Envisioning India – Institute for International Economic Policy (IIEP)

Ashoka Mody on “India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today”

February 10, 2023April 4, 2023Global Governance, India, Past Events

Thursday, March 2nd, 2023
9:00 am EST, 7:30 pm IST
via Zoom

We are pleased to invite you to a joint virtual event with the Sigur Center for Asian Studies. This event will feature panelist remarks from Ashoka Mody, Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in International Economic Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Sadanand Dhume, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and Dr. Jaimini Bhagwati, Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), will provide discussant remarks.

Ashoka Mody is Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in International Economic Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. Previously, he was Deputy Director in the International Monetary Fund’s Research and European Departments. He has also worked at the World Bank, University of Pennsylvania, and AT&T’s Bell Laboratories. Mody has advised governments worldwide on developmental and financial projects and policies, while writing extensively for policy and scholarly audiences.

India Is Broken: A People Betrayed, Independence to Today is a provocative new account of how India moved relentlessly from its hope-filled founding in 1947 to the dramatic economic and democratic breakdowns of today.

When Indian leaders first took control of their government in 1947, they proclaimed the ideals of national unity and secular democracy. Through the first half-century of nation-building, leaders could point to uneven but measurable progress on key goals, and after the mid-1980s, dire poverty declined for a few decades, inspiring declarations of victory. But today, a vast majority of Indians live in a state of underemployment and are one crisis away from despair. Public goods—health, education, cities, air and water, and the judiciary—are in woeful condition. And good jobs will remain scarce as long as that is the case. The lack of jobs will further undermine democracy, which will further undermine job creation. India is Broken provides the most persuasive account available of this economic catch-22.

Challenging prevailing narratives, Mody contends that successive post-independence leaders, starting with its first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, failed to confront India’s true economic problems, seeking easy solutions instead. As popular frustration grew, and corruption in politics became pervasive, India’s economic growth relied increasingly on unregulated finance and environmentally destructive construction. The rise of a violent Hindutva has buried all prior norms in civic life and public accountability.

Combining statistical data with creative media, such as literature and cinema, to create strong, accessible, people-driven narratives, this book is a meditation on the interplay between democracy and economic progress, with lessons extending far beyond India. Mody proposes a path forward that is fraught with its own peril, but which nevertheless offers something resembling hope.

The Envisioning India series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director Remi Jedwab, Associate Professor of Economics and International Affairs, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber.

About the Discussants:

Jaimini Bhagwati is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Chairman of the Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation (IDFC) Asset Management Trustee Company, and Board member of IDFC Limited. Amb. Bhagwati was India’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and India’s Ambassador to the European Union, Belgium, and Luxembourg. He has held senior positions in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Department of Atomic Energy and the World Bank Treasury. His responsibilities at the World Bank included bond funding including execution of over-the-counter derivatives transactions. Between 2013-2018 Amb. Bhagwati was the Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at ICRIER. Amb. Bhagwati was educated at St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi, Tufts University, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

Sadanand Dhume (Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute) is a Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes on South Asian political economy, foreign policy, business, and society, with a focus on India and Pakistan. Mr. Dhume has served as India bureau chief of the Far Eastern Economic Review and as Indonesia correspondent of FEER and the Wall Street Journal – Asia, and is currently a South Asia columnist for the Wall Street Journal. Previously, he was Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the Asia Society in Washington, D.C. He has written articles and op-eds for Foreign Policy, Forbes, Commentary, YaleGlobal, the Washington Post, and other publications. His television appearances include CNN, PBS, BBC World, Al Jazeera International, CNBC Asia and ABC Television. His political travelogue about the rise of radical Islam in Indonesia, My Friend the Fanatic: Travels with a Radical Islamist, has been published in four countries. His upcoming book discusses the rise of a new right in India and its impact on Indian democracy.

Are China and India Likely to Miss the Convergence?

April 13, 2022April 18, 2022Development Economics, International Trade, Past Events

Wednesday, April 13th, 2022
9:00 – 10:30 a.m. EDT / 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. IST
via Zoom

We were pleased to invite you to the sixth webinar in the 2021-2022 Envisioning India series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. This is a platform for dialogue and debate in a series of important discussions.

This event featured Arvind Subramanian, Senior Fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development, and Kalpana Kochhar, Director of Development Policy and Finance at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, provided discussant remarks.

The event reflected on the development experiences, similar and different, of China and India, as well as their prospects going forward.

The Envisioning India series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director Jay Shambaugh, Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber.

About the Speaker:

Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) to the Government of India between 2014 and 2018, is now Senior Fellow, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development. Previously, he was Professor at Ashoka University (2020-21), taught at the Harvard Kennedy School (2018-2020), and was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (2011-2014). Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers in 2011. As CEA, he oversaw the publication of the annual Economic Survey of India, which became a widely read document on Indian economic policy and development. For example, the 2018 Survey had 20 million views from over 190 countries in its first year of publication. Among the major ideas and policies he initiated and helped implement were a simplified goods and services tax (GST), attempts to tackle the Twin Balance Sheet challenge, creating the financial and digital platform for connectivity (the so-called JAM trinity), charting a new fiscal framework, and Universal Basic Income. Announcing his departure as CEA, the former Finance Minister, Mr. Arun Jaitley wrote a Facebook post, Thank You, Arvind. His award-winning book Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance was published in September 2011 and had printed 130,000 copies world-wide in four languages. His latest, best-selling book, reflecting on his time in India, “Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi-Jaitley Economy,” was published by Penguin Random House in December 2018.

Joshua Felman is currently the head of JH Consulting, providing economic advice to academics and policy practitioners. Before that, he was for many years a senior official at the IMF, where he specialized in Asia and especially India.

His familiarity with India started in the 1980s, when he first began analyzing the economy, as it started to open up to the outside world. During the boom of the mid-2000s, he moved to Delhi to take charge of the IMF’s India office. And in 2015 he returned to India to work for several years in the Office of the Chief Economic Adviser in the Ministry of Finance.

Mr. Felman also has extensive familiarity with crises. During the East Asian crisis, he was posted to the IMF’s Jakarta office, where he worked closely with the authorities as they reconstructed a shattered financial system, following the collapse of more than 200 banks. Then, he led the IMF’s operations in the Philippines, as they sought to overcome the lingering effects of the crisis. And after that he led the IMF’s work in Korea, when that country was suffering from a household debt crisis.

Following the Global Financial Crisis, he was appointed Assistant Director in the IMF’s Research Department, where he worked closely with Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard, analyzing the implications for the global economy — and also for our understanding of economics.

Mr. Felman did his graduate work at Oxford University in England.

