ET2012 (12)

Wit and charm were traits of Dr. Abid Hussain, one of India's first practitioners of economic reforms

On June 21, 2012, precisely a year to the day after Suresh Tendulkar passed away, India lost another of its leading light of economic reforms, Dr Abid Hussain.Read full article On June 21, 2012, precisely a year to the day after Suresh Tendulkar passed away, India lost another of its leading light of economic reforms, Dr Abid Hussain. Affectionately known to his friends as Abid Bhai or Abid Sahib, he was a warm, wise and witty gentleman. His conversations and speeches were peppered with humour and memorable anecdotes. Those who came into contact with him or heard him speak invariably came away with interesting material for future conversations. My own first substantive interaction with Abid Sahibfollowed a brilliant speech he delivered at the World Bank in 1990, soon after his arrival in the United States as India’s ambassador. The speech narrated how protectionism and licensing had hurt India.

Continue reading...

Instead of celebrating the fall in poverty numbers, critics within and outside UPA keep carping

Even the popular narrative, which paints the ST as the victims of development, is thoroughly falsified by the evidence.Read full article Evidence that poverty has declined since India began to liberalise in the 1980s, that the acceleration in growth to 8-9% range since the mid-2000s has resulted in accelerated poverty reduction and that these trends hold for each broad social group rather than just the aggregate population is as irrefutable as it gets in social sciences. In the accompanying graphic, taken from a recent study by Megha Mukim and the author, show the proportion of the population below the conventional poverty lines in rural and urban areas, respectively, in 1983, 1987-88, 1993-94 and 2004-05 among the scheduled castes (SC), scheduled tribes (ST) and non-scheduled (NS) castes. The years selected in these figures are those associated with large-scale expenditure surveys conducted by the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO). The NSSO conducts these surveys only approximately once every five years.

Continue reading...

UP election shows that reforms, not the Gandhi name, will win future polls

Rahul and Sonia Gandhi should lend the Prime Minister a hand in moving the reforms forward just as Prime Minister Narasimha Rao had once done.Read full article So much has already been written on the UP elections that one might ask what more is there to say. Yet, the subject is so fascinating that it is hard to resist. Outcomes in state level elections have lately come to depend critically, though surely not exclusively, on the performance of the incumbent government. As Jagdish Bhagwati and I had originally hypothesised in 2004, the post-1991 reforms had demonstrated that rapid improvement in the economic fortunes was possible and had consequently unleashed a revolution of rising expectations. According to this hypothesis, embraced by numerous commentators recently, voters reward performing governments and punish nonperforming ones. Because individuals think of the state government as having the greatest impact on their lives, this effect operates with potency at the level of the state.

Continue reading...