Tag: mostly economics

Economists Do It In Tribes

… or at least, economists employed by the governments. So says Amol Agrawal in a searing piece that is at once a lament as well as an indictment.

Why is the nature of discourse today so painfully zero-sum? Why do we have a take-no-prisoner approach to discussions, where disagreement is necessarily proof of the fact that the other person isn’t just wrong, but their motives are suspect? There are plenty of hypotheses for why this is so for all of us at large, but Amol shines a spotlight on my tribe, and my tribe is supposed to internalize for themselves and teach the rest of the world that the world is a non-zero sum game.

Except it isn’t. Not any more, and certainly not in the case of economists talking about the economy in India:

The current government economists discredit any critique of economic policy. Each time any analysis/report comes up critiquing the economic policy, the economists rush in to disagree and discard the criticism. The purpose of these articles is not to engage but rebut/attack the institution/writer of the critiques. Shoot both the message and the messenger seems to be the mantra.

It is also highly fashionable to draw comparisons with earlier eras and say how bad things were back then. They forget it has been ten years of the current government and people are asking questions on the current economic policy. They also forget how they themselves critiqued economic policy and built their own careers. One is also amazed how the media whose job is to critique economic policy, allow so many one-sided articles.

https://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/04/11/economists-working-with-the-government-what-has-changed/

Disagreements are not just “fine”, they are the point. When you and I look at a slice of the world and come away with different conclusions, it is because we bring a different perspective, a different methodology, a different set of facts to emphasize and analyze,and a different ideology.

All of these things are true, not just the last one.

For all of us to sweep away the different conclusions, perspectives, methodologies and sets of facts under the carpet, and pin the differences on ideology alone is a tragedy with far reaching consequences.

There are people who will oppose the current government on ideological grounds alone (alone, in this case, is used in this sense: indicating that something is confined to the specified subject or recipient). And likewise, there are people who will defend the current government on ideological grounds alone. That is just the world we live in, and these messages will get amplified and shared more than they should.

But for all of us to behave in only this manner is a society that no longer talks to each other. It is a society that is divided along deeply tribal lines, and with every passing day, those lines get deeper and more permanent.

The hardliners on both sides – on one side are those who critique the government and and on the other those who defend it – will say that the other side started it first, and they had no choice to respond. They will also say that the other side is worthy of this kind of behavior and ostracization, because the other side is evil, and needs to be destroyed for our version of this country to flourish.

Bullshit.

Allow me to labor the point:

When you and I look at a slice of the world and come away with different conclusions, it is because we bring a different perspective, a different methodology, a different set of facts to emphasize and analyze and a different ideology.

We would do well to not ignore all of these points. Hanging the weight of the world on just the one word, regardless of which side does it (or did it first), does nobody any good.

No government in independent India’s history has been uniformly bad. Nor has any government been uniformly good. You and I will (and should!) have opinions about which government was the best, which was the worst, and which lay somewhere in the middle. You and I will try to convince the other of why we say what we do. And you and I will reach some sort of an agreement, or at least an appreciation of why the other person thinks what they do. Disagreements are food for thought, not excuses to launch personal attacks.

That this needs to be said is a matter of shame for everybody, but especially for social scientists, and doubly so for economists. (Yes, I hold my tribe to a higher standard).

Economics is about three things:

  1. What does the world look like?
  2. Why does the world look the way it does?
  3. What can we do to make the world a better place?

“Better” is tricky because better is subjective.

“We” is all of us, those who defend and those who critique the government.

So if I say (and I do) that the census not having been conducted is a problematic thing, I say it because I think it is a problematic thing. The truth value of that statement isn’t only a function of the fact that I am saying it, or that I am saying it in a publication that you don’t like, or what my political affiliations or economic ideology are.

I use the census thing as an example. Replace “census not having been conducted” with “improvements in our airports”, and replace “is a problematic thing” with “is a wonderful thing” for the same take, but from the other side.

If your Pavlovian response to the census thing is whataboutery, or if your Pavlovian response to the airports thing is whataboutery, then you have a problem. Sure, bring up the fact that the pandemic was a factor. And likewise, sure, bring up the fact that oligopolies are a problem. But don’t decide that the statement is wrong as a function who is saying it – decide the truth value on the basis of the statement, not the person behind the statement.

And one final point, to circle back to Amol’s post.

Criticizing the government is not just fine, it’s not just OK, it’s what economists will do. We will do it because we want the world to be a better place.