About the Discussants:

Dr. Kalpana Kochhar is Director, Development Policy and Finance at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prior to taking this position, she spent 33 years at the IMF, ending her career there as the Director of the Human Resources Department of the IMF between 2016 and 2021. She has also held positions as Deputy Director in the Asia and Pacific Department of the IMF where she worked on India, China, Korea, Japan and several other Asian countries, and in the Strategy, Policy and Review Department where she launched the IMF’s work on the macroeconomic implications of gender inequality and women’s economic empowerment. Between 2010 and 2012, she was seconded to the World Bank as the Chief Economist for the South Asia Region of the World Bank. Ms. Kochhar’s research interests and publications have been on emerging markets including India and China, and jobs and inclusive growth, gender and inequality issues, structural reforms, and regional integration in South Asia. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Economics from Brown University and an M.A. in Economics from Delhi School of Economics in India. She has a B.A in Economics from Madras University in India.

David Dollar is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and host of the Brookings trade podcast, Dollar&Sense. He is a leading expert on China’s economy and U.S.-China economic relations. From 2009 to 2013, Dollar was the U.S. Treasury’s economic and financial emissary to China, based in Beijing, facilitating the macroeconomic and financial policy dialogue between the United States and China. Prior to joining Treasury, Dollar worked 20 years for the World Bank, serving as country director for China and Mongolia, based in Beijing (2004-2009). His other World Bank assignments focused on Asian economies, including South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh, and India. Dollar also worked in the World Bank’s research department. His publications focus on economic reform in China, globalization, and economic growth. He also taught economics at University of California Los Angeles, during which time he spent a semester in Beijing at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1986. He has a doctorate in economics from New York University and a bachelor’s in Chinese history and language from Dartmouth College.

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Understanding Poverty Dynamics and the Impact of the Pandemic

February 24, 2022March 23, 2022COVID-19, India, Past Events, Ultra Poverty

Wednesday, March 2nd, 2022
8:30 – 10:00 a.m. EST / 7:00 – 8:30 p.m. IST
via Zoom

This event featured Professor Anirudh Krishna of Duke University to discuss “Understanding Poverty Dynamics and the Impact of the Pandemic.” Dr. Sekhar Bonu (NITI Aayog, India) and Christian Oldiges (UNDP) provided discussant remarks.

In this talk, Professor Anirudh Krishna discussed how income- and consumption-based measures are handy but provide an ephemeral and incomplete assessment of people’s underlying poverty status. Measures based on assets and capabilities more reliably reflect people’s structural situations, providing a better handle on sustained earning ability. He examined changes in longer-term poverty over the Covid-19 pandemic using the Stages-of-Progress method. He selected locations where he had collected household-level data several years earlier. On-the-ground surveys in one rural part undertaken in July and August 2021 show that while households’ incomes fell sharply, there was no accretion of longer-term poverty. In urban slums, however, structural poverty increased; assets and capabilities are considerably eroded. Mounting the appropriate response requires a fine-grained approach; because of differences in local economies, state and national averages are misleading.

Abstract: Income- and consumption-based measures are handy but provide an ephemeral and incomplete assessment of people’s underlying poverty status. Measures based on assets and capabilities more reliably reflect people’s structural situations, providing a better handle on sustained earning ability. We examine changes in longer-term poverty over the Covid-19 pandemic using the Stages-of-Progress method. We select locations where we had collected household-level data several years earlier. On-the-ground surveys in one rural part undertaken in July and August 2021 show that while households’ incomes fell sharply, there was no accretion of longer-term poverty. In urban slums, however, structural poverty increased; assets and capabilities are considerably eroded. Mounting the appropriate response requires a fine-grained approach; because of differences in local economies, state and national averages are misleading.

About the Speaker

Anirudh Krishna (PhD in Government, Cornell University, 2000; Master’s in Economics, Delhi University, 1980) is the Edgar T. Thompson Professor of Public Policy and Political Science at Duke University. His research of the past 25 years investigates how poor communities and individuals cope with the structural and personal constraints that result in poverty and powerlessness. Krishna has written more than seventy journal articles, and has eight books, including One Illness Away: Why People Become Poor and How they Escape Poverty and The Broken Ladder: The Paradox and the Potential of India’s One-Billion. For this body of work, Krishna was awarded an honorary doctorate by Uppsala University, Sweden, and received other academic awards. Before returning to academia, Krishna spent 14 years with the Indian Administrative Service, managing diverse rural and urban development initiatives. He has consulted with the World Bank, the United Nations, national governments, and non-government organizations.

About the Discussants

Dr. Sekhar Bonu joined as the Director General of Development Monitoring and Evaluation Office (DMEO) in April 2019. The Government established DMEO in September 2015 as an attached office of the NITI Aayog to fulfil the monitoring and evaluation mandates assigned to NITI Aayog. Before joining NITI Aayog, Dr. Bonu worked with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) in Manila for 15 years. At ADB, he worked in health, urban infrastructure development and regional cooperation, mainly in South Asia. Dr. Bonu worked in the Indian Administrative Services and served as a civil servant in Rajasthan between 1987-2003, among others, as district magistrate, director of primary and secondary education, chief executive officer of state-owned Enterprises. Dr. Sekhar Bonu has a PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is a Chartered Financial Analyst charter holder. He has a wide range of research and operational interests and has published in peer-review journals.

Christian Oldiges is a Development Economist, currently serving as Policy Specialist at the Inclusive Growth team of UNDP/BPPS, New York. He brings more than 10 years of experience in the fields of development economics, policy advocacy and social protection. Previously, as Director of Policy Research at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI), University of Oxford, he has been directly involved in developing national MPIs with governments in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In postdoctoral studies at Oxford, he has written about how 270 million people moved out of multidimensional poverty in India within a decade, poverty reduction and its interlinkages with COVID-19, migration, and conflict, as well as on workfare programs and food security in India. He holds a PhD in Economics (Heidelberg University, Germany) and has studied at Hindu College and the Delhi School of Economics, Delhi University.

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Equitable Action for Climate Change

February 9, 2022March 16, 2022Climate Adaptation, India, Past Events

Wednesday, February 9th, 2022
8:30 – 10:00 a.m. EST / 6:30 – 9:00 p.m. IST
via Zoom

We were pleased to invite you to the fifth webinar in the 2021-2022 Envisioning India series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

This event featured Professor Jyoti K. Parikh, Executive Director of Integrated Research and Action for Development, and Dr. Kirit S. Parikh, Chairman of Integrated Research and Action for Development, to discuss “Equitable Action for Climate Change.” Amar Bhattacharya, Senior Fellow at the Global Economy & Development Program at Brookings Institution, and Shreekant Gupta, Professor at the Delhi School of Economics, provided discussant remarks.

In this talk, Professor Jyoti K. Parikh and Dr. Kirit S. Parikh showed that India can live within its 1.50 C budget without much loss in economic growth or consumer welfare. They show this under the assumption that technical progress in renewables and battery costs take place as is expected and that climate finance and access to technology at reasonable cost are available. They discussed various pathways that India can follow with different outcomes and highlight the roles of technology, behavioral change and finance in achieving them.

