Interesting readings

Rajdeep Sardesai on the problems of law and order in Bombay. Nothing is more important in the priorities of the State than the police and the courts.

In recent weeks, we're seeing fresh attention on the flaws of the HR processes of government. Shashi Tharoor in the Indian Express on the IFS, and Sundeep Khanna in Mint.

Trampling on the individual in India:
- Sending cartoonist Aseem Trivedi to jail is ridiculous.
- Vijaita Singh in the Indian Express about the government interfering in grants to think tanks, followed by an editorial on this.
- As Robert Kaplan says, underdevelopment is where the police are more dangerous than the criminals. Here's a story about the police in Gurgaon.
- Meghan Davidson Ladly writes in the New York Times about the struggle for freedom that many women in Pakistan are facing. We can't say we're finished with this. What fraction of India faces this level of social backwardness?

N. Sundaresha Subramanian has a great first draft of history, telling the story of Sahara in the Business Standard. This is a great vindication for K. M. Abraham and C. B. Bhave, and a reminder of the importance of the recruitment process in government. Also see great reportage on Firstpost : Sahara will have to sell realty assets to pay off investors by Raman Kirpal; ROC: The dog that did not bark when Sahara came in by R. Jagannathan.

I recently blogged about checks and balances that will keep Indian capitalism safe. I guess I am picking up ideas from the zeitgeist. On related themes, see: The old India is dead. Wake up, netas and business babus by R. Jagannathan on Firstpost; A long way from 1984 by Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express and an editorial Behind the curve in the Business Standard.

Many people in India like to invest in gold and in real estate. I would like to remind them that the analytical case for these is weak. Here is some new evidence on gold, and here are some older arguments about real estate.

Sunil S. in Pragati magazine about India's electricity grid problem.

Mobis Philipose in the Mint writes about an intruiging development: a `Intermediaries and Investor Welfare Association (India)' has filed a petition in the Delhi High Court alleging that algorithmic trading is bad. I wonder who is behind this.

On the theme of the transformative impact of google maps, see How Google Builds Its Maps, and What It Means for the Future of Everything by Alexis C. Madrigal.

Sebastian Mallaby has a great response (originally in the Financial Times) to the Apple-Samsung patent violation case. If you're in the US, you need to run, not walk to buy cool Samsung equipment, or buy it when you travel abroad.

The Euro crisis is back from vacation by Adam Davidson, in the New York Times magazine.

If Xerox PARC invented the PC, Google invented the Internet by Cade Metz in Wired magazine.

Why sex could be history by Kira Cochrane in the Guardian, about a new book by Aarathi Prasad.

Some of the biology that we learned in high school is getting overturned.

Did the Indian GDP just jump up by a basis point?

Google made two important announcements:

• The database underlying google maps is now of the quality required to support turn-by-turn navigation. Every smart phone or tablet that can use google maps just became a GPS device that is capable of giving you turn-by-turn navigation including giving you instructions in audio.
• In six cities, they now have realtime traffic data available as an overlay on google maps. You can look at the map and it will show you what segments of what roads are congested.

This will, I assume, enable cool things within applications like Google Now to work: it knows your calendar, it analyses traffic conditions, and tells you at the right time "Now it's time for you to leave". Similarly, we can now use Google Places ("search for a coffee shop close to where I am right now"). It shows you the list of what's available, you touch one of them, and it's now ready to give you turn-by-turn directions to go there.

Industry sources say there are roughly 26 million smart phones out there that are able to use google maps. In other words, we have just had 26 million satnav devices added to the Indian capital stock. And, we've added realtime traffic data for the subset of these that are in 6 cities. Millions of people have just had a jump in productivity.

An interesting Fermi problem : Will this add one basis point to GDP? At first, I thought this was hard because it'd require making assumptions about how much time each satnav saves for the person, that person's output per minute, and so on. But a reverse calculation is illuminating: 1 basis point of GDP is Rs.1000 crore or Rs.10 billion. Divide by 26 million smart phones and you get : a flow of increased output of Rs.384 per satnav per year. In other words, if each satnav device adds Rs.384 of output to the owner's life per year, then Google's turn-by-turn navigation added 1 bps to GDP. And I'm not even counting the impact of realtime traffic data. This number (Rs.384 per satnav per year on average) seems plausible to me.

