59.  Is the Indian miracle inevitable?: Can the lower interest rates, favorable demographic transition and home-grown multinationals really deliver the Indian miracle?  Happy dreams...

58. A Godsend for Developing Countries: What does WTO really do to be decried as the "World Terrorist Organization" by a rally supported by three former Prime Ministers of India?

57.  If this is success, what will be failure?  India's role in the WTO negotiations has turned less negative but it has some ways to go.

56. l'affaire cola: When NGOs operatre in their areas of expertise, they can force important policy debates and policy changes in democratic countries in not just developed but also developing countries.  Here is a beautiful example from India

55. The Macroeconomy & Policy Change: Given India's success in achieving macroeconomic stability during the last half century, it is ironic that the study of macroeconomics in India has lagged far behind that of microeconomics.  For this reason alone, the recent volume Macroeconomics and Monetary Policy: Issues for a Reforming Economy, edited by M. S. Ahluwalia, Y. V. Reddy and S. S. Tarapore, honoring Chakravarti Rangarajan, the first academic economist to serve as the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India and a much-admired figure among Indian economists and policy makers, is a useful addition to literature on economic reforms in India.

54.  Adopt a Single, Uniform Tariff Rate: The exisitng trade policy commitment in a previous budget speech is to unify tariff rates around two rates of 20 and 10 percent starting 2004-05.  But why not adopt a single, uniform rate of 15 percent instead?

53. Free-trade Skeptics: Skeptics After All?: Do free-trade skeptics such as Joseph Stiglitz and Dani Rodrik recommend protection?  Not really, if you read carefully.

52.  Without Trade Openness, There is no Sustained Growth: So trade openness is not sufficient for growth.  But can you do without it?  And are there autarkies or near autarkies in the developing world that have rapidly reduced poverty?

51.  How to break the TRIPS impasse?: The negotiations on how to allow poor countries to take advantage of the compulsory licensing provision of the TRIPS Agreement are at an impasse.  But there is a way to break the logjam.

50. Your Move, Mr. Jaitley!: The United States has proposed that all tariffs on non-agricultural goods be reduced to 8 percent or less by 2010 and to zero rate by 2015.  This offers India a gloden opportunity to either make a huge economic gain or win a major tactical victory.  But will Arun Jaitley, India's new Commerce Minister act?

49. Diwan-e-Khas to Diwan-e-Aam: Policy changes in India are no longer by stealth. Indeed, Kelkar has now brought the process out of the diwan-e-khaas to diwan-e-aam. Critics of his reports have been unsparing but are they right? 

Economic Times 2002

48. Welcome Aboard Mr. Stern: Abandoning the exclusive focus on the rich country protectionism and complacency towards the poor country protectionism, the World Bank Chief Economist has now forcefully condemned the latter. This is good news.  But the World Bank also needs to pay attention to the nuances while propagating the view that agricultural subsidies and protection in the rich countries inflict huge injuries on the poor countries. The removal of these intervention will no doubt benefit the developing countries as a whole but it will also hurt the majority of the poorest countries. 

47.  A tax system for the 21st century: In less than two months, the Kelkar taskforces on direct and indirect taxes have spoken. They propose to overhaul the Indian tax system. The question is whether Jaswant Singh will show the necessary courage.

46.  Tackling the Crisis in Higher Education: Besides, railways and nuclear power, the only state monopoly remaining in India is the one on issuing university degrees. Universities in India can be established only by an Act of Parliament, Act of a State Legislative Assembly or by the University Grants Commission (UGC) "deeming" an institution university. UGC centrally controls all major functions of universities and colleges. Not surprisingly, the Indian higher education system is in a quiet crisis on both quantity and quality dimension. 

45.  Experimenting in economics: This year's economics laureates — economist Vernon Smith of George Mason University and psychologist Daniel Kahneman of Princeton University — have both been pioneers in the field of experimental economics. But the similarity between their contributions ends there.

44.  A case for import substitution?: Does evidence point to ISI leading to a golden age of growth in developing countries and liberal trade policies, deregulation and privatization going no where? 

43.  Resolving the RBI dilemma: RBI foreign exchange reserves now exceed $60 billion. Must it keep accumulating or there are other alternatives? Read on for some answers.

42. Potentially disabling aid: Are the calls for raising aid flows to 0.7 percent of the industrial countries' GDP grounded in proper analysis? Have those making the calls offered a roadmap of how they can use this larger amount effectively to promote the Millennium Development Goals?

41.  Is this free meal worth having?: Under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP), developed countries grant one-way tariff preferences to developing countries.  But the experience with these preferences has been even less encouraging than that with aid.

40.  Why India lags behind China?: Skeptics say that exports have not responded to trade liberalization. Are they right? And even if they are wrong, why has the response in India been more muted than in China? Here is one hypothesis. 