They further argued that climate science shows that due to lifetimes of over 100 years of CO2, global warming is a function of the stock of GHGs in the atmosphere, i.e. accumulated emissions over a pathway. Thus the responsibility for climate change of different countries should be based on their cumulated emissions since 1990. This should be the indicators for climate discourse and not just on their annual emissions. An annual fee for parking their emissions in the global space can encourage countries to delay their emissions as well as promote negative emissions. A $1 annual fee per tonne of CO2 space occupied from all countries can collect US $700 billion per year. They suggested that if a substantial portion is given back to countries as compensation for their climate action, it should make such a scheme acceptable to all.

About the Speakers:

Professor Jyoti K. Parikh is the Executive Director of Integrated Research and Action for Development (IRADe), New Delhi. She was a Member of the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change–India and is a recipient of Nobel Peace Prize awarded to IPCC authors in 2007. She served as the senior professor and Acting Director of Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai 1986-03. IIASA, Austria for 8 years (1980-86, 76-78) and Planning Commission, as senior energy consultant at New Delhi (1978-80).

She has served as energy consultant to the World Bank, the U.S. Department of Energy, EEC, Brussels and UN agencies such as UNIDO, FAO, UNU, and UNESCO, Environment Consultant to UNDP, World Bank and so on. She worked as an advisor to various ministries for Government of India.

She obtained her M.Sc. from University of California, Berkeley, in 1964 and Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from University of Maryland, College Park in 1967. She has guided Sixteen Ph.D./Masters theses in energy, environment and climate change area and given lectures in more than 40 countries around the world. The topics ranged from vulnerability and adaptation of agriculture, forestry, power sector, construction sector, and carbon emission baselines for power, transport, cement and steel sector.

Her publications include nearly 200 project research papers and 25 books and monographs in the area of energy economics, climate change and modeling, energy technology assessment, rural energy, power sector, environment economics, natural resource management and climate change.

Dr Kirit S. Parikh is the Chairman of Integrated Research and Action for Development, IRADe, a non-profit think tank that works on policies in the areas of energy, climate change, urban issues, agriculture and poverty. He was honored with Padma Bushan (third-highest Civilian Award) by the President of India in March 2009 and shared the Nobel Prize in 2007 given to IPCC authors. He was a Member of the Economic Advisory Councils (EAC) of five Prime Ministers of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Chandra Shekhar, V.P.Singh and Rajiv Gandhi. He was Member of Planning Commission (2004-09) in charge of Energy, Water and Perspective Planning. He was the principal architect of India’s official Integrated Energy Policy.

He obtained his MTech from IIT-Kharagpur, Doctor of Science in Civil Engineering from MIT and also an S.M. in Economics from MIT. He has been a Professor of Economics since 1967 and was the founding Director of IGIDR. He has authored, co-authored and edited 30 books in the areas of planning, energy and power systems, energy modeling and planning, energy policy, energy economics, inclusive growth, and strategies for low carbon development.

About the Discussants:

Amar Bhattacharya is a Senior Fellow at the Global Economy and Development Program at Brookings Institution, Visiting Professor in Practice at the London School of Economics and Co-Lead of the Sustainable Growth and Finance Initiative of the New Climate Economy under the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. His focus areas are the global economy, sustainable finance, global governance, and the links between climate and development, including on the role of sustainable infrastructure. He co-led the Independent Expert Group on Climate Finance commissioned by the UN Secretary General. From April 2007 until September 2014 he was Director of the Group of 24, an intergovernmental group of developing country Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors. Prior to taking up his position with the G24, Mr. Bhattacharya had a long-standing career in the World Bank. His last position was Senior Advisor to the President on the Bank’s international engagements and Head of the International Policy and Partnership Group. He completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Delhi and Brandeis University and his graduate education at Princeton University.

Professor Shreekant Gupta is Professor, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He is also President, Indian Society for Ecological Economics and Associate Editor, Indian Economic Review. His areas of research and teaching are environmental economics, public economics, environment and development and climate change economics. In addition to Delhi University he has also taught at the National University of Singapore, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Nazarbayev University.

He received his PhD in Economics from the University of Maryland College Park in 1993, MA Economics from Delhi School of Economics (1982) and BA (Hons) Economics from Shri Ram College of Commerce (1980). He was Fulbright Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2002) and Shastri Fellow at Queens University, Canada (2001).

Prior to joining Delhi School of Economics in 1997, he was Fellow, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi (1993-95) where he headed the Environmental Policy Cell. He has also worked as an environmental economist at the World Bank at Washington DC and as a career economist in the Indian government (Indian Economic Service cadre). His policy experience includes Director of National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi. He is a Lead Author of the forthcoming Sixth Assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and was also a coordinating lead author of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report.

Professor Shreekant Gupta’s Google Scholar profile

Professor Shreekant Gupta’s Delhi School of Economics profile

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Taking on China – the Imperative and agenda for India

October 31, 2021March 16, 2022Development Economics, India, International Trade, International Trade Events, Past Events

Wednesday, November 17th, 2021
8:30 – 10:00 am EDT / 7:00 – 8:30 pm IST

This was the third webinar in the 2021-2022 Envisioning India series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy, a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The Envisioning India series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director Jay Shambaugh, Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The third event of the 2021-2022 series featured Ambassador (Retd) Gautam Bambawale (Distinguished Professor, Symbiosis University, Pune, India) and Dr. Ganesh Natarajan (5F World and Lighthouse Communities) to discuss “Taking on China – The Imperative and Agenda for India.” Manjeet Kripalani (Gateway House) and Dr. Jaimini Bhagwati (CSEP) provided discussant remarks.

India and China were more or less comparable in terms of economy size and global influence in the past but the rapid growth of China in the last five decades has taken China to near super power status and an economy which is over four times the size of India (14 trillion vs 3 trillion USD). This has seen increasing belligerence from China in the last year or so and we believe that India must act and act on multiple fronts if we are to retain our position on the High Table of global affairs.

Six senior members of the Pune International Center in India came together over a one year period in 2021-21 to produce a book Rising to the China Challenge: Winning Through Strategic Patience and Economic Growth that has been recently published and widely read in political, diplomatic and economic circles. Our submission is that there is a need for significant policy responses and diplomatic moves on the one hand and a renewed focus on restoring economic symmetry with China on the other to restore some level of equilibrium between the two nations. Two of the authors, Ambassador (Retd) Gautam Bambawale and Dr. Ganesh Natarajan, will present the book.

In the talk, three areas of great importance will be addressed.
1. Redressing the economic imbalance by focusing on industry sectors where India has the opportunity to redress the huge disparity that currently exists in domestic independence and global position, sectors where we have the imperative and the ability to catch up and build much higher values in the years to come and finally areas where India can indeed take the lead and build jobs for the future.
2. Diplomatic responses needed from India by having new models of engagement with global nations of importance, China’s neighbors and India’s own neighbors to counter China’s growing dominance in world affairs.
3. India’s own domestic and international imperatives and policies and programs that are essential to set India on a path of sustained and significant growth as a democratic force of significance to the world.

