the crisis:

Danielle Pletka, writing in The Dispatch, begins and continues her essay arguing against the idea that authoritarian regimes will  do a better job in these times:

Dictatorships make you sick. Not spiritually, not morally (though both may apply), but actually sick. Consider the responses to coronavirus by China and Iran, two authoritarian regimes whose rank mismanagement and compulsion to cover-up have driven the world to a full-blown pandemic.

She also shows this figure:

and quotes from The Economist:

Using data from the International Disaster Database, maintained by researchers at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, we analysed all recorded epidemics since 1960, from an outbreak of smallpox in Nepal in 1963 to more recent threats such as Zika and Ebola. The results were highly dispersed but a distinct trend was apparent: for any given level of income, democracies appear to experience lower mortality rates for epidemic diseases than their non-democratic counterparts (see chart). In authoritarian countries with China’s level of income, for example, we found that past epidemics have killed about six people per 1m population. In democracies with similar incomes, they have killed just four per 1m.

The key takeaway is this:

Authoritarian regimes are much more likely to be concerned with their image, and with keeping bad news down, because that is important to the perpetuation of said regimes. A media clampdown, in fact, is all but guaranteed if you are in an authoritarian regime. And I hope I don’t speak for myself when I say that is the last thing one could want.

We cannot fully test the counterfactual and know whether conversely regime support would have further eroded under restrictive media policy. However, our matching (quasi)-experiment strongly suggests that the authorities failed to reap obvious benefits from this strategy. Indeed, later restrictions on access to and reporting from the epicenter and the arrest of several activists seem to confirm our finding that the benefits of openness and transparency are tenuous at best. For better of worse, media control is key ingredient of authoritarian resilience.

The Atlantic argues that public trust, transparency and collaboration are key at such times:

Yet good public-health practice doesn’t just require control. It also requires transparency, public trust, and collaboration—habits of mind that allow free societies to better respond to pandemics. Democracies’ ability to cope with COVID-19 will soon be tested; after a proliferation of cases in South Korea, Japan, and Italy in recent days, officials are weighing how to respond. But citizens of democratic nations can reasonably expect a higher level of candor and accountability from their governments.

For these reasons, I find myself arguing against the idea that an authoritarian government will necessarily be better.

In addition, it is worth noting that Taiwan and South Korea – to the best of my knowledge the countries that have dealt with the crisis the best – are anything but authoritarian regimes today.

A better way to think about this issue is to ask if a country has the state capacity. Read this article by Gulzar Natarajan, and this review of In the Service of the Republic by me (preferably the entire book) to get a better idea about state capacity.

Now, the second question:

If the answer to the first question is in the affirmative, might it be likely that said authority will want to remain in power after the crisis is over?

Hungary has already succumbed:

On Monday, Hungary’s parliament passed a controversial bill that gave Orban sweeping emergency powers for an indefinite period of time. Parliament is closed, future elections were called off, existing laws can be suspended and the prime minister is now entitled to rule by decree. Opposition lawmakers had tried to set a time limit on the legislation but failed. Orban’s commanding two-thirds parliamentary majority made his new powers a fait accompli.

And this Twitter thread makes for depressing reading:

 

 

Might some leaders, and some citizens (from countries the world over) wish for a more authoritarian regime in the hope that the corona virus is better tackled than at present?

Perhaps.

But it will almost certainly make a bad situation worse, and the regime will almost certainly outlive the crisis.

And so, to me, it is an unreservedly bad idea.

To be clear, I know for a fact that the anonymous reader does not want such a regime: they simply wanted to air the question – and so, dear anonymous reader, thank you for helping make my thinking about this clearer than it was before!

 

Notes on In Service of the Republic, by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah

A book that I have recommended unhesitatingly to students who ask me about how to go about learning public policy is “In The Service of the Republic” by Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah.

In this Monday post, I plan to write my observations from having read the book.

The book is divided into six sections:

  1. Foundations
  2. Diagnosing the Indian Experience
  3. The Science
  4. The Art
  5. The Public Policy Process
  6. Applying These Ideas: Some Examples

Part V and VI are the meat of the book, and that’s a good thing! If you are a student reading this book, it will be really helpful to have many, many examples of what the actual applications of the theoretical parts are.

What follows below are my highlights from having read the book, divided into four sections, with some commentary below each excerpt. The book is, it goes without saying, much much richer – and you should definitely read it, especially if you are interested in the field of public policy!

The Big Introductory Idea

The first question in the field of public policy is: What objectives of public policy are appropriate?

And for whom? For the government, for the people in society, for the elected representatives or somebody else? These questions need to be asked (and answered), for that changes the answers to the question in quotation marks above!

While the state is often seen as benign or benevolent, almost like an uncle or a parent, we have to remember that at the heart of the state, there is violence. The state acquires a monopoly upon violence. States establish conditions where nobody is permitted to engage in violence, but the state is able to inflict violence.

If this definition of the state strikes you as unusual, you should read, at the very least, this Wikipedia article.

The big idea of liberal democracy is to limit state violence into a controlled, predictable and just form.

That’s the plan, at any rate.

 

 

 

On State Intervention and Market Failure

The free market tends to overproduce things which induce negative externalities and underproduce things that induce positive externalities.