You may like to see this material on map databases in India.

Indian capitalism is not doomed

India's problem of crony capitalism

by Ajay Shah.

The rise of modern capitalism in India in the 1990s was at first viewed in optimistic terms. A new breed of companies were born, who seemed to exhibit a new kind of competence, international competitiveness and high ethical standards. We could start putting our old mistrust of corrupt business houses behind us.

These hopes were substantially dashed by the fresh emergence of crony capitalism. Doing business in many areas in India involves an extensive interface with the government. In these areas, the weaknesses of the State generated an opportunity for crooks. At first, the financial system sent massive resources into dubious companies, with an attitude of being blind to anything but profits. When these companies controlled vast resources, and were shown the promise of even bigger valuations to come, they embarked on systematically undermining the State. Through this, we got a feedback loop: The crooks came up where the State was weak, and their activities further undermined the State.

In some cases, we saw rotten companies spring up in one part of the economy where the State was weak, and once these companies were up and running, they turned their attention to related fields and devoted themselves to undermining State institutions in related fields. Through this, the gangrene spread from one area to the next.

In the the early 1990s, we could hope that India would smoothly moving up to the ranks of middle income countries, powered by world class local companies in addition to global companies building operations here. These hopes have substantially receded. The heart of the Indian story is now about the feedback loop between rotten companies and the State. If we manage to bootstrap ourselves out of this, we have a bright future. But will be be able to bootstrap ourselves out of this? Many countries got mired in this `middle income trap': we shouldn't assume that our destiny is rosy.

At first blush, stopping the rotten companies seems infeasible. These are typically efficient and competent firms in a day to day tactical sense. They are staffed with hard-driving amoral people (typically incentivised very strongly using high-powered incentives), who fully understand the weaknesses of the system and attack it. Considerable resources are invested into subverting politicians, bureaucrats, judges and the media. The Indian system is rotten and ripe for attack. It's like computer criminals attacking Microsoft Windows. Resistance is futile. Indian capitalism is doomed.

There is, however, an array of homeostatic forces in place which are generating push back. Some crooked companies have faced enforcement actions by arms of the State. In some cases, India has had good discussions in the public domain which has generated checks and balances. In addition, while many people are devoid of ethics and will support the latest nouveau riche entrepreneur who is throwing cash around, a large number of people get revulsed by the sight of this, and quietly and doggedly refuse to cooperate.

Enforcement in India does not work perfectly. The key point of this blog post is that medium grade enforcement has far reaching implications. The key insight is to look at the way the goals of labour and capital (i.e. investors and employees) are reshaped by medium grade enforcement.

The perspective of the investor

The enforcement push back against rotten firms is yielding results. Many crooked companies have grossly underperformed the index. Some have experienced enforcement actions and have experienced jaw-dropping returns. Some have experienced dogged opposition from pockets of high ethics in the system, which have effectively led to systematic and sustained under-performance of the index over five- and ten-year periods. The stock market has become wary about ethical issues. As Shekhar Gupta says in the Indian Express yesterday:

If you draw a simple chart of the large companies that have lost the most value on the stock markets over the past three years, you'd notice that almost all of these were doing business on the same cusp of politics, finance and natural resources. To that extent, you have to admit that the market has been the first to sense the rot and has applied a stunning self-correction, severely punishing those responsible for it.

There was a time when investors used to be oblivious about ethical standards of portfolio companies. The attitude of the investor in the 1990s used to be I don't want to know how you do business; I will hold my nose since you stink; but as long as you will produce returns, I will happily invest in you. This attitude has been thoroughly broken. The investors who pursued such strategies have often been devastated. Even if you have only 10% invested in a crooked company, if you get -80% returns on it, this generates a -800 basis point returns drag on your overall portfolio performance. As a consequence, portfolio managers have started caring about the ethical standards of portfolio companies.

