Economic Times ⁽²¹⁸⁾

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. Economic Times, 26 February 2002 ECONOMISTS, with the possible exception of macroeconomists, are ill at ease when asked to pronounce on aggregate employment in the economy. This was driven home to me many years ago when, during a talk by T N Srinivasan of Yale University, I happened to ask what the implications of his model were for employment. “If your question is about the impact on employment in a particular sector,” TN responded, “I can answer it. But if it is about economy-wide employment, I am afraid it falls in the realm of macroeconomics, which I regard as non-economics.” Therefore, when the Planning Commission decided to appoint a Task Force on Employment Opportunities in January1999 with the charge to…

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. Economic Times, January 30, 2002 Capitalizing on the popular support he received for the determined military intervention following the 9-11 attacks, U.S. President George Bush has gone on to take a bold initiative on the economic front: he has made concessions that were unthinkable two years ago at Seattle and successfully launched a new round of trade negotiations. Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee has responded with a similar resolve to the 12-13 attacks on the Indian Parliament and received popular acclaim for it. And he, too, may now want to capitalize on this popularity by taking bold initiatives on the economic front in the forthcoming budget. India’s reform program has come to a standstill in the current year and there is unlikely to be a better opportunity to jumpstart it. Last year, in what was a truly historic budget, Finance Minister Yashwant Sinha had announced…

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. India in the Year 2002: New Year's Day Special 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 the following five questions: 1) What is your assessment of the state of the Indian economy today? 2) What is your wish-list for the coming year? 3) What kind of public-private partnership do you think is most suited to India? 4) Are falling standards in public life affecting our economic performance; if yes, what is the remedy? 5) Is there a future for a society like ours that seems to be getting more and more polarized with each…

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. Economic Times, December 19 2001 THIS past September, I had the delightful experience of participating in a conference on the Indian economy at the University of Michigan’s William Davidson Institute. The conference brought home the realisation that after declining for over two decades scholarship on India was once again beginning to gather momentum in the United States. Scholars from such distinguished universities as Harvard, MIT, Michigan and Carnegie Mellon came to present their ongoing research on India. Study of India by foreign scholars is, of course, nothing new. In his monumental work, Discovery of India, late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru offers a fascinating account of the two-way exchange of scholars that took place between India and China throughout the first millennium. Following the missionaries of emperor Ashoka, who blazed the trail in third century BC, thousands of Indian and Chinese scholars crossed the Gobi desert to reach one another…

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? Economic Times, November 21 2001 “THE only real loser in Doha was India, writes Guy de Jonquieres in an editorial comment in the Financial Times (November, 2001). "It achieved no obvious gains except for the dubious pleasure of delaying the close of the meeting." 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 assessment by de Jonquieres. But did India truly fair so poorly? Consider first the outcome of the summit. I have consistently argued (ET, August 25, 2001) that the launch of a new round with a minimalist agenda that focuses on trade liberalisation is in India’s own best…