About the Speakers:

Ambassador (Retd) Gautam Bambawale was a member of the Indian Foreign Service from 1984 to 2018. He was India’s Ambassador to Bhutan, Pakistan and China. Bambawale was stationed in Washington DC in 2004-07 during the Indo-US nuclear deal which transformed ties between the two countries. He has been India’s first Consul General in Guangzhou (China) 2007-09. He was Director of the Indian Cultural Centre, Berlin 1994-98. Ambassador Bambawale worked in the Prime Minister’s Office 2002-04. At the Ministry of External Affairs he was Joint Secretary for East Asia from 2009-2014. Bambawale has dealt with China for 15 years of his 34 year diplomatic career. He is currently Distinguished Professor, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Symbiosis International University, Pune.

Dr. Ganesh Natarajan is Chairman and Co-Founder of 5F World and Lighthouse Communities. He is an investor and mentor to digital platforms and AI entrepreneurs in India and USA. Ganesh is a Board Director of SBI, Hinduja Global Solutions and Asian Venture Philanthropy Network and is Chairman of Honeywell Automation India. Ganesh is an alumnus of IIT Bombay and Harvard Business School and a recipient of IIT’s Distinguished Alumnus Award.

About the Discussants:

Manjeet Kripalani is Executive Director of Gateway House. Prior to the founding of Gateway House, she was India Bureau chief of Businessweek magazine from 1996 to 2009. During her extensive career in journalism (Businessweek, Worth and Forbes magazines, New York), she has won several awards, including the Gerald Loeb Award, the George Polk Award, Overseas Press Club and Daniel Pearl Awards. Kripalani was the 2006-07 Edward R. Murrow Press Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, New York, which inspired her to found Gateway House. Her political career spans being the deputy press secretary to Steve Forbes during his first run in 1995-96 as Republican candidate for U.S. President in New Jersey, to being press secretary for the Lok Sabha campaign for independent candidate Meera Sanyal in 2008 and 2014 in Mumbai. Kripalani holds two bachelor’s degrees from Bombay University (Bachelor of Law, Bachelor of Arts in English and History) and a master’s degree in International Affairs from Columbia University, New York. She sits on the executive board of Gateway House and is a member of the Rotary Club of Bombay.

Dr. Jaimini Bhagwati is currently a Distinguished Fellow at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Chairman of the Infrastructure Development Finance Corporation (IDFC) Asset Management Trustee Company and Board member of IDFC Limited. Dr. Bhagwati was India’s High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and India’s Ambassador to the European Union, Belgium and Luxembourg. He has held senior positions in the Indian Ministry of External Affairs, Ministry of Finance, Department of Atomic Anergy and the World bank Treasury. His responsibilities at the World Bank included bond funding including execution of over-the-counter derivatives transactions. Between 2013-2018 Dr. Bhagwati was the Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at ICRIER. Dr. Bhagwati was educated at St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi, Tufts University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), USA.

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India’s Economy in a Post-Pandemic World

September 26, 2021March 16, 2022Development Economics, India, International Trade, Past Events

Wednesday, October 20th, 2021
9:00 – 10:30 a.m. EDT / 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. IST
via Zoom

We were pleased to invite you to the second webinar in the 2021-2022 Envisioning India series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. This was a platform for dialogue and debate, and we invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The Envisioning India series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Director Jay Shambaugh, Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The second event featured Dr. Sajjid Z. Chinoy, J.P. Morgan’s Chief India Economist, discussing “India’s Economy in a Post-Pandemic World.” Dr. Poonam Gupta (Director General of NCAER) and Dr. Shankar Acharya (former Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India) provided discussant remarks.

What is the nature of India’s recovery from COVID? Where are pressures most evident and what opportunities has COVID-19 thrown up? Why is inflation so sticky in the wake of ostensible slack? What role can monetary and fiscal policy play in the near term? Where will India’s growth come from in a post-pandemic world: Consumption? Investment? Exports? Public Investment? Finally, what do we know about India’s underlying growth potential, particularly investment and productivity growth? Our distinguished speaker and discussants will address these and related issues in this second talk of 2021-22 on Envisioning India.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Sajjid Z. Chinoy is J.P. Morgan’s Chief India Economist and a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. He served as a member of the Advisory Council to India’s 15th Finance Commission and has previously served on several RBI committees and task-forces (Offshore Rupee Markets, Secondary Market for Corporate Loans) including the RBI’s “Expert Committee to Revise and Strengthen the Monetary Policy Framework” that proposed inflation targeting in 2014. He was a consultant to the FRBM Review Committee that proposed a new fiscal anchor in India in 2016. He has been ranked by Asset Magazine as one of the best individuals in fixed income research in India for every year since 2014. Sajjid has authored several publications on the Indian economy including co-editing a book on Indian economic reform with Dr. Anne O. Krueger, former First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF. He has previously worked at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and McKinsey & Company, and holds a Ph.D. in Economics from Stanford University.

About the Discussants:

Dr. Poonam Gupta is the Director General of NCAER. Before joining NCAER, she was Lead Economist, Global Macro and Market Research, International Finance Corporation (IFC); and Lead Economist for India at the World Bank. Her prior appointments include the Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP); Professor at Indian Council for Research on International Economics Relations (ICRIER); Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics; and, Economist at the International Monetary Fund. Her research has been published in leading scholarly journals and featured in The Economist, Financial Times, and Wall Street Journal. She holds a PhD in International Economics from the University of Maryland, USA and a Masters in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.

Dr. Shankar Acharya is one of India’s leading policy economists. As the longest-serving Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India (1993-2001), he was deeply involved in the economic reforms of the 1990s and served three successive governments of the Congress, the United Front and the National Democratic Alliance. He also served as Member of the Securities and Exchange Board of India (1997-2000), Member, Twelfth Finance Commission (2004) and Member, National Security Advisory Board (2009-2013). He was non-executive Chairman of Kotak Mahindra Bank for 12 years (2006-2018), one of India’s newest and most successful private commercial banks. He also served as a member of the Reserve Bank of India’s Advisory Committee on Monetary Policy (2005-2016). Earlier, he worked in the World Bank (1971-1982 and 1991-1993), where he led the World Development Report team for 1979 and was Research Adviser to the Bank. He returned to India in 1982 as Senior Fellow, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), before joining the Government as Economic Adviser, Ministry of Finance (1985-90).