Enforcement does not have to be 100% perfect for it to impact on the decision making of investors. Even if there is only a 10% chance of getting caught and thus getting -80% returns, that is a big risk from the viewpoint of the investor. From the viewpoint of the investor: Why take the risk? Why not make a thorough analysis of the ethical standards of a company one element of the security selection process?

The problem of freedom of speech

Journalism is printing
what someone else does not want printed.
Everything else is public relations.
-- George Orwell.

India is supposed to be a liberal democracy, and a free press is supposed to write vigorously about misdeeds (link). By and large, this has not worked out as it was meant to be. On one hand, it is quite easy for the bad guys to corrupt the media. Whether this is done through gifts of shares to a media company, or through advertising and sponsorship, it is fairly easy to obtain a supportive media. In addition, defamation is a criminal offence in India: a legacy of colonial law that we have not yet been bright enough to undo. Putting these together, the bad guys have a nice combination of carrot (throwing money at the media) and stick (litigation).

Analysts and financial intermediaries are supposed to make a living out of spotting problems in firms. Here also, there is quite a bit of corruption which impedes speaking freely. Few are willing to go against the latest nouveau riche entrepreneur who is throwing cash around, including his efforts at buying respectability. The mainstream strategy is to participate in the gravy train, and look for ways to part the fool and his money.

This is a real shame: India should be much better than China in the role of freedom of speech acting as a check against corporations. However, the Indian media has largely caved in the face of carrot and stick: it is largely doing public relations.

At the same time, there is strong demand among investors for skills in identifying the crooks, given that this is an important investment fundamental. The problems of the conventional media and financial firms, which inhibit naming the crooks openly and in the public domain, has created a business opportunity in this space. Supply has come up to fill this demand; a new breed of companies has come up, reflecting this need. Examples of firms with these capabilities include Ambit Capital, Veritas Investment Research, Forensic Asia, and Espirito Santo. Numerous investors are building in this analysis into their portfolio process, and this is helping to channel capital away from dubious companies.

Foreign firms seem to be more prominent in this field of research and analysis from the viewpoint of ethical standards, because they are relatively immune to the problems of intimidation through courts and police in India, and because they are relatively cutoff from the reciprocity that binds everyone in the world of business in India. See Veritas' report on Indiabulls has put in contrast the research by India-based analysts in the Economic Times by Uday Khandeparkar. But even they are not immune to the problems of the Indian legal system. Now we have a new investment tool: sell shares of the companies that embark on such litigation.

The weaknesses of freedom of speech in India have thus emphasised a greater role for information processing and analysis away from Indian shores. I am reminded of what is going on in China, where some of the most important short sellers who are bringing out the misdeeds of Chinese companies are located abroad: it's too dangerous to do the same things within China. We in India are evolving towards a similar structure of information processing.

The perspective of the employee

In the modern world, a vital determinant of the success of an enterprise is the kind of people it is able to attract. Here also, at first, there was a relatively amoral attitude on the part of most young people: I don't want to know how you do business; I will hold my nose since you stink; but as long as you offer me the highest wage, I will join you. But over the years, it has been demonstrated that this is a bad strategy:

• The sight of senior employees going into Tihar Jail has given out powerful messages to everyone in Indian companies that good people should not hang out with crooks.
  
• The second phenomenon is reputational damage. It makes business sense for an individual to engage in fair play. I have been in recruitment conversations where a person is being discussed but his name gets shot down as he has not been careful about the company that he keeps. Birds of a feather flock together. I recently heard a senior person say: ``I knew XXX was a rotten firm when a bunch of corrupt people from SEBI joined it''. Low ethical standards in people and in firms go together; a cloud of mistrust envelops them.
  
• Gradually, as regulators develop and refine the doctrine of `fit and proper' such people will increasingly suffer career damage. We aren't fully there in Indian finance yet, but it will increasingly be the case that a name is shot down for a CEO position because he was part of a team that was caught doing nasty things by SEBI or RBI.
  
• These factors are particularly important for the best and the brightest. If you are the best and the brightest, why would you suffer even epsilon risk of going to jail? Why would you run with crooks if this could hamper your rise to CEO? Why would you suffer reputational damage, and not be able to hold your head high at your class reunion?