Economic policy should not be limited to criticizing the previous governments and praising the current government. The policy should lay a framework to improve the economic conditions of the people. It should not just agree to the government decisions but caution the government against missteps. That is how we saw things and admired all the economists who have served the governments all these years.

https://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2024/04/11/economists-working-with-the-government-what-has-changed/

Kudos to Amol for saying what he did, and I look forward to reading more from him about what the government, and its economists, can do better. The fact that he (and I, and so many others) critique their work isn’t proof that the work of the government or its economists is bad. Nor is it proof that we are evil. It is our attempt to help make the world a better place.

Now, please tell me why you think I’m wrong, and let’s have a debate about it.

Very underrated thing to do in 2024!

KISS and Macroeconomics

My PhD was in macroeconomics. Specifically, it was do with business cycles. It took my seven long years to finish my PhD, and that was mostly because I was (and remain) incurably lazy.

But here is what I know about macro and business cycles for having finished my PhD in the topic:

  1. Macro is hard.
  2. We don’t really know what causes business cycles.
  3. We don’t really know what to do about business cycles, and when to stop doing whatever it is that we choose to do about them.

That’s not what I said in my thesis, of course. Because one is not awarded a PhD for saying these three things, I ended up taking a lot of pages and a lot of words to make it seem as if I knew what causes business cycles. I also made it seem as if I had figured out what to do about them.

But the truth is that well, macro is hard, and we don’t really know what to do about business cycles.

And so these days, when I teach students introductory courses in macroeconomics, that’s what I tell them. That hey, macro is hard. And my job is two-fold:

One, it is to show you how and why it is hard. And two, to tell you what we think we know about how to deal with it being hard. And three, to tell you that we do all this because we think (hope, really) that tinkering with a big, complicated thing we don’t really understand will make our world a better place, at least in the short run.

What do I mean when I say “short run”? Well you see, we don’t really know for sure.

But anyways, the reason we study macro is because we wish to make our world a slightly better place. And in order to make it a better place, we need to:

  1. Understand the world better,
  2. …and we need to understand our current theories about how to make it better.

And so a good course on macro will teach us about the world, and about our macroeconomic theories of the world.

The problem is that most macroeconomic textbooks focus exclusively on the latter, and not at all on the former. This is a problem, because context-less theorizing doesn’t get us very far. Context without theory also doesn’t get you very far.

You need, in other words, both:

“while the conceptual framework influences our selection of contexts, a contextual understanding enriches our conceptual understanding and also points out the limits of economic theory. And to do good economics, it is necessary to equip ourselves with both concept and context by continuously reading—the classic books (and articles) in economics, the history of economic thought, studies based on extensive fieldwork in India, government and RBI reports, books of fiction and newspapers”

Amol Agrawal points us to a lovely essay by Prof. Annavajhula J C Bose of SRCC, which drives home this point with lovely, eloquent prose. Please read it here, and if you have not already, please read the macroeconomic textbook by Alex Thomas (EFE review here). It is that rare book that talks about both the world we live in, and how to make it better by thinking about macroeconomic theories.

Mostly Awesome, Except When It Is Awesomer

I really do not know where to begin. Should I focus on authors or on topics or on interesting academic papers or ???

Let me begin on my thoughts first. I have been reading a bit on what leads to development and growth in a country. It has traditionally been studied by people studying development economics (or dev eco as it is popularly called in campuses). It seeks answer to one question:

What are the causes of growth? Sustainabale growth?

This topic has always been at the centre of economic research. There are numerous ways economists have analysed growth and its factors. I would discuss the different factors in my next blogs.

https://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2007/04/20/finance-irrelevant-for-growth/

So began a blog that I think every single student of economics in India should subscribe to. For those of us who have been following Amol Agrawal’s blog, Mostly Economics, for a while, it’s easy to reflect on all of what he’s written over the years since 2007 and realize that he was as good as his word.

For the last fifteen years, Amol has indeed focussed on factors that have influenced growth. His very first post on his blog, which I have excerpted from above, was written all the way back in 2007, and touched upon a point that was clearly a sore one for him: the paucity of research on the role of finance in development. If you are looking for just one source that has diligently shared resources on this topic, you’re in luck, because that is exactly what Mostly Economics is all about.