Since 2001 he has been Honorary Professor at the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER). He has authored eleven books (mostly on Indian economic issues and policies) and numerous scholarly articles in academic journals. His eight most recent books are Essays on Macroeconomic Policy and Growth in India (2006, Oxford University Press, Delhi); Can India Grow without Bharat? (2007, Academic Foundation, Delhi); India and Global Crisis (2009, Academic Foundation, Delhi); (edited with Rakesh Mohan) India’s Economy: Performance and Challenges (2010, Oxford University Press, Delhi; paperback edition, 2011); India after the Global Crisis (2012, Orient BlackSwan, Delhi), Towards Economic Crisis (2012–14) and Beyond (2015, Academic Foundation, Delhi), India’s Economy 2015-2000 (2021, Academic Foundation, Delhi) and An Economist at Home and Abroad (Harper Collins, 2021, Delhi).

Dr Acharya did his B.A. from Oxford, graduating with First Class honours in Politics, Philosophy and Economics in 1967, before proceeding to Harvard University to earn his Ph.D. in Economics in 1972.

Getting India to the Green Frontier

September 11, 2021March 16, 2022Climate Adaptation, Development Economics, India, Past Events

Wednesday, September 29, 2021
9:00 – 10:30 a.m. EDT / 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. IST

This was the eleventh webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, a platform for dialogue and debate co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy.

The talk focused on the Getting to the Green Frontier Development Model for India that has been proposed by Mr. Sinha and laid out a Net-Zero Pathway for India in the 21st century. He also discussed climate finance options and India’s expectations from the COP 26 conference in Glasgow in November this year.

About the Speaker:

Jayant Sinha, Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Finance, Parliament of India and BJP Lok Sabha Member of Parliament from Hazaribagh, Jharkhand. Mr. Sinha is a second term Member of Parliament from Jharkhand, India. Mr. Sinha won his Lok Sabha elections in 2014 and 2019 with record margins. As Chairperson of the Standing Committee on Finance, Mr. Sinha leads the 31 member Parliamentary panel that has oversight of the Ministries of Finance, Corporate Affairs, Statistics & Program Implementation, and the Niti Aayog (the government planning agency). In addition, the panel has Parliamentary responsibility for the Reserve Bank of India, the Securities & Exchange Board of India, the Insolvency & Bankruptcy Board, and the Insurance and Pension regulatory authorities. Mr. Sinha is very active in Parliament having opened the debate on India’s Annual Budget on multiple occasions as well as by introducing important Private Member Bills. In the 2021 Budget session, he introduced the Climate Change (Net Zero Carbon) Private Member Bill 2021.

Previously, Mr. Sinha served on India’s Council of Ministers from 2014 to 2019; first, as the Minister of State for Finance and then as the Minister of State for Civil Aviation. During his time as a Minister, Mr. Sinha gained wide recognition as an innovative and results-oriented policymaker with singular successes ranging from piloting the legislation that brought in India’s game-changing bankruptcy code to establishing India’s sovereign wealth fund (the National Infrastructure Investment Fund) to privatizing multiple airports under an entirely new regulatory framework. As Aviation Minister, Mr. Sinha was instrumental in upgrading safety and security across India’s fast-growing aviation system. He launched the UDAN Regional Connectivity Scheme which expanded the number of operational airports in India by 50% in just three years. Mr. Sinha also implemented several major digital initiatives such as the DigitalSky Drone policy and the DigiYatra digital traveler program.

Prior to his career in public service, Mr. Sinha was Partner at Omidyar Network (ON) and the Managing Director of Omidyar Network India Advisors, where he led overall investment strategy and operations in India from 2009 to 2013. At Omidyar, Mr. Sinha made venture capital investments in a variety of companies including two unicorns: Quikr and DailyHunt. Before joining Omidyar Network, Mr. Sinha was Managing Director at Courage Capital Management, where he led Global Technology and India-related investing for a billion dollar global special situations hedge fund. Mr. Sinha joined Courage Capital in 2006 after twelve years with McKinsey & Company, where he was a Partner in the Boston and Delhi offices, and co-led the Global Software & Services Practice.

As a global thought leader, Mr. Sinha has been published in the Financial Times, Times of India, Economic Times, Indian Express, Business Standard, Harvard Business Review, and the McKinsey Quarterly. He has pioneered new thinking on platform-based businesses, innovation-driven entrepreneurship, Climate Change, and sustainable development. Mr. Sinha’s Getting to the Green Frontier development model is gaining broad acceptance as the Net Zero pathway for India in the 21st century.

Mr. Sinha has an MBA with Distinction from the Harvard Business School, an MS in Energy Management & Policy from the University of Pennsylvania, and a BTech with Distinction from the IIT Delhi. He was awarded the Distinguished Alumni award from IIT Delhi in 2015.

About the Discussants:

Mohua Mukherjee served for over 25 years in many roles at the World Bank in Washington DC, primarily on investment projects. Her experience with World Bank lending spans 9 different sectors in 44 countries. Her most recent responsibility at the World Bank was heading the innovative US$1 billion Solar Program for Govt of India, which covered rooftop solar, large-scale solar parks and dedicated transmission lines to transport solar energy from one part of the country to the rest. She is also an Advisor with the India Smart Grid Forum. Previously, she worked pro bono for two years to support the establishment of the International Solar Alliance and served as their Program Ambassador. Mohua retired early from the World Bank in 2017 due to family reasons, and today she works as a Consultant for various international organizations, including the World Bank.

She also worked as an investment banker during a four year sabbatical in Nairobi, Kenya, where she successively headed the Corporate Finance Departments of Citibank and ABN AMRO Bank. Mohua has a Bachelors and Masters degree in Economics and an MBA, all from Boston University on an academic scholarship, and she has a Certificate in Public Private Partnerships from Harvard University.

Nitin Desai has had a long and distinguished career in the Government of India and the United Nations. He has also worked for some time in private industry and taught at two UK Universities.

In the Government of India Mr. Desai worked at senior levels in the Planning Commission from 1973 to 1987. From 1988 to 1990 Mr. Desai was the Chief Economic Adviser and Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs in the Ministry of Finance.

Mr. Desai joined the United Nations in 1990 as Deputy Secretary General of the Rio Earth Summit and was Under Secretary General from 1993 to 2003 dealing with economic and social affairs. Mr. Desai’s international involvement has been most prominent in the development and promotion of sustainable development as the goal of policy, first as Senior Adviser and key draftsman for “Our Common Future”, the Report of the Brundtland Commission on Environment and Development and then as Deputy Secretary-General for the Rio Earth Summit, the manager of the Commission on Sustainable Development for its first decade and as the Secretary General for the Johannesburg Summit. He was also responsible for the organisation of the Copenhagen Summit on Social Development, the Monterrey Summit on Finance for Development and many other global events.

After his retirement from the UN Mr. Desai continued to remain a Special Adviser to the UN Secretary General for Internet governance and chaired the Advisory Group that organizes the annual UN Internet Governance Forum till December 2010.