These factors are inhibiting the flow of talent to dubious companies. I know of several situations where a person was made an offer, and chatted about this with his friends, and turned it down. It was just too much of a risk to be seen in the wrong company.

Second rate people recruit third rate people. Once a firm is contaminated with a series of low grade staff at senior levels, it becomes increasingly hard to draw in top quality talent, which drags down capabilities all across the board.

I believe this is one of the factors which has generated systematic under-performance in the stock price of dubious companies. It isn't just the case that they are in danger of enforcement actions. It is also the case that on an every day basis, they find it harder to operate well given that they generally fail to recruit as well as their competitors.

How might Indian capitalism develop?

If the crooks had thundered ahead producing super-normal stock market returns, and attracting the best talent, I would have been truly gloomy. What is fascinating about the Indian story is that things have worked out differently. Some dubious companies have cratered with -80% returns over short periods. Others have generated substantial under-performance when compared with the index over 5- and 10-year horizons. The best people are avoiding rotten companies. Putting these together, the bad guys are finding it difficult to obtain both capital and labour, which are seeking out better firms.

Wall Street tells Main Street what to do. At a time when the investors did not care about ethical standards of portfolio companies, and only asked for earnings growth, this sent out powerful signals into the economy (a) Favouring rotten firms and (b) Encouraging rotten entrepreneurs to setup firms so as to harvest the opportunities available by selling shares. We got a precipitous collapse of ethical standards in India in the last decade in India, partly because that is what a financial system that was oblivious to ethical standards was encouraging. Some of the most rotten companies rose to the top. Now that the investors and the employees are seeing things differently, this is sending out signals into the economy (a) Favouring healthy firms and (b) Encouraging healthy entrepreneurs to setup firms so as to harvest the opportunities available by selling shares. We will also see some chameleons turn a new leaf: You will see the oddest of characters preaching purity.

Vishal Kampani pointed out a remarkable fact to me: Some of the biggest successes of the last decade have been the old `Bombay Club' companies. All too often, they have outperformed when compared with the hard-driving unethical nouveau riche entrepreneur. What is going on? I would conjecture that there is a survivorship bias. A large number of different strands of corporate DNA compete. Over the long run, the survivors are those where elements of policy and strategy are of a certain kind. The old rich of the `Bombay Club' are not paragons of virtue, but they have developed certain good practices which are conducive to survival and stock market returns.

I am reminded of the mighty German Wehrmacht in the Second World War. At the level of tactics and operations, it was second to none. In the short run, it generated the most amazing achievements in battle. After the campaigns from September 1939 till December 1941, many contemporary observers thought that Germany was unstoppable. But at the same time, Germany was making profound mistakes at the levels of strategy and policy. No amount of operational art could overcome those fundamental mistakes in strategy and policy.

In similar fashion, we tend to get very impressed by the hard-driving take-no-prisoners nouveau riche entrepreneurs and their hypercharged sidekicks. Their dynamism and willingness to play dirty seems to be unstoppable, particularly given the weaknesses of politicians, bureaucrats, judges and media in India. But it appears that in India, these strengths in tactics and operations have often been unable to overcome fundamental mistakes in strategy and policy. Indian capitalism is not doomed.

Has monetary policy in India helped or hurt?

Carlos Vegh and Guillermo Vuletin have an article Overcoming the fear of free falling: Monetary policy graduation in emerging markets, in `The role of Central Banks in financial stability: How has it changed?', Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, 2012. They have drawn on this to write a column on voxEU titled Graduation from monetary policy procyclicality.

In an ideal world, monetary policy should stabilise business cycle conditions. When times are good, the central bank should raise rates, thus reining in a boom. When times are bad, the central bank should cut rates. As an example of how this might not arise, recall that on 16 Jan 1998, in what was arguably a pretty bad time for the Indian economy, RBI raised rates by 200 basis points. Economists have a delicate and damning phrase for monetary policy that fuels a boom and exacerbates a bust: it is termed "procyclical" monetary policy.

