Economic Times ⁽²¹⁸⁾

Read full article Economist Deena Khatkhate, who passed away at the age of 92 on September 15 in Bethesda, Maryland, in the US, was an unusual man. By his own description, he was a ‘gadfly’. Early in his youth, he joined the Communist Party of India (CPI), but quickly discovered its internal contradictions and exited it before finishing college. As he grew older, his disillusionment with State control of the economy and his conviction for promarket reforms grew.Between Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati, he saw his thinking aligned with that of the latter. Oddly, however, it was Bhagwati who first discovered Deena as an author. As Bhagwati puts it, when doing his bachelor’s degree in Bombay, he greatly “profited” from Deena’s writings. The two economists became good friends while still in Bombay, and maintained close contact after they moved to two different cities in the US. Phone calls between them grew particularly frequent after the passing away of two of Deena’s dearest friends, V V Bhatt and Anand Chandavarkar. Both had been his colleagues first at the Reserve Bank of…

From being the architect of the open world trading system in the post-Second World War era, today the United States has descended into a state in which it feels it is a victim of that same system.Read full article A trade war is now in progress on two fronts. The United States opened the first front by imposing a 25% tariff on steel imports and 10% tariff on aluminium imports from a large number of its trading partners. That led many damaged parties to take retaliatory actions. China was the first to respond with a 25% tariff on $3 billion worth of food imports from the US. Mexico, Turkey, European Union and Canada followed suit once it became apparent that the US would not grant them the exemption from tariff they had sought. On the second front, the US has exclusively targeted China by slapping 25% tariff on a wide variety of imports worth $34 billion from it. China hit back in this instance as well, imposing 25% tariff on $34 billion worth of imports from the US. The US has…

Read full article As in school education, India has broadly won the battle of numbers in higher education. The Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), which measures the number of students enrolled in higher education institutions (HEIs) as percentage of population aged 18-23 years, has risen from 8.1% in 2000-01to 25.2% in 2016-17. But just as in school education, the battle for quality of education has barely begun. One dimension of the quality is the number of universities recognised globally for the quality of their education and research. How does India do along this dimension? India Absent In the 2018 Times Higher Education (THE) university rankings, no Indian university appears in the top 200 institutions. China has two in the first 100 and another two in the 101-200 category. Among the institutions ranked between 201 and 600, India has six and China 19. Several smaller Asian countries — Hong Kong with three in the top 100 and two in the 101-200 category, South Korea with two in each category, Singapore with two in the top 100, and Taiwan with one university in…

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The Narendra Modi-led government has set the stage by inviting applications for 10 joint secretary positions for terms lasting three to five years.Read full article In an article published in this newspaper in September 2000, ‘ Bringing Competition to Bureaucracy’, I had argued that increased complexity of policymaking required opening up of the top bureaucracy to outside specialists. I recommended, “Positions at the level of joint secretary and above should be filled by fully open competition. To ensure fairness in the process, the UPSC (Union Public Service Commission) can be entrusted with the task of administering the selections. When outside individuals are chosen, they may be brought on fixed terms of a suitable length.” Two decades later, the government has set the stage for this important reform. It has invited applications for 10 joint secretary positions for terms lasting three to five years. Surprisingly, however, the majority of news stories have taken a sceptical view of the GoI announcement. A key criticism has been that this is nothing new; lateral entry, most prominently of economists, has been a feature of our…