He chaired a Committee on Venture Capital and Technology Innovation set up by the Planning Commission in 2005-06 and the Advisory Panel on Transparency Standards set up by the Reserve Bank of India in 2007-08. He is also the Indian co-chair with Lord Chris Patten of the Indo-UK Roundtable set up by the two governments. He is a member of the Council on Climate Change chaired by the Prime Minister and was a member of the National Security Advisory Board 2008-10. He is also a member of the News Broadcasting Standards Authority.

He is an Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. In India he is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) and Honorary Professor at the Indian Council for Research in International Economic Relations (ICRIER). He is connected with the governing bodies of several NGOs and research institutions including the Institute of Economic Growth whose Governing Body he chairs. He is a trustee of Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) International. He writes a monthly column for the Business Standard, an Indian daily.

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India’s Trade Policy: Past, Present, Future

April 22, 2021April 13, 2022India, International Economic Policy, International Trade, James Foster, Past Events

Wednesday, June 2nd, 2021
9:00am – 10:30 am EDT
via Zoom

This was the ninth webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The ninth event featured Harsha Vardhana Singh, Chairman, IKDHVAJ Advisers LLP and Former Deputy Director-General at WTO, discussing “India’s Trade Policy: Past, Present, Future.” Dean Alyssa Ayres (GWU), Judith Dean (Brandeis), and Rajeev Kher provided discussant remarks. IIEP Co-Director Jay Shambaugh moderated.

India liberalised its trade regime in 1991 as part of a larger reform initiative. India’s trade surged and the economy grew to become the world’s 5th largest in 2019. Since 2018, India’s trade regime has become more protectionist with an aim to stem the trade deficit and promote domestic industry. India’s concern with a high trade deficit, in particular with China and ASEAN, has also impacted its approach to trade agreements. More recently, India opted out of RCEP. In 2020, India announced a new program of self-reliance (Atmanirbharta). Some fear that this is a signal of turning further inward. Yet India’s stated goals are to attract more FDI – especially as an alternative to China, enter global value chains, and encourage exports. How should we assess India’s recent policy changes and reconcile these shifts? What are the likely pathways for India’s future trade stance? Will India seek to substantively enhance growing US-India trade ties? Will its renewed interest in trade agreements with others such as the EU move forward giving some substantive results? Is it permanently out of RCEP? What steps by other nations could facilitate India’s increased trade engagements with major economies? What choices India makes will affect India and the world. Our distinguished speakers addressed these and related issues in this 9th talk on Envisioning India.

About the speakers:

Harsha Vardhana Singh is Chairman, IKDHVAJ Advisers LLP, a consulting firm working on trade policy, industrial policy and regulatory issues. He has been a member of High-Level Expert Groups within India and abroad that inter alia address policy concerns related to trade policy, industrial policy, competition and regulatory policy. Earlier, he has worked at the GATT/WTO for 20 years (eight years as Deputy Director General, WTO), was Secretary Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, Executive Director of Brookings India, Senior Fellow at Think Tanks in Switzerland and Canada, taught at Universities in the US and China, and been Chair/secretary of GATT/WTO Dispute Settlement Panels. He has a Ph.D. in Economics from University of Oxford, where he went as a Rhodes Scholar from India in 1979.

As WTO Deputy Director General, he had direct responsibility for Trade in Services, Trade in Agriculture, Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, Trade and Environment, Technical Barriers to Trade, Chairman of the Groups on E-Commerce Program and the Cotton Development Agenda. As Economic Advisor and Secretary of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, he was part of the small group of officials that conceptualized and implemented a number of telecom sector policy reforms, resulting in large growth in the sector.

His recent engagements include: Senior Fellow, Council on Emerging Market Enterprises, The Fletcher School, Tufts University, USA (ongoing); Member of the Advisory Board of UNCTAD’s “Transnational Corporations Journal” (ongoing); Member of the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) International Trade Policy Council (ongoing); Non-Resident Senior Fellow, South Asia Center, Atlantic Council (ongoing); Senior Research Affiliate, Berkeley APEC Study Center, US (ongoing); Member, High Level Advisory Group on International Trade, established by Government of India; Member, Competition Law Review Committee to revise the Competition Act, established by Government of India; Member, Expert Enquiry Committee Set Up by UK All Party Parliamentary Group on Trade Out of Poverty on “Can the Commonwealth help countries trade out of poverty?”; Member, High Level Board of Experts on the Future of Trade Governance, set up by Bertelsmann Stiftung; Senior Adviser to the Global Commission on Internet Governance on the topic, “Governance of International Trade and the Internet: Existing and Evolving Regulatory Systems”; Senior Advisor, Asia Society Policy Institute, on the topic “India and APEC: Charting a Path to Membership.”

Alyssa Ayres was appointed Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University effective February 1, 2021. Ayres is a foreign policy practitioner and award-winning author with senior experience in the government, nonprofit, and private sectors. From 2013 to 2021, she was senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), where she remains an adjunct senior fellow. From 2010 to 2013 Ayres served as deputy assistant secretary of state for South Asia. During her tenure at the State Department in the Barack Obama administration, she covered all issues across a dynamic region of 1.3 billion people at the time (Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Maldives, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and provided policy direction for four U.S. embassies and four consulates.

Her work focuses primarily on India’s role in the world and on U.S. relations with South Asia in the larger Indo-Pacific. Her book about India’s rise on the world stage, Our Time Has Come: How India is Making Its Place in the World, was published by Oxford University Press in January 2018 and was selected by the Financial Times for its “Summer 2018: Politics” list. An updated paperback edition was released in 2019. She served as the project director for the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S.-India relations, and, from 2014 to 2016, as the project director for an initiative on the new geopolitics of China, India, and Pakistan supported by the MacArthur Foundation.

Judith Dean is the Professor of International Economics in the Brandeis International Business School. Her research focuses on international trade and economic development. Much of her work examines the relationship between trade and the environment. In a series of empirical studies using Chinese data, she has been exploring the possibility that trade growth, foreign investment and production fragmentation may have beneficial effects on the environment. In other work, she studies global value chain trade, non-tariff barriers. and trade preferences for developing countries. Her new work on India explores the impact of trade liberalization on Indian poverty. Judy came to Brandeis from the US International Trade Commission (USITC) where she was a Senior International Economist in the Research Division of the Office of Economics. Prior to joining the USITC, Judy was Associate Professor of Economics at SAIS, Johns Hopkins University, and Assistant Professor at Bowdoin College. She has been a consultant to the World Bank and the OECD, and a Visiting Scholar at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi, India. She has also helped facilitate research collaboration for the USITC with Tsinghua University and the India Development Foundation. Judy was named one of six Visiting Scholars in the Clayton Yeutter International Trade Program, University of Nebraska, 2012-13. In 2018, she gave the 4th Annual John Mason Lecture at Gordon College in 2018. Judy recently completed many years of service on the Board of Directors of World Relief, and the Board of Trustees of Gordon College.