39b.  Dump the anti-dumping?: India is now the top ranking user of anti-dumping. The Economic Times asked three specialists to write on "Should anti-dumping be dumped?" My take: This is a no-brainer. WTO members should jointly agree to outlaw the use of this self-destructive weapon. But should they fail to do so, countries should unilaterally discard it from their arsenals. 

39.  Stamping in Nutrition: “THE poor are a gold mine,” wrote economist Thomas Sowell two decades ago, arguing that often anti-poverty programmes benefit those who administer them rather than those for whom they are administered.  India’s food procurement, storage and distribution system lends unequivocal support to Sowell's contention: Out of every Rs. 100 spent on food subsidy in India, only Rs. 3.70 reached the poor in the year 2000-01.

38.  The right recipe: Those of you old enough to remember Mother India, the first Indian film to be nominated for an Oscar, would remember its hero Sunil Dutt sitting on top of a mound of grain and trying to keep the villain from taking it away. Well, gone are the days. We now have the Food Corporation of India sitting on top of a mountain of grain, trying to keep the rains from washing it away. How did we arrive here? What should be done?

37. On Generating Employment: Because of its large and growing population, the threat of “employment problem” is never far from the minds of policymakers in India. Yet, there are good reasons for the ambivalence of economists towards such a threat. The old saying that the child is born not just with a mouth to eat but also two hands to work carries much wisdom.

36.  Redeem Last Year's Promises: Last year, in what was a truly historic budget, Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha had announced several major reforms.  But the Vajpayee government utterly failed to deliver on them.  The forthcoming budget must offer credible commitment to undo this failure. 

35.  New Year's Day Special: The Economic Times invited three economists (Jagdish Bhagwati of Columbia University, Kaushik Basu of Cornell University and Arvind Panagariya of the University of Maryland) and two industrialists (Azim Premji of Wipro and R. Seshasayee of Ashok Leyland) to address five questions relating to the economy, wish-list for 2002, public-private partnership, public morality and future for India.

Economic Times, 2001

34.  Barriers to Scholarship in India:  Our persistence in obstructing foreign scholars and scholarship in India is unfortunate. We continue to subject all research projects by foreign scholars to an elaborate approval process involving one or more ministries.

33.  India Arrives at the WTO :  If you were at the summit and heard the frequent assertions in the corridors and the pressroom that India was hell bent to bring down the launch of the new round, you would likely believe the harsh assessments that appeared subsequently in the Western press.   But did India truly fair so poorly?

33b.  India at Doha (2):If victory and defeat were judged by juxtaposing the initial objective and final outcome, India suffered an unequivocal defeat in Doha. But by that count, Doha produced no winners.

32.  Milton Friedman on India in 1955:   “A FIVE per cent per annum rate of increase in real national income seems entirely feasible...” If these opening words in a memorandum addressed to the government of India do not impress you, think again: the date on the memorandum is November 5, 1955 and its author is Milton Friedman, the 1976 Nobel Laureate in Economics.

31.  Nobel Prize, 2001: This year, I successfully predicted all three Nobel laureates and surprising a figure no less than Professor Assar Lindbeck, the chairman of the Nobel Committee from 1980 to 1994.

30.  Rigid Labor Laws: a Minor Barrier to Growth?:  “Removing the main barriers to growth would free India’s economy to grow as fast as China’s, at 10% a year.”  This is the central conclusion of a recent report entitled “Achieving India’s Economic Growth Imperative” by the McKinsey Global Institute.

29.  Launching the Qatar Round:  India has expressed its clear opposition to the launch of a new round of multilateral negotiations at the forthcoming WTO ministerial in Qatar.  India’s position is not without justification.  Yet, unless intended to be an interim, tactical move, it can hurt our ultimate interests.  We have much to gain from a new round provided we actively engage in shaping its agenda.

28.  Savouring a Decade of Reforms:  THIS month marks the end of the first decade of India’s economic reforms. What have we accomplished? In this feel-good piece, I demonstrate that the focus on incremental reforms in individual years results in an understatement of the totality of India's  achievements.

27.  Why did Singapore and Hong Kong Escape Protection?:  Singapore and Hong Kong have been the most open economies in the world during the past fifty years.  How do we explain this success of the two economies during a period when all other developing countries found themselves resorting to protection?

26.  The Indian Diaspora in the United States:  Can the Indian Diaspora play the same role in the economic transformation of India that the Chinese Diaspora has played in the People’s Republic of China (PRC)? 

25.  Korean Growth Experience:  The contribution of infant industry protection to Korea’s growth is at best controversial and at worst negative. But even if one accepts it to be positive, there are two reasons why it is safer today to err on the side of non-intervention.