Vegh and Vuletin construct a measure of monetary policy procyclicality : the correlation between the cyclical component of the short-term interest rate and GDP. This is computed for a large number of countries for the 1960-1999 period. Here is the result:

The bars in black are advanced economies and the bars in yellow are developing countries. There is a striking pattern: All the countries with a negative correlations -- i.e. interest rates are raised in bad times -- are developing countries. This is a striking demonstration of the faulty monetary policy frameworks that are found in developing countries: Every country which suffers from procyclicality in this period is a developing country.

India fares pretty badly in this list: Starting from the bottom, we have Uruguay (Rank 1 from the bottom), Chile, Mexico, Venezuela, Gambia, and then India (Rank 6 from the bottom).

Things got better after 1999. Vegh and Vuletin repeat the analysis for 2000-2009 and find that India did much better. The correlation swung to a positive value. India moved up, to the middle of the distribution. You could find one developed country -- Japan -- which did worse than India in this period.

In my assessment, there are two elements to this story: (a) Is there room to manoeuvre for monetary policy and (b) Is the monetary policy process properly constructed? The first is largely a question about exchange rate flexibility. If the central bank pursues exchange rate goals, this uses up the instrument of monetary policy. The second is about how monetary policy is conducted.

The figure above shows how India's exchange rate regime evolved towards flexibility. The structural break dates (23 May 2003 and 23 March 2007) are computed using the methodology of Zeileis, Shah, Patnaik, 2010. For 4.74 years, we had INR/USD volatility of 2.31% per year. On 23 May 2003, the contradictions of this regime became unbearable, and the exchange rate regime changed: volatility jumped up to 3.93% per year: a rough doubling. On 23 March 2007, the contradictions of this regime became unbearable, and the exchange rate regime changed: volatility jumped up to 9.05% per year: another rough doubling.

From 23 March 2007 onwards, we have finished 5.43 years -- the longest single period out of the three shown here -- in this zone of high exchange rate flexibility. On the subject of the Indian exchange rate regime, you may like to read this post.

I believe these changes have substantially, though not completely, freed monetary policy of the burden of pursuing exchange rate goals. This is one half of the story of Indian monetary policy reform. The second half is that of setting up a sound monetary policy process. Now that you have a lever of setting the short rate in your hands, what would you like to do with it? The first stage is a relatively easy and nihilistic one: it requires getting out of trading in the currency market. By 23 March 2007, this was completed. The second stage is harder: it requires institution building. We have not yet begun on this phase.

This increase in exchange rate flexibility is consistent with the Vegh & Vuletin calculation which shows that the procyclicality of Indian monetary policy was reduced in the 2000-2009 period.

Welcome Ila Patnaik to the Internet

Ila Patnaik now has a blog, an RSS feed and a twitter feed. The blog will also email out updates to you. Her stock of materials is on her home page on the web.

The widget illusion

The Economist runs a discussion forum titled The Economist By Invitation. In this, they recently setup a discussion about an opinion piece by Dani Rodrik about the future of manufacturing-led growth in emerging markets. I wrote a response there which is reproduced here.

The role of manufactures

I agree with a small element of Dani Rodrik's argument, but mostly for different reasons. Rodrik says:

Except for a handful of small countries that benefited from natural-resource bonanzas, all of the successful economies of the last six decades owe their growth to rapid industrialization.

I have seen this kind of thinking among some policy makers in India also: that industrialisation is somehow special and good when compared with services. I would question this proposition, that I term `the widget illusion'. What matters to a country is having sophisticated firms that have a high marginal product of labour. We should not care whether this happens in services or in manufacturing. If anything, the opportunity to do it is perhaps better in services.

India is a good example of a country which embarked on its catchup by connecting into globalisation late: from 1991 onwards. It was probably the last country in the world to shed autarkic policies. This has given a remarkable growth acceleration. Sustained growth of 7 per cent is pretty good by world standards. These achievements have been significantly driven by services production in India within global supply chains (whether within production facilities owned by global MNCs who are operating in India, or contracted-out by global MNCs to Indian firms). If your null hypothesis was that industrialisation is essential to growth, then you would not have predicted what happened in India, where manufacturing was hobbled by an array of policy mistakes.