Rajeev Kher superannuated as Commerce Secretary, Government of India in 2015 after a career of 35 years in the Indian Administrative Service. He then worked as a Member in the Competition Appellate Tribunal for two years. He has now associated himself with some leading think tanks. He also advises a Private Equity. His field of experience includes broad areas of International Trade and Commerce, Competition Law and Policy, Sustainable Development Policy, Environmental Management, Global Governance, particularly with reference to trade and environment and Decentralised Governance. He has held several important assignments in the Central Government and the State Government of UP. Some of the more prominent once include a tenure of 9 years in the Department of Trade and Commerce, a stint of 8 years in the Ministry of Environment and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi and senior level assignments in the Departments of Renewable Energy, Finance, Planning and Science and Technology, besides administering two very challenging charges of District Magistrates. He is credited with bringing in the first comprehensive Foreign Trade Policy for India. His vision on international trade issues has been well respected by the stakeholder community within India and abroad. He led negotiations on behalf of his country for Trade Agreements with major blocks such as EU, EFTA, RCEP and ASEAN. His initiatives to bring discourse on India’s competitiveness in Trade in Services, evolution of Policy on Technical Regulations and Standards and India’s position on the Global and Regional value chains in the forefront of Policy making are much recognised by the stakeholder community. He is also credited with hand holding the Pharmaceutical sector in its pursuit to become global leader in Generic Medicine and his work is highly appreciated by the industry. He has published work on India’s Patent Policy, Trade Policy, WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism, Product standards and Technical Regulations and several other related areas.

About the Moderator:

James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank. Prof. Foster received his PhD in Economics from Cornell University and has a Doctorate Honoris Causa from Universidad Autónoma del Estado Hidalgo (Mexico).

This event and seminar series was jointly organized with the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative (OPHI) and the UNDP Human Development Report Office.

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India’s Environment Challenges and Impact of COVID

April 1, 2021April 11, 2022Adaption to Climate Change Events, India, Past Events

Wednesday, May 12, 2021
9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
via WebEx

This was the ninth webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, a platform for dialogue and debate co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The ninth event featured Sunita Narain, Director General of the Center for Science and Environment, discussing “India’s Environment Challenges and Impact of COVID.” Laveesh Bhandari and Muthukumar Mani provided discussant remarks. IIEP Co-Director Jay Shambaugh moderated.

This session with India’s leading environmentalist Sunita Narain highlighted findings of the State of India’s Environment 2021, the most comprehensive report on India’s environment produced by 60 notable experts in the subject in India by the Down To Earth magazine at the Centre for Science and the Environment. It has three special sections: an assessment of the pandemic and its impacts a year after, a data analysis of how India’s states are faring on environment and development parameters, and a tribute to the decade of biodiversity.

About the Speaker:

Sunita Narain is a Delhi-based environmentalist and author. She is currently the Director General of Center for Science and Environment (CSE) and Editor of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth. Dr. Narain plays an active role in policy formulation on issues of environment and development in India and globally. She has worked extensively on climate change, with a particular interest in advocating for an ambitious and equitable global agreement. Her work on air pollution, water and waste management as well as industrial pollution has led to an understanding of the need for affordable and sustainable solutions in countries like India where the challenge is to ensure inclusive and sustainable growth. She was a member of the Indian Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change and has been awarded the Padma Shri. In 2005, the Centre for Science and Environment, under her leadership was also awarded the Stockholm Water Prize. In 2016, Time magazine selected her as one of the most influential people in the world. She received “The Order of the Polar Star” award from the Swedish Government in 2017. Narain also received the Edinburgh Medal 2020 conferred by the City of Edinburgh Council in the UK. She continues to serve on national and international committees on environment.

About the Discussants:

Laveesh Bhandari is a Senior Fellow at CSEP. Laveesh will lead and develop the climate change capability at CSEP. In addition, he will help define the broad macro agenda and advise on the sub-national reform. Dr Bhandari is an economist, entrepreneur and an environmentalist. He is currently the Director of Indicus Foundation and leads its Environment and Sustainable Livelihoods initiative. Laveesh has published widely on subjects related to sustainable livelihoods, industrial, economic and social reforms in India, economic geography and financial inclusion. He received his PhD in economics from Boston University for which he was awarded the Best thesis in International Economics. He has taught economics in Boston University and IIT Delhi. He has been the managing editor of Journal of Emerging Market Finance, and worked at National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi. He has built, seeded, and exited from three companies in the research, analytics and digital domain.

Muthukumar Mani is a Lead Economist in the Office of the Chief Economist in the South Asia Region (SAR) of the World Bank. In his current position, Mani has been working on climate change mitigation and adaptation issues, water and environmental issues in the SAR. He has led several regional flagship reports on climate change, glaciers, air pollution, and water. His report on “South Asia’s Hotspots,” was featured in the New York Times as a benchmark study. More recently, Mani has been supporting South Asia region’s green, resilient and inclusive recovery program in addition to co-leading the preparation of the SAR Climate Change Action Plan. Prior to joining this position, Mani was in operations with the SAR Climate Change Team, where his work program focused on leading policy dialogue in advancing inclusive green growth and climate change issues with national and sub-national governments.

About the Moderator:

Jay Shambaugh is the Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy and recently served as a member of the Biden transition team. His work includes analysis of the interaction of exchange rate regimes with monetary policy, capital flows, and trade flows as well as studies of international reserves holdings, country balance sheet exchange rate exposure, the cross-country impact of fiscal policy, the crisis in the euro area, and regional growth disparities. He has also served as a Member of the White House Council of Economic Advisors from 2015-2017. He also spent 3 years as the Director of the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institution. He is also a Faculty Research Fellow at the NBER and Non-Resident Senior Fellow in Economic Studies at Brookings. Shambaugh received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of California at Berkeley, an M.A. from the Fletcher School at Tufts, and a B.A. from Yale University.

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India’s Federal Finances in COVID Times: The 15th Finance Commission

February 15, 2021March 19, 2022Global Governance, India, International Finance, Past Events

Wednesday March 10th, 2021
9:00 – 10:30am EST
via Webex

This was the eighth webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The eighth event on “India’s Federal Finances in COVID Times: The 15th Finance Commission” featured NK Singh, Chairman of India’s 15th Finance Commission, with Junaid Kamal Ahmad of the World Bank and Indira Rajaraman as discussants. The discussion was moderated by IIEP Co-Director Jay Shambaugh.

The concept of the Finance Commission is embedded in the constitutional history of India. In a sense, it is even older than our Constitution. The Finance Commission has been described as the balancing wheel in the Constitution because it is designed to correct the structural and inherent imbalances between the resources and the expenditure of the Union and the States. The correction of this imbalance would constitute the basis for a fair vertical devolution.

The Fifteenth Finance Commission (FC-XV) was constituted by the President under Article 280 of the Constitution on 27 November 2017.The title of the report ‘Finance Commission in Covid Times’, submitted to the President for the period 2021-26, itself speaks of the onerous task it had in hand when the pandemic had significantly impacted the economy and shrunk the overall pie of resources. The Union government, in its action taken report on the commission’s report tabled in Parliament on 1^st February 2021 accepted most of the recommendations.