This might sound like an exaggeration, but I really do mean this – if you want a treasure trove of material on research on this very broad (and very important!) topic, you could do a lot worse than trawl Amol’s blog for specific variations of this topic. This search, I maintain, will give you a better starting point than this one. Of course, you should narrow it further still by choosing a specific topic or a specific central bank, but – forgive me, I’ve always wanted to say this, and since I’ll almost certainly never write a textbook, this is my only platform to say so – I leave that as an exercise for the reader.

But I’m not joking when I say this – Amol’s blog is without question the single best repository when it comes to a very careful curation of content that is still plugging away at answering the question that he raised in his very first blogpost. And taken together, the sum of those blogposts is an invaluable resource to equip yourself with when you start to study macro/monetary/growth/development in India.

What explains the rather weird title of today’s post? It is a (rather horrible, admittedly) attempt at wordplay on his original title. But that does still beg the question – what explains the mostly in Mostly Economics?

Well, the blog is called mostly economics but as I mentioned at the start I am going to write on some topics that interest me. Cricket is one of them. No matter how the performance of the Indian Cricket team, I try and keep updated on the latest the sport has to offer.

https://mostlyeconomics.wordpress.com/2007/04/27/time-for-some-cricket/

Here’s the link to all the blog posts that Amol has written on cricket. How often do you read a blog in which you’ll meet a post on India’s Minsky moment in cricket? What is the intersection set of people who will love the reference from both perspectives? Or a post about Greece being bailed out by the… ICC? Or about the similarities between cricket and the subprime crisis? There’s ton more where this came from, and as someone who tries to figure out ways to make learning economics fun, exciting and is therefore always looking for “hooks”, Mostly Economics has been a rare ol’s treat.

The nature of sharing interesting links and information online has changed over time. Blogs have been replaced with Facebook updates, and those eventually gave way to tweets. And (I’m writing this on the 19th of December, at 10.30 pm, India time, so who knows what all has taken place by the time you read this) once Elon is done with Twitter, something else may come along. But the cantankerous old uncle in me cracks a rare ol’ smile at the sight of a carfeully curated, regularly updated blog that has been plugging away, year after year at a singular task – to help all of us understand the factors that influence growth in the world in which we live.

And so bad English or not, I’ll reiterate the sentiment – the blog is mostly awesome, save for when it is awesomer.

Amol, thank you!

Externalities, R&D and Public Policy

Amol Agrawal, author of the blog Mostly Economics, linked to a very interesting article from CEPR recently:

How knowledge spillovers operate between academia and private firms remains an open question. This column exploits the Laboratoire d’Excellence, or LabEx, a large-scale funding programme of public research in France implemented in 2010–2011, to understand the spillover process. The authors find strong spillovers through the contracting channel, the mobility channel, and the informal channel, with the contracting channel playing the central role. As financing public research is an indirect way to spur private sector activity, comparing it with more direct instruments would be interesting.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/knowledge-flows-public-labs-private-firms

That publicly funded research and development is a good thing is something I’ve spoken about on this blog before, and I’ve also written about how it could (potentially) be made better. I’ve also written about the fact that India needs to up its spending on publicly funded R&D. But all that, eventually, does beg a rather obvious and important question: how?

That is, imagine that you are the newly appointed czar in charge of deciding how and where a lot of money is to be spent on R&D in India. What you say goes, and you would (naturally) like to make sure you get the maximal bang for your buck. Which states will get more money, and which states will get less? Which geographical clusters within these states will you prioritize and why? Which industries will you focus upon, and why?

These are not easy questions to answer, far from it. There will be economics, politics, geopolitics, sociology, finance, history and geography-based aspects to consider, and there may well be other nuances to this question. Today’s post is about a very simple, specific question, which the authors of the piece that Amol linked to focus upon:

Once there has been some knowledge that has been gleaned, or developed, as a consequence of spending on R&D, how to ensure maximal spillovers into private firms? And even more specifically, through which specific channels will these spillovers be conducted?

Let’s put that into simple English: a university has developed knowledge that is of use to industry. How will this knowledge reach industry? The authors of this piece highlight three different ways (there are others):

  1. The contracting channel: there is direct, explicit cooperation between the academic institution and the private parties. This could involve “subcontracting research by private firms, contracts signed for PhD supervision or for joint research projects”.
  2. The mobility channel: Researchers who worked on the knowledge project in academia could move to the private firm.
  3. The informal channel: events, dinners, conferences etc.