24.  End the State Monopoly on Higher Education :  Last month, when I wrote that public-sector monopoly in India had been abolished in virtually all sectors except railways, I made one major error of omission: higher education.

23.  Fertiliser Subsidy:  We spend more than 0.7 per cent of India’s GDP on fertiliser subsidies. This is almost twice the entire amount we spend on higher education.

22.  Unshackling the Old Economy :  The major new stimulus to growth must come from further freeing up of the Old Economy, which lags behind the unfettered New Economy.

Economic Times, 2000

21.  The Shoe is now on the Other Foot:  In a recent report entitled Unfair Advantage: Workers' Freedom of Association in the United States under International Human Rights Standards (August 31, 2000), Human Rights Watch offers a stunning indictment of the laws governing worker rights and their enforcement in the United States.

20.  Defending Free Trade:  Mathematician Stanislaw Ulam once asked economics Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson whether he could point to an idea in economics that was universally true and not obvious at the same time.  Samuelson’s response was the “principle of comparative advantage.”

19.  The New Tyranny of the Auto Industry:  We persist in ignoring the lessons of our own experience and stand ready to punish the consumer in favour of narrow, short-term industry interests. By all accounts, the government is poised to replace import licensing on used cars by prohibitive tariff duties and technical barriers.

18.  Nobel Prize 2000:  The statistical techniques of measurement, for which Heckman and McFadden have been awarded the prize, may seem esoteric to a non-specialist.  Yet, they are an indispensable part of the tool-kit of an empirical economist.

17.  Bringing Competition to Bureaucracy:  Since politicians usually lack specialized skills, the burden of policy making often falls on the top layer of bureaucracy.  But what if top bureaucrats themselves lack these skills? We then run the risk of blind leading the blind.

16.  A Golden Opportunity For India:  During his forthcoming visit to the United States, Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee will have an unusual opportunity to promote the Indian viewpoint among the U.S. leaders and policy makers on issues of mutual interest to the two nations.

15.  Exit Policy:  The ban on retrenchment has produced few winners.  Under the threat of strikes, it has forced firms to tolerate extreme inefficiency.  The ban also discourages entrepreneurs from seeking entry into labour-intensive sectors and employing labour-intensive techniques. 

14.  Separating Milk and Water:  The calls for very large duties on imports by Prakash Singh Badal, the chief minister of Punjab, are misplaced.

13.  The Anti-reform Lobby Has Got It Wrong:  While Prime Minister Vajpayee and Sinha must fight their own battle with the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, the gratuitous attack by the critics on the left is altogether a different matter.

12.  The World Bank under Fire:  The Meltzer Commission has harsh words for the manner in which the World Bank has served the poor in developing countries in recent years.

11.  Consensus Building and Nehru :  In spite of the public confidence he enjoyed, or perhaps because of it, Pundit Nehru used every opportunity available to him to explain to the lay public and intellectuals alike the rationale behind the big economic initiatives he had been undertaking or planning to undertake.

10.  Time to Return to Trade Reform : India's tariff liberalization has come to a virtual halt.  It is time to resume it in the 2000 budget.

9.  Yes to IPRs, No to their Inclusion into the WTO :  The TRIPs Agreement has become an effective instrument of promoting more non-trade agenda by labour and environmental groups.  They say the WTO must now do for workers and nature what it has already done for corporate interests.

8.  My Millennium Wish: Double-digit Growth :  The road will be much rougher as reforms move into difficult areas such as banking.  Nevertheless, the double-digit growth appears well within the grasp of the country.

Economic Times, 1999

7.  Seattle:  A Failure without Losers: Given where the round was heading, even pro-free-trade economists such as myself are relieved for the moment

6.  The Return of Labour Standards in the WTO? With the Seattle Ministerial meeting right around the corner, the United States has tabled a proposal for a working group on labour standards at the World Trade Organization (WTO).

5.  WTO Negotiations:  Invest in Research:  Even large developing countries such as India seem to lack the capacity for systematic research on how best to promote their interests in trade negotiations.

4.  Narrowing Down the Seattle Round Agenda:  Defining the agenda is the first stage of a negotiating game, which every player must take with utmost seriousness.

3.  “Extravagant” Predictions of Benefits to developing Countries from the Uruguay Round: Jagdish Bhagwati had warned even as the Round was approaching closure that appeals to overly optimistic predictions could undermine future trade liberalization.

2.  E-commerce:  How can developing countries maximize the benefits from the Internet and how should they approach the issue at WTO?

1.  Anti-dumping: Let Us Not Shoot Ourselves in the Foot:  Anti-dumping is turning into a lethal instrument of protection in India.  Does its aggressive use make sense?

Economic Times 1998

-1.  Dealing with investment in WTO: On a net basis, developing countries play the role of the `host' country to foreign investment while developed countries serve as the `source' country. This asymmetry leads to a divergence in the interests of developing and developed countries. Thus, the issue has a clear North-South dimension.

