Random Musings, Ramblings and such on Theory and Like

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IS India the Vaccine Hold Out?

- April 02, 2021

The West can never countenance India doing something good. They try to dig out a dark line in the brightest of the skies. They had colonized India. They cannot fathom, that a country that was long their vassal could stand up on its feet but more importantly could take the lead in many different global dimensions. This was despite numerous hurdles that were placed in its journey. This treatment is never applied to China or Japan for that matter. India is something wrong unless it follows the Western dictums in every domain. The tragedy is not the Western treatment of India but the very fact that Indians themselves diss themselves. There is vast section that thrives on finding rot in the Indian society, economy, business and what not. They love to run down Indian achievements. In the Chinese pandemic, it is India which has emerged as the pharmacy of the world. In the initial days, it was India which led the world in exporting masks, protection equipment, HCQ tablets, paracetamols

China and the Time Warp

- March 31, 2021

China has fascinated the West for a very long time. They have been inquisitive about the way China has gone about in it thousands of years of history. Partly because China has been secretive, in part the curiosity has been about China’s handling of its relations overseas, its expeditions, its kingdoms in the Middle to Late Age, the Forbidden City and of course its Communist Revolution and post Maoist period. China was largely forbidden to the West for many years. For many years, China played a role of contented kingdom which had everything to satisfy the needs. The only things it needed perhaps was those goods which had certain snob or entertainment value. In the Middle to Late Middle Ages, it projected itself as something interested in Veblen imports and not something routine. In the Maoist period, the revolutionary impact made it forbidden to the rest. China was perhaps not colonized the way India for instance, yet there were many regions in China that were under Western control at

Academic Research and Policy Interventions

- March 30, 2021

At least in terms of perception, there seems to be disconnect between public policy and academic research. Research is something sound, yet it has little application more often than not in terms of policy prescriptions. What might work as good policy measure might actually turn out to be bad research from a methodological point of view. There are occasion when there is some interesting research findings have emerged, yet when implemented in policy have turned out to be very bad choices. There is an interesting discussion on the same on Freakonomics . The talk highlights the gap between the research objectives and the policy instruments and objectives. Research, in academic parlance is all about methodology. The journals would go at length to enquire on the methodological approaches. Their interest in findings are an outcome of methodology adopted rather than the outcomes themselves. The absence of rigor in research is a disqualification. For instance, if a firm has experienced

The Hand of Finance in the Digital Business Models

- March 29, 2021

The business landscape keeps changing. The only constant perhaps in business would be change. Therefore, there would be a pressing need to re-haul the business models to accommodate the changing environment. As the brick and mortar economy gives way to the digital economy, the firms have to constantly innovate. The firms are configured for a certain topography and when faced with an unfamiliar configuration of assets and resources, they struggle. This perhaps could be a critical point in understanding why very few firms survive for more than half a century. There would be hardly a handful of firms which might record double digit year on year growth over let us say five consecutive years. The landscape that has been predominating over the last couple of decades is something interesting. There is an increase in research and development costs. It is a different story that the returns continue to sub-par with respect to the expenditure on research and development. Yet in the absenc

Of Economics, Right and Left

- March 28, 2021

In recent days, there was news that Amazon is forcing its employees, especially the delivery team to urinate in bottles so as to save time. This is something that has come to be associated with what is wrong with capitalism and its variants and mutations. What Amazon seems to have done is nothing unusual if one goes by past precedents? There are countless stories of excesses by the capitalist enterprises in terms of their treatment of the employees. Instances from China highlight how poor conditions haunt the workers who assemble a Nike shoe to an Apple iPhone. They work in conditions that are pathetic and little time is given even for meeting their biological requirements. Instances of pregnant women being harassed and dismissed in factories from China to Sri Lanka to the Central America to avoid meeting maternity leaves and similar perks too have been well documented. The sweatshops as these get branded have been considered by a school of thought as something unavoidable evil in th

Studying the Knowledge Economy

- March 27, 2021

On April 30, 1993, the WWW became open to public. So the era in the human society could very well be defined before the www era and the www era. The vision of Tim Berners Lee came to fruition on this day. He had visualized the interconnectivity among systems in the early 1980s which came to become the internet in 1989 at CERN. While the first website might have come around in 1991 or so, it was in 1993, the access was open to the public. It heralded into a revolution few could have imagined. As the world entered 1990s, it was believed computers would be here to stay but more of a standalone systems or at the most local area connected networks. The concept of wide area networks would again be a private or rather a club good. In the years following 1993, the expansion of the internet was beyond the expectations of its most ardent advocates. As information or even before it, the data began to pile up, it had become virtually difficult to search for something one needed in the internet.

Reviewing Inflation Targeting

- March 25, 2021

In 2016, India officially adopted inflation targeting as the objective of the monetary policy. With five years elapsed since the Urijit Patel committee submitted its report and later adopted, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) is all set to review the policy. The committee headed by Urijit Patel had suggested 4% as the targeted inflation with of course a permitted band of plus or minus two percent. In other words, the RBI policy would have to ensure the inflation remains within the range of 2-6%. The repo rate was made the benchmark interest rate around which the RBI stance would revolve. Based on the data and evidence, it was believed that 1.25% would be the ideal real repo rate. In other words, at this real repo rate, the economy grow at a level it would have grown if there was full employment. This was something akin to what Philips Curve would have projected around. The four percent inflation mark was perhaps viewed in the Philips Curve terminology as non-accelerating inflation ra

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