The price mechanism matters!

Markets work, but nothing ever works perfectly. People can (and should!) always debate how perfectly markets work, but it is simply an unavoidable reality that they sometimes fail.

Now, when they fail, it is usually because of one of the following four reasons:

Market failures come in four kinds: Externalities, Asymmetric information, Market power and Public goods.

When such a market failure occurs, a state intervention may be necessary. Without one or more of these factors being present, it absolutely isn’t necessary. But even with their presence, we’re on thin ice when we recommend that the state intervene:

When faced with a proposed state intervention, our first question should be: What is the market failure that this seeks to address? When market failure is not present, we should be sceptical about state intervention.

The state can intervene in three ways:

In many fields, we see three pillars of intervention: production (e.g., government running schools), regulating (e.g., government regulating private schools) and financing (e.g., government paying kids to attend private schools).

But the state can also intervene when there isn’t a market failure:

Forcing companies to spend 2 per cent of their profit on ‘corporate social responsibility’ is a use of the coercive power of the state that is not connected with market failure. Companies are rational economic actors, and if there is a problem with non-compliance, monetary penalties would suffice. When the law threatens to put individuals in jail for violating the rule, this is an excessive use of force.

And, pleasingly enough as an economist, every now and then, externality problems can be solved by the market itself:

In Maharashtra, there are professional beekeepers now charging farmers anywhere from Rs 1000 to Rs 3000 for renting out boxes for a month. 2 This presence of a private market for pollination services shows that this contractual solution is a feasible one. Through these private contracts, we have solved the externality problem, without a requirement for state intervention.

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Management is Hard!

It’s hard for anybody, anywhere. It is much harder for government:

There is quite a management challenge in identifying the 0.1 billion poorest people, and accurately delivering Rs 100 to them every day.

It is made harder for the following reasons (each of which is discussed in detail in the book):

Public policy failures are born of: (1) The information constraint; (2) The knowledge constraint; (3) The resource constraint; (4) The administrative constraint; and (5) The voter rationality constraint.

And “democratic decision making” is often problematic (also see Garett Jones‘ book about this):

Direct democracy also suffers from majoritarianism, the idea that policy should be made based on the views of 51 per cent of the population. We must question the extent to which ‘the voice of the people’ is the oracle that must be followed. There is much more to liberal democracy than winning elections.

Incentives matter, and policies have unseen, unintended consequences. The entire book is about this, but the following was my favorite passage by far:

In 1902 in Hanoi, under French rule, there was a rat problem. A bounty was set—one cent per rat—which could be claimed by submitting a rat’s tail to the municipal office. But for each individual who caught a rat, it was optimal to amputate the tail of a rat, and set the rat free, so as to bolster the rat population and make it easier to catch rats in the future. In addition, on the outskirts of Hanoi, farms came up, dedicated to breeding rats. In 1906, there was an outbreak of bubonic plague that killed over 250 people.

Update: Aadisht sends in this, from Discworld:

Shortly before the Patrician came to power there was a terrible plague of rats. The city council countered it by offering twenty pence for every rat tail. This did, for a week or two, reduce the number of rats—and then people were suddenly queueing up with tails, the city treasury was being drained, and no one seemed to be doing much work. And there still seemed to be a lot of rats around. Lord Vetinari had listened carefully while the problem was explained, and had solved the thing with one memorable phrase which said a lot about him, about the folly of bounty offers, and about the natural instinct of Ankh-Morporkians in any situation involving money: “Tax the rat farms.”

The Tinbergen Rule is really and truly important, and not just in public policy:

Public choice theory predicts that public organizations will favour multiple objectives as this gives reduced accountability. Clarity of purpose is efficient for the principal and not the agent.

Thinking about how government functions:

The five pillars of checks and balances—data, intellectuals, media, legislature, judiciary—all work poorly upon state governments.

As it turns out, not only is management hard, but management at the state level is even harder.

Why is there such a dearth of research when it comes to public policy?

At present in India, there is no community which systematically looks for fully articulated solutions. Academic journals do not publish policy proposals, hence academic researchers are not keen to invent policy proposals.

Or to use the jargon of public policy, we are missing incentive compatibility.

As Isher Ahluwalia says, nothing gets done by writing it in a government committee report, but nothing ever got done without it being repeatedly written into multiple government committee reports.

Public policy proceeds along the margins, and then very slowly!

Don’t fix the pipes; fix the institutions that fix the pipes. Old saying in the field of drinking water

The public policy equivalent of give a man a fish versus teach a man to fish

 

All this apart, the authors of the book also outline the “full pipeline”  of the policy process:

Stage 1: Collect data

Stage 2: Descriptive and Causal Research

Stage 3: Inventing and Proposing New Policy Solutions

Stage 4: Competing Policy Proposals are debated

Stage 5: Internal Governmental Debates, and Choice

Stage 6: Translate Decisions into Legal Instruments

Stage 7: Construction of State Capacity, Enforcement

I would personally add a stage 8: Monitoring, Evaluation, Feedback Loops.

But that quibble apart, the book is quite an education for anybody who hopes to learn more about the art and the science of public policy. If you are such a person, this book is certainly for you.