The research mentions that the contracting channel was the most dominant:

We find evidence that firms more exposed to the shock start more PhD co-supervisions with public labs (panel a) and increase their outsourcing to the public research sector (panel b). Both these effects are consistent with the contracting channel being at play. We also find that researchers are more likely to move to the more exposed firms (panel c) and that these firms are more likely to hire fresh PhDs (panel d), evidence of the mobility channels. All channels thus seem at play, but the reports written by the funded units suggest a central role played by the contracting channel.

https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/knowledge-flows-public-labs-private-firms

But that, of course, was for France. What might the story be like in India? A simple search on Google Scholar and Elicit.org didn’t throw up much that was useful and of recent vintage, but if any of you have any academic references that might be of help, please do send them my way.

In my personal experience, though, as someone who has worked in academia and industry when it comes to analytics, I would say that the mobility channel is by far and away the most dominant. While the contracting channel grows a little bit every year, it is nowhere near enough. And don’t get me started about the under-utilization of the mobility channel – while there is some movement of some faculty members, it can (and should) be a lot more, and in a variety of ways, not just a full time switching of careers.

The development of knowledge clusters, and the free (two-way!) flow of both people and knowledge between academia and industry needs to dramatically increase, and this increase needs to happen with every passing year. Funding R&D is one thing, but this – the exchange of people and ideas – is a relatively low-cost intervention with only upsides.

We should be making this happen!

On Sri Lanka

Back in 2014, out of the blue, I got the chance to travel to Sri Lanka thrice in the space of two months for work. It was my first visit to the country, and I haven’t been back since. I spent time in Galle, Colombo and a place called Puttalam. As with most other people who have been to the country, I found it to be a beautiful place with fabulous food. Oh, the food. What food it was.

And the deep irony, of course, is that the current tragedy revolves so much around the same word: food. Only now, there simply isn’t enough of it.

But what happened, exactly? How did Sri Lanka get to where it is today?

The answer to that question must necessarily be another one: how far back do you wish to go? To borrow an analogy from another field, where should you begin if you want to explain the 2008 Great Financial Crisis? Should you begin with Bear Sterns going belly up in March 2008? Or should you begin with low interest rates in the early 2000’s? Maybe 9/11 and the lowering of interest rates immediately after? The S&L crisis of 1984? How about tulips in the 16th century?

In Sri Lanka’s case, thanks to the excellent Amol Agarwal, let’s begin with a book written by the son of the guy who founded Bata shoes:

At that time, the only oasis of peace in the area was Sri Lanka, or Ceylon as it was called before decolonization. When I first went there in the late 1940s, it was a Shangri- la full of smiling people, ambling elephants and king coconuts with delicious milk to quench one’s thirst. Almost in defiance of the horrors that were raging all around it, Ceylon was an island of tranquility and racial tolerance. Forty years later the Indian subcontinent, along with Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia all enjoy peace and varying degrees of prosperity, and our enterprises in these countries are among the strongest pillars of the Bata organization.

https://www.amazon.com/Bata-Shoemaker-World-Thomas-J/dp/0773724168

But then things started to go wrong in 1948, and who better than Samanth Subramanian to make a complicated history simple to understand? Read the entire book, but the introduction is a good way to come to grips with how things started tear apart at the seams:

It is curious to locate the proximate cause of a war in something as noble as a desire for education. When Sri Lanka broke free of British rule in 1948, the seats in its universities were occupied to disproportionately high levels by the minority Tamils, who through quirks of colonial history spoke better English and were better educated than the majority Sinhalese. The Tamils then went on, after university, to fill the civil service, the country’s most reliable provider of employment at the time. To the country’s Sinhalese who suddenly found themselves empowered with a vote, and therefore to the government, this state
of affairs appeared too lopsided and unfair to continue. When laws and quotas were enacted to protect the interests of the Sinhalese, the Tamils felt they were being discriminated against. The frictions between the two communities erupted repeatedly into ghastly riots; in the worst of them, the Black July riot in 1983, roughly 3,000 people were killed, many of them burned alive. Tamil houses and shops were looted and burned, and 150,000 Tamils were rendered homeless.
When a clutch of Tamil militant groups had begun to emerge in the 1970s, to agitate for a free Tamil state, they found only a trickle of willing recruits; after Black July, though, they were flooded by young
men and women wanting to fight, and none more so than the Tigers. Starting as a ragtag outfit carrying out the odd guerrilla attack, the Tigers grew into a fearsome terrorist organization. They ran arms and drugs, pulled in funds from a Tamil diaspora scattered across the planet, killed thousands of civilians, assassinated presidents and prime ministers, and perfected the art of the suicide bomber. They kept their own people, the Tamils, in line by intimidation and murder. In their full pomp, the Tigers controlled vast wedges of territory in the north and east of Sri Lanka, where flat, hot, sandy coasts meld gradually into jungle. Here they ran their own country in all but name, collecting taxes and policing the streets and adjudicating disputes. But the Sri Lankan state was always just outside the door, impatient to snatch back its land, working itself up into a state of angry nationalism.
Buddhism, the religion of most Sinhalese, developed a vocal right wing; its monks entered politics, pressed for a more merciless war, and dreamed of a purely Buddhist island.

