ET2001 (14)

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Barriers to Scholarship in India: Trading freely in ideas

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…

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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? 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…

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India at Doha: Doha produced no winners

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. Economic Times, November 21 2001 (Tuesday Debates) 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. The US wanted to include labour standards in the agenda, exclude anti-dumping and peak tariffs from it and retain the existing intellectual property rights regime. EU was vehemently opposed to the “phasing out of subsidies” in agriculture as a negotiating goal and desperately wanted the Singapore issues to be included in the negotiating agenda. Both failed to achieve their respective goals. But victory and defeat in negotiations must be judged differently. The questions we must ask are whether the outcome was in the negotiating party’s interest and whether it had a significant impact on the negotiations. Regarding the first question, I have already argued (ET, November 21, 2001) that the Doha outcome squarely promotes India’s…

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Heed the words of wisdom: 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. Economic Times, October 24 2001 “A FIVE per cent per annum rate of increase in real national income seems entirely feasible on the basis of both the experience of other countries and of India’s own recent past. The great untapped resource of technical and scientific knowledge available to India for the taking is the economic equivalent of the untapped continent available to the United States 150 years ago.” 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. Friedman visited the ministry of finance briefly during 1955 and wrote the memorandum at the invitation…

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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. Economic Times, October 16 2001 IN MY write-up on the Economics Nobel laureates last year, I began by stating that if you wanted to predict future laureates, your best bet was to look at the list of the recipients of the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded every other year to the best American economist below 40 years of age. This year, I successfully applied this model, predicting all three Nobel laureates correctly and surprising a figure no less than Professor Assar Lindbeck, the chairman of the Nobel Committee from 1980 to 1994. Lindbeck and I happened to be together in Manila around the time the prize was announced. Daniel McFadden, the Clark Medal recipient in 1975, was awarded the Nobel Prize last year. Martin Feldstein, the 1977 recipient of the medal, has not appeared prominently on the recent lists of potential Nobel laureates. Lindbeck, who knew the winners in advance, also…

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