- A difficult article to excerpt, so go ahead and read it in its entirety: Andy Mukherjee on India’s telecom woes.
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.. - “The NFMW should be determined based on macroeconomic considerations, namely (1) whether the NFMW would increase aggregate demand for mass market consumption. (2) Whether there are supply bottlenecks in responding to such aggregate demand and, if so, calibrate the NFMW to not cause inflationary pressures by driving up demand that would not elicit a domestic supply response- mass market textiles is a good example. (3) The impact of the minimum wage on the factor distribution of income i.e. wage and profit shares should be a key consideration not from the point of view of equity, but from that of macroeconomic stability and growth optimisation. (4) Subnational minimum wages could be set above the floor as desired with other considerations in mind.”
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Rathin Roy in an excellent article on the need for minimum wages in India.
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.. - Vivek Kaul is less than impressed with the real estate bailout package.
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“According to real estate research firm Liases Foras, the number of unsold homes in the country is more than 1.3 million. The number of unsold homes in India has risen dramatically primarily because of high prices. Builders have cited higher development costs as a reason for their inability to reduce prices of properties. The bailout package of ₹25,000 crore will lead to a further increase in the supply of homes, but without adequate price cuts these homes are not going to get sold. Hence, the problem will only deepen.”
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.. - “So he mounted his horse and galloped over to a nearby hill. “From the top of the hill there was a magnificent view embracing old Delhi and all the principal monuments situated outside the town, with the river Jumna winding its way like a silver streak…”The hill, near the village of Raisina, would become the epicentre of the new capital. By October 1912 the government initiated the legal process to acquire land. The first plots, required for the construction of what would be called Rashtrapati Bhavan, amounted to 4,000 acres.”
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Sidin Vadukut in a lovely article on how modern Delhi came to be, well, Delhi.
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.. - “The scorers refused to continue after the covering over their heads went up in flames. Fire brigades were called and a riot squad formed a line between the dressing rooms and the pitch.”
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The Guardian on riots in a Test match in Bombay during the 1960’s.
Tag: minimum wage
India: Links for 23rd September, 2019
- Income tax reforms: in my opinion, an urgent necessity.
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.. - ““If we wake up a little late after there is daylight, and go to defecate in the open, the railway authorities pelt us with stones or beat us with big sticks,” said Sumanben, a migrant Adivasi woman who lives on public land near a railway track. “Sometimes there is a watchman at night. If he is there then we cannot defecate that day.”.”
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Indiaspend, ostensibly, on the Minimum Wage stipulations – but it is about more than that.
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.. - “We must therefore recall that if the India story plays out well in the world’s capitals, boardrooms, think tanks and editorial offices today, it is because of three developments: the development of a nuclear arsenal with a no-first use doctrine, the revulsion against international terrorism after 9/11, and India’s emergence as a high-growth economy with several globally competitive sectors. In the past two decades, India has come to be seen as an engine of global economic growth, a potential counter-weight to China, and a country that has taken a liberal democratic path to prosperity. It is high economic growth that created the conditions for India to tango with the US, be taken with grudging seriousness by China, and clear the way for better relations with East Asia, Australia and Europe.”
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High growth matters: the geopolitical argument.
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.. - Amol Agarwal reports on the proceedings of ‘The International Conference on Indian Business and Economic History’. This deserves to be widely read, and widely shared.
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.. - “What is needed is a change in the policy regime in many cross-cutting systemic issues, such as the role of politicians, stability of tenure, size and nature of Indian bureaucracy, accountability, monitoring of programmes, and civil service reforms, which will transform the individual competence of IAS officers into better collective outcomes.”
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In a sense, a frustrating article to read, because more than the what, which is clear to all, it is the how that is important – and that is missing.
Links for 29th May, 2019
- “And so India will continue to grow at her sluggish pace; socialism will continue to thrive; Air India will continue to fly; and Modi will continue to waste a fifth of our yearly budget on PSUs. Modi always knew that the secret to winning elections is socialism. What he has learnt now is the secret to running India. It is to gamble.”
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I have posted this link not because I agree with the conclusion (I don’t), but because I share the sense of pessimism when it comes to matters pertaining to economic reforms, or the lack of them. India needs me, and the author, to be completely wrong about our pessimism.
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.. - “Zahran Hashim, 33, radical preacher and alleged ringleader, found little acceptance in his hometown Kattankudy, in eastern Batticaloa. Mosques in the predominantly Muslim town rejected him outright. Their members even complained to authorities, before he went absconding in 2017 after a clash with a fellow priest who challenged his interpretation of Islam.But soon, a team of young Muslim men — and one woman — from other, mostly Sinhala-majority, areas eagerly joined him on his Easter mission to carry out a suicide attack on churches and high-end hotels in and around Colombo and Batticaloa. All nine bombers were in their 20s and 30s.”
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A mostly depressing, but also revealing, portrait of the nine people who perpetrated the terror attacks in Sri Lanka recently.
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.. - “There are striking parallels between the philosophies of Trump and NIMBY urbanists. Trump asserts that America is “full” and so wants to restrict the flow of immigrants. The urbanists, who tend to be Democratic and highly educated, assert that their cities are too crowded and so want to restrict the supply of housing. The cultural valence of the two views is quite different, but the practical implications have a lot in common — namely, a harder set of conditions for potential low-skilled migrants to the U.S.”
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As he so often does, Professor Cowen reminds us why studying economics is entirely worth our time. In this case, he explains why NIMBYism, and high minimum wages are at least as anti-immigration as are, well, walls.
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.. - “Our goal is to defeat the snail in a race.”
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Possibly the shortest extract I have put up ever, but it is hard to improve on that sentence. For once, I won’t speak about what the link is about. Try guessing what it might be about before clicking here!
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.. - “What’s happening here is much more complicated than an imagined zero-sum game between the defenders of books and library futurists. The decline in the use of print books at universities relates to the kinds of books we read for scholarly pursuits rather than pure pleasure, the rise of ebooks and digital articles, and the changing environment of research. And it runs contrary to the experience of public libraries and bookstores, where print continues to thrive.”
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The Atlantic on substitutes and complements. On books actually, but read this article to understand how to think about the implications of thinking about complements and substitutes
EconForEverybody 