Introduction, This Divided Island (Life, Death and The Sri Lankan War) by Samanth Subramanian

Even by my usual standards, this is a bit of a whopper, this extract, but I hope it nudges you into reading the entire book. (Actually, given that it is Samanth Subramanian we’re talking about, pick up anything written by him. It’s guaranteed value for money.)

The war ended, finally, in the year 2009, but it ended with a very high cost. The Wikipedia article serves as an introduction to the war, and Samanth’s book is a deep, thought-provoking reflection on the aftermath.

That’s a ridiculously brief background, and now let’s get down to the economy. The Sri Lankan economy, much like the Indian economy, is mostly a service based economy. Around sixty percent of their GDP comprises of services today, but that’s where the similarity with the Indian economy ends. A large chunk of this sixty percent, as you might imagine, is down to the tourism sector. And the pandemic has devastated this segment – not just in Sri Lanka, of course, but the effects are felt with much more severity in a nation that is so very dependent on it.

But it gets worse!

The economy is highly-dependent on imports for essential items such as food, and oil. The economy finances these imports mainly via agricultural exports (tea, rubber, and coconut), industrial products (textiles), and remittances from abroad. The revenues from exports, and remittances have not covered the cost of imports, and Sri Lanka has always been in a current account deficit (CAD). The average CAD in 2010-19 was around 1.2 percent of GDP.
The CAD has been met mainly by the government borrowing from abroad. As the government borrowing from abroad has been larger than the CAD, the balance has been pegged to the foreign exchange reserves. What can one make of an economy where the forex reserves consist of mainly borrowings from abroad!

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/opinion/how-sri-lanka-reached-this-economic-precipice-8314151.html

So an economy that was, at best, precariously placed during the Covid-19 pandemic. And then, of course, going 100% organic.

Here’s a part of the conclusion from Seeing Like a State, by James C. Scott:

Take small steps: In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move. As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes.”

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve The Human Condition Have Failed, by James C Scott

Or, if you prefer pithier statements, Deng Xiaoping’s famous dictum about crossing the river by feeling the stones comes to mind (although the quote isn’t originally by him). But Sri Lanka, of course, went straight to 100% organic farming, and well, if you’ve read even a single newspaper in the last two months or so, you know how that turned out.

The rest of the story is predictably depressing, and depressingly predictable. Rapidly depleting forex reserves, a drying up of foreign investment, stratospheric inflation, a weakened currency and all the rest of it.

And the knock-on effects of each of these on the ordinary person on the street are equally horrible. We’ve all heard about postponement of exams because of a lack of ink, long lines at petrol pumps, rising protests, people fleeing the country and so on.

And most tragic of all perhaps, is the ostrich-like approach of the government, which insists on coming up with ridiculous (there really is no other word) responses in terms of policy making. Long story short, this is a problem that is going to get much, much worse before it gets better.

I’ve tried to keep the story as simple as possible, but if you’re looking for a good in-depth read about this, here are some recommendations:

  1. Via Splainer.in (which you really should subscribe to!), an excellent in-depth macro analysis of the crisis, but in English (with jargon explained at the end, imagine!)
  2. The political fallout, which is rapidly evolving, and may well be out of date by the time you read this.
  3. Best of all, try and play around with the data if you happen to be a student of macroeconomics. What charts and tables would you create using this data, for example, and why? Best of all, pick an article such as the first one here, and try and see how many of these charts you can recreate in Excel. Trust me, ’tis the best way to learn.