This illustrates the limitations of manufacturing-focused thinking, which seems a bit out of date in today's world economy where most output is services. Agriculture and manufacturing have wilted away in the consumption of the global representative agent: to succeed in the world economy today requires prime attention upon services.

Rodrik says:

Consider India, which demonstrates the limitations of relying on services rather than industry in the early stages of development. The country has developed remarkable strengths in IT services, such as software and call centers. But the bulk of the Indian labor force lacks the skills and education to be absorbed into such sectors. In East Asia, unskilled workers were put to work in urban factories, making several times what they earned in the countryside. In India, they remain on the land or move to petty services where their productivity is not much higher.

As Rodrik points out, there are important gaps between the skills of the great unwashed masses in India versus China, where elementary technical training reached a larger mass of humans. In addition, China did better on core economic policy choices about (a) Removing protectionism; (b) Removing barriers to FDI; (c) Building hard infrastructure; (d) Labour law and (e) Rationalising taxation.

What policy advice would flow from this? India should not have have made these six mistakes in economic policy (low training for the masses, protectionism, barriers to FDI, weak investments into infrastructure, labour law and mistakes in tax policy). At the same time, this does not recommend a bias in favour of manufacturing. It is hard to discern a meaningful choice about emphasising services versus manufacturing in Indian economic policy. Participation in all global production is good. Governments should remove all barriers that inhibit global integration whether in goods or in services - e.g. the six mistakes in Indian policy sketched above.

A paragraph earlier, Rodrik says:

To be sure, some modern service activities are capable of productivity convergence as well. But most high-productivity services require a wide array of skills and institutional capabilities that developing economies accumulate only gradually. A poor country can easily compete with Sweden in a wide range of manufactures; but it takes many decades, if not centuries, to catch up with Sweden's institutions.

I would point out the contradiction: "A poor country can easily compete with Sweden in .. manufactures" but earlier it was asserted that the gaps in Indian skills inhibited India's ability to compete with Sweden in manufactures.

Doing things that push skills and institutional capabilities

I would go further to say that it is good to go after fields which require a wide array of skills and institutional capabilities.

I am reminded of Ricardo Hausmann's `Good Cholesterol' argument about financial globalisation as opposed to mere FDI. When a poor country operates in an institutional vacuum, foreign investors are uncomfortable, and the only thing that can happen is FDI. To obtain financial flows, the country has to build institutions: laws, regulators, property rights, and so on. This is a good thing! A country that gets to FDI and gets stuck there should ponder what is going wrong. In similar fashion, no country aspires to have low-wage production; every country wants to understand the secret sauce through which a part of the labour force can earn high wages by world standards.

As a country rises out of poverty, it is essential to build up skills and institutional capabilities. If policy makers hinder services and/or favour manufacturing, there is a greater chance of being stuck in low skills and low institutional capabilities. I am not proposing industrial policy in favour of services. I am only proposing the absence of industrial policy; we should avoid a `widget illusion' and foster more global integration without trying to push towards one industry or another.

In India, with 7 per cent growth, GDP doubles every decade. As a thumb-rule, I feel that a comprehensive transformation of skills and institutions is required across each doubling of GDP, which is roughly each decade for India. A country that is stuck in low-skill manufacturing will find it difficult to achieve the reinvention of this `soft infrastructure' of the mind. If policy makers tried to push a country towards doing low end grunge work, it would be harder to obtain these repeated transformations of institutions and the furniture of the mind, which would lead to growth decelerations.

As an example, in the article New wave of deft robots is changing global industry, John Markoff says:

Foxconn has not disclosed how many workers will be displaced or when. But its chairman, Terry Gou, has publicly endorsed a growing use of robots. Speaking of his more than one million employees worldwide, he said in January, according to the official Xinhua news agency: ``As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache.''

The project of economic development requires sophisticated interactions between firms and workers. The laws, human rights and management practices that are required when dealing with humans are different from those required when running a firm with `one million animals'. I would hence argue that it is limiting for a country to focus on the political, legal and institutional requirements to produce a la Foxconn. It is better to confront the complexities of high skill, high wage production, and to build the environment for this to happen: in the political and legal system, in management practices of firms, and in the power structure embedded in a conversation between two citizens who are co-workers within a firm. Services production is a valuable learning ground where the complex management practices that involve high skill humans can be learned.

