Interesting readings

One of the important mistakes that India is making, in terms of integration into the world economy, is in visa rules. A key element of progress there is the new `Visa on Demand' program, which has now been expanded. The list of lucky countries now stands at: Japan, Singapore, Finland, Luxembourg, New Zealand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Philippines. This needs to now cover the G-20 countries. Another big frontier is setting up convenient access to work visas in order to support the burgeoning need for skilled foreigners who are needed in the Indian labour force.

Russell K. Nieli on the power of meritocracy as seen in Caltech. The IITs are similar to Caltech in two respects: No concern for how `well rounded' the background of an applicant is, and no concern in the admissions process for parentage or donations. The IITs do care about caste to some extent in the admissions process, while Caltech cares about nothing other than brainpower.

Materials of the 2010 Neemrana conference organised by NCAER, NBER and ICRIER.

Sigh. Building a clean environment is hard!

Materials from the recent IGIDR finance conference.

Annie Lowrey on Slate on the role of prizes in public funding for research.

Mobis Philipose on competition against Nifty options at NSE by Nifty options at SGX, and on the problem of transaction taxes and exchange competition.

A household survey by CMIE tells us something about how ordinary households see the debate about the Bimal Jalan committee.

Sindhu Bhattacharya has an article in DNA about foreign airlines who are being prevented from operating in India. We need a treaty framework that would render such things unlawful.

A. D. Miller in the Guardian on why Western authors like Mother Russia.

Interesting developments in the freedom of speech.

I guess they noticed that if you take the first word on every seventeenth page, it spells out "Death to the Shah". That's nothing, I have a blog that is banned in China!

A great story about how grain and oil led to the collapse of the USSR. By Yegor Gaidar.

Joe Keohane on boston.com on the odd feature of forecasting: The guy who gets the huge event right is often likely to fare badly in ordinary times.

Lant Pritchett says that the notion of an `ethics code' for economists is a silly idea.