Industrial Policy, South Korea and Learning by Doing

Amol Agarwal points us to an excellent paper, the title of which is “The Long Term Effects of Industrial Policy“. Here is the abstract:

This paper provides causal evidence of the impact of industrial policy on firms’ long-term performance and quantifies industrial policy’s long-term welfare effects. Using a natural experiment and unique historical data during the Heavy and Chemical Industry (HCI) Drive in South Korea, we find large and persistent effects of firm-level subsidies on firm size. Subsidized firms are larger than those never subsidized even 30 years after subsidies ended. Motivated by this empirical finding, we build a quantitative heterogeneous firm model that rationalizes these persistent effects through a combination of learning-by-doing (LBD) and financial frictions that hinder firms from internalizing LBD. The model is calibrated to firm-level micro data, and its key parameters are disciplined with the econometric estimates. Counterfactual analysis implies that the industrial policy generated larger benefits than costs. If the industrial policy had not been implemented, South Korea’s welfare would have been 22-31% lower, depending on how long lived are the productivity benefits of LBD. Between one-half and two-thirds of the total welfare difference comes from the long-term effects of the policy.

https://www.nber.org/papers/w29263

Why should you read this paper if you are a student of the Indian economy?

Because industrial policy has been, i,s and will be critical for long run growth in India, and South Korea is an excellent example of getting industrial policy “right”. The reason I put “right” in inverted quotes is because there is still debate about whether South Korea really got it right or not.

If you are interested in reading more about this, part of footnote 4 from the paper is worth reading in greater detail (And the papers that are cited there, naturally):

However, many economists have been skeptical of the effectiveness of industrial policy (e.g. Baldwin, 1969; Lederman and Maloney, 2012). Lee (1996) did not find a positive correlation between sectoral TFP growth and tariff rates in South Korea during the 1970s and interpreted the correlation as the ineffectiveness of industrial policy.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29263/w29263.pdf, footnote 4, page 5

Me, I’m very Studwellian in my outlook, and am therefore a sucker for papers such as these. And even if the paper were to show that industrial policy had not worked, that in itself is also a lesson worth learning, no? But if you ask me, something worked in South Korea at that point of time, and while causality is tricky, Industrial Policy (IP) certainly seems to have been at least partially at play:

Between 1973 and 1979, the average annual real GDP growth rate of South Korea was 10.3%, and the average export growth rate was around 28%. The HCI sectors increased their share of manufacturing output from 40% to 56% and their share of total exports from 12.9% to 37%.

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w29263/w29263.pdf pp 6

The paper does three things, in my opinion:

  1. Establishes that Industrial Policy did too have a role to play in South Korea’s development
  2. That role has had effects that have persisted well beyond the years in which that specific industrial policy was “in play”
  3. Makes the case for how South Korea’s welfare would have been lower had this policy not been implemented

Your mileage may vary with regards to point 3, no matter how careful the econometric modeling (and it’s pretty careful, if you ask me). But this paper is worth reading because it reinforces my opinion that industrial policy, when done well, can have meaningful impacts upon the development of a nation.

There is a citation in this paper that is worth reading in its entirety (if you go in for that sort of thing). The citation is that of a chapter in The Handbook of Development Economics, Vol. 5. The title of the chapter is “Trade, Foreign Investment, and Industrial Policy for Developing Countries“

I really do mean the “if you go in for that sort of thing”, because this is assuredly not light reading. Why, the section titled “Concluding Comments” takes up a solid four and a half pages! But I’ll speak here about three things that I found especially relevant from that section alone. Note that this is my paraphrasing, not a direct quote.

  1. The infant industry argument is, on the whole, overrated.
  2. In general industrial policy that promotes more exposure to international trade is likelier to be more successful
  3. The authors say that more work is urgently needed to understand, as they put it, “the human cost of adjustment to trade and FDI reforms”. Maskin and Kremer’s work is worth reading in this regard.

Finally, “Learning By Doing“. What does it mean, exactly? The classic paper to read is by Lucas, titled “On the Mechanics of Economic Development“, and the classic-er (est?) paper is, of course, “The Economic Implications of Learning by Doing“. But simply put, it is this:

Learning-by-doing is a concept in economic theory by which productivity is achieved through practice, self-perfection and minor innovations. An example is a factory that increases output by learning how to use equipment better without adding workers or investing significant amounts of capital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning-by-doing_(economics)

It remains underrated at all levels of economic organization, if you ask me.

India: Links for 23rd September, 2019

  1. Income tax reforms: in my opinion, an urgent necessity.
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  2. ““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.”.”
    ..
    ..
    Indiaspend, ostensibly, on the Minimum Wage stipulations – but it is about more than that.
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  3. “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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  4. 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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  5. “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.