-2.  WTO and Developing Country Interests: The Uruguay Round (UR) Agreement stipulates that, beginning January 1, 2000, WTO members will launch a round of negotiations for trade liberalisation in agriculture and services. With that date approaching, there is now a talk in international policy circles of a millennium round of multilateral trade negotiations (MTNs). How should the developing countries such as India approach this development?

-3.  Full convertibility: Must we have it?:  Should India embrace full capital account convertibility in the near future? And was Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia wise to reintroduce controls in the wake of a crisis? The answers to these questions are asymmetric: while India is well advised to wait before entering the world of convertibility, Mahathir was ill advised to exit it.

-4.  Is India returning to protectionism? If Mr. Sinha is serious about reclaiming the trade reform for the country, he must resist pressures from the industry for lower excise duties and also explain to the public that when tariffs are reduced, increases in excise duties overall are entirely consistent with reforms.

-5. SAARC: Follow APEC, not NAFTA:  Despite much enthusiasm on the part of some regional leaders and policy analysts, the creation of a discriminatory trade bloc in the region, dubbed the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA), along the lines of the NAFTA will be a mistake. The region's interests will be served by following the APEC model which calls for full adherence to the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) principle and, hence, nondiscrimination in trade policy.

Wall Street Journal

1.  Rich Man, poor Man:  Just prior to the Cancun WTO Ministerial, a compromise on access to medicines for poor countries had raised hopes that the Developed and the Developing could resolve their differences after all-and that the Doha Round might actually move forward. But the talks at Cancun have collapsed and the opportunity is lost. But Cancun is no Seattle. At Seattle, the WTO members tried and failed to launch a new round whereas at Cancun they have failed to move an ongoing round forward. The more apt analogy is with the failure in Montreal in 1988 when developed and developing countries had failed to advance the Uruguay Round.

Financial Times

1.  A Trojan Horse for Africa:  (with Jagdish Bhagwati) The Africa Act offers more to US lobby groups than to participant countries.

2.  The Truth about Protectionism: (with Jagdish Bhagwati) just as the Jubilee 2000 movement triumphed where many exhortations to give debt relief had failed, we could now count on a church-led movement, a Jubilee 2010, to do the same for ending rich countries' protectionism.

3.  NAFTA has harmed the Cause of Free Trade : (Letter) You seem to accept too readily the conclusion in the recent World Trade Organi­sation report that these agree­ments have been "complemen­tary" to multilateral liberalisation ("WTO's blessing for trade groups", April 27). Surely, this conclusion is unwarranted.  

4.  Free Trade Target Date Essential to Remove “Spaghetti Bowl” of Barriers:  As economists deeply interested in the future of the world trading system, we and a group of economists worldwide would like to urge the member states of the WTO to make the endorsement of a target date for free trade their first priority.

5.  FTAA and President Kennedy: (Letter) This provides an opportunity to re-think the issue and to convert the original goal of free trade only for the Americas into a co-operative regional agreement (like Apec) and simultaneously to pressure trade liberalization multilaterally at the World Trade Organization.  That is the model, also of President Kennedy’s celebrated, but premature, Alliance for Progress for South America.

6.  Integration Can Help Reduce Poverty and Act as Force to End Child Labor: (Letter) In Bangladesh, the garments industry, which had expanded greatly with exports due to global integration, played a major role in reducing the country's poverty. And ironically, it was the threat of "anti-globalization" sanctions from US, rather than globalization, which harmed the children.

7.  WTO: US Demands Threaten Seattle Meeting:  (Letter) The US demand for a World Trade Organisation working group that will draw up a report in two years on the relationship between international trade and labour standards risks scuppering the Seattle ministerial meeting.

8.  Poverty Reduction Starts with Growth: (Letter) It is possible to immediately reduce poverty by redistributing from a fixed pie. But even that must be discounted when the pie is small and poor are many. Give every Indian his country's per-capita income and you will have him living on a dollar and 10 cents daily.

Times of India

1.  India: U.S. Action under Super-301: On May 25, 1989 U.S. declared India, Brazil and Japan to be “unfair traders” under Super-301.  Specific charges were brought against each country.

2.  Liberalise Consumer Goods Imports: Though liberalization of consumer goods im­ports has been controversial, at present, the case for it is impeccable.

3.  The Myths and Realities of Neem-Based Patents: Can Neem be patented?  If not, what is the controversy surrounding patents based on Neem products?

4.  Child Labor and Rugmark Label:  While rejecting the case for a social clause, however, many developing country critics of child labor have suggested that alternative strategies be adopted to combat the practice.  Among these is the use of “social labeling” which effectively gives the consumers the option to refuse to buy goods produced by child labor.

THES, Economist, India Today, and Outlook