The new world of manufacturing

Rodrik correctly points out that manufacturing has become more sophisticated in recent years. This has some fascinating dimensions:

• The rapid improvements in capabilities and declining costs of robots.
• The rise of open source design coupled with 3-d printers. If a 3-d printer in the US fabricates a part close to its usage in an assembly line, while the labour-intensive design work ("services") that controls the 3-d printer is done in India, does this entail manufacturing or services work in India?
• The world economy is likely to be in a low interest rate environment for a long time, which will encourage capital intensity worldwide (robots, 3-d printers), thus blunting the value of low wages.

Momentous changes are afoot, which challenge our traditional notions of manufacturing versus services. To some extent, we are even seeing some manufacturing go back to the US.

Things that might `go wrong'

Finally, Rodrik talks about reduced willingness in the West to tolerate unfair tactics like the Chinese exchange rate regime. I would generally consider this to be a good thing, both for developing countries and for the world. In any case, the Asian `Bretton Woods II' episode seems to be subsiding. As an example of the disenchantment with exchange rate distortions: From 2004 to 2007, India debated exchange rate rigidity, and walked away from it. The links between undistorted exchange rates and growth have not been adequately emphasised in the discourse. A developing country builds up inferior skills and institutional capabilities by exporting under a subsidised exchange rate: it is better to force firms to confront the market price and achieve the productivity required to participate in globalisation when facing an undistorted price vector.

He worries about a rise in protectionism in the West, but we have to admit that the 2008-2012 experience has been pretty good in this regard: by and large the West has not succumbed into protectionism. In 2008, all of us worried about Smoot-Hawley. Today, things seem to be be going well.

Conclusion

In summary, I would argue that we should avoid a `widget illusion'. There is nothing special about manufacturing or industrialisation: as long as people in India get high wage jobs, this is good. Getting there requries deep integration into the world economy, which includes policy battlefronts such as:

• Openness to the Internet
• Use of English
• Inbound and outbound FDI
• The array of cross-border financial services that are the enablers of complex globalised production of both goods and services
• Globalisation-compatible tax policy on both trade and finance
• The absence of either protectionism or mercantalism
• Fostering high quality human skills, and
• Infrastructure.

To the extent that globalised production of goods and services happens in areas which involve high skills and complex institutional development, this is a bonus, since any high growth country needs a rapid pace of reinvention of laws and institutions.

Most of this is the old orthodoxy. Policy makers worldwide are generally focused on these issues, as they should be. From the 1960s onwards, dirigisme has generally subsided, with the twilight of policies like fixed exchange rates, industrial policy, capital controls, protectionism, etc. These key lessons remain intact in the 21st century.

Interesting readings

Ila Patnaik in the Indian Express on the role of the Ministry of Finance in India's growth. Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express on India's cabinet reshuffle. Anil Padmanabhan in the Mint about how things have changed at MoF after Chidambaram got back.

Bibek Debroy on a major problem that afflicts India today: Human capital obsolescence. Now that I'm safely past that age, I know the right answer for leadership positions: the right age is 40.

Theodore Dalrymple in the Wall Street Journal likes India's Olympian detachment from the Olympics.


Trampling on the individual in India: Jayalalithaa vs. India Today. Also see Gopu Mohan in the Indian Express who shines the light on the systematic use of litigation.



Russell Green in Mint on the problems of priority sector lending.

Pramit Bhattacharya in Mint on Kaushik Basu's tenure as CEA.

Mythili Bhusnurmath in the Economic Times on the difficulties of bank solvency that India now faces. The article refers to this RBI report on restructuring of bad debt.

The ghost of Abraham's letter by N. Sundaresha Subramanian in the Business Standard.

Amol Sharma and Megha Bahree in the Wall Street Journal about Mukesh Ambani's 4G plans. In it: "On one page there was a complex mathematical calculation of how fast each cell tower could carry data."

Odd SDP data for Maharashtra, by Dilasha Seth in the Business Standard. Also see.



The man who saved capitalism by Stephen Moore in the Wall Street Journal.