About the Speaker:

N.K. Singh is a prominent Indian economist, academician, and policymaker. He is currently Chairman of the 15th Finance Commission. Prior to this position, he served as a member of Parliament in the Rajya Sabha, from 2008 to 2014. He also presided as Chairman of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Review Committee (FRBM) in 2016.

About the Discussants:

Junaid Kamal Ahmad is the Country Director for the World Bank in India. He joined the World Bank’s Delhi office on 1 September 2016. Junaid, a Bangladeshi national, was formerly the Chief of Staff to World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. He joined the World Bank in 1991 as a Young Professional and worked on infrastructure development in Africa and Eastern Europe. He has since held several management positions, leading the Bank’s program in diverse regions including Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in India and South Asia. He holds a PhD in Applied Economics from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard University, and a BA in Economics from Brown University.

Indira Rajaraman holds a PhD in Economics from Cornell University. She was previously Professor of Economics at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, and Reserve Bank of India Chair Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, Delhi. She also served as a member of the 13th Finance Commission; and Member of the Central Board of Directors, Reserve Bank of India and of the Technical Advisory Committee for Monetary Policy. She has over 75 research publications in international and national journals and edited volumes and writes regularly in the financial press. She was a member of several official committees that shaped the process of financial and fiscal reform over the last three decades.

India’s Farm Laws

February 14, 2021April 11, 2022Development Economics, India, Past Events

Friday, February 26, 2021
9:00 a.m. – 10:30 a.m.
via WebEx

This was the seventh webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The seventh event on “India’s Farm Laws” featured Kaushik Basu, Mahendra Dev, and Sudha Narayanan. The discussion was moderated by IIEP Co-Director Jay Shambaugh.

In September 2020, the Indian Parliament passed 3 farm acts: The Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020; Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020; Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020. The laws allow farmers to sell outside regulated government markets, allow contractual farming and remove cereals, onion, potato and oil seed from the essential commodities list. The laws ostensibly designed to modernize the farm sector have generated huge protests in India, led to violence on India’s Republic Day, January 26, and continue unabated. Farm Associations and many experts consider them anti-farmer, whereas others think these reforms are necessary to move Indian agriculture forward. India’s farm sector provides only 15% of India’s GDP but provides livelihood for almost 50% of the population. The stakes are indeed high.

Our distinguished panel of experts debate the laws, place them in a broader context of India’s agricultural sector problems and suggest possible solutions.

About the speakers:

Kaushik Basu is Professor of Economics and Carl Marks Professor of International Studies at Cornell University. He is currently the President of the International Economic Association and a nonresident senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at the Brookings Institution. He recently served as Chief Economist at the World Bank and before that was Chief Economic Adviser to the Government of India. During his four years at the Bank he co-taught a popular course in the Elliott School with James Foster, entitled Introduction to Game Theory and Strategic Thinking, which every week brought 150 GW students and many visitors from the Bank and other neighboring institutions to the Harry Harding Auditorium of the Elliott School. One class per term was held in Preston Auditorium of the World Bank. As one student commented “Being taught by Prof. Basu was definitely an only at GW moment!” He has now returned to Cornell but fondly remembers his time in DC – especially his weekly chats with GW students and his daily strolls across the GW campus from home to work in the Bank, and back again.

Professor Basu has research interests that span across development economics, welfare economics, game theory, industrial organization, and law. As a professor at the Delhi School of Economics, he founded the Centre for Development Economics in 1992 and served as its first Executive Director. Kaushik Basu holds a B.A. in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi University, and M.Sc. and PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics, and several honorary degrees, including doctorates from IIT Bombay, Fordham University New York, Bath University, England, and the University of Florence. His recent books are “An Economist in the Real World” and “The Republic of Beliefs.”

S. Mahendra Dev has been the Director and Vice Chancellor of the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR) in Mumbai, India, since 2010. Prior to this, he was Chairman of the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices for the Ministry of Agriculture of the Government of India, Director of the Centre for Economic and Social Studies in Hyderabad, and Acting Chairman of the National Statistical Commission of the Government of India. He is a recipient of the Malcolm Adiseshiah Award for outstanding work on development studies and has approximately 120 research publications in international and national journals in the areas of agricultural development, poverty, public policy, inequality, food security, nutrition, employment guarantee schemes, social security and farm and nonfarm employment. He has written or edited 20 books, including Inclusive Growth in India. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Food Policy Research Institute and was nominated to serve as Vice Chair of the Board beginning in 2018. He has been a consultant and adviser to many international organizations, including the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, the International Labour Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific, UNICEF, UNESCO, the UK Department for International Development, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. He received his PhD from the Delhi School of Economics and completed his postdoctoral research at Yale University.

Sudha Narayanan joined IFPRI’s South Asia Regional Office in December 2020 as a research fellow. Sudha’s research interests straddle agriculture, food and nutrition policy, and human development. She is particularly interested in survey-based research using micro econometric approaches to understand broader questions of agrarian change and state delivery systems for nutrition security. Her research focuses on contract farming, agrifood value chains, technology adoption in agriculture, public policies for food security and employment and agriculture-nutrition linkages.

She was previously an Associate Professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai. She obtained a PhD from Cornell University in 2011, specialising in agricultural economics. She earlier obtained M.A. and M.Phil. degrees in Economics from the Delhi School of Economics, India. Prior to studying for a doctoral degree, Sudha worked with the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi, the Right to Food Campaign in India and Cornell University, among others.

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Schooling in India’s New Education Policy and Impact of COVID on Learning Outcomes

January 25, 2021March 23, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, India, James Foster, Past Events

Wednesday February 10th, 2021
9:30 AM-11:00AM EST
via WebEx

We are pleased to share with you the sixth webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. This is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

Improving the quality of education is a critical investment for enabling “inclusive growth” in India. It matters both for growth at the aggregate level, and for enabling citizens to broadly participate in this growth process at the individual level. India’s National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 is the first major overhaul of education policy in nearly 35 years. Karthik discussed the main learnings from two decades of research on school education in India and present key principles for the way ahead.

Rukmini provided her perspective on these issues based on her work on learning outcomes at Pratham since 2005 and will also present findings from the 2020 Annual Survey of Education Results (ASER) the first ever phone based ASER survey. Conducted in September 2020, the sixth month of national school closures, the survey explores provision of and access to distance education mechanisms, materials and activities for children in rural India, and the ways in which children and families are engaging with these remote learning alternatives from their homes.

About the Speakers:

Dr. Rukmini Banerji is the CEO of Pratham Education Foundation. Trained as an economist, Dr. Banerji completed her B.A. at St. Stephen’s College and attended the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). She was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University and earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago.

Dr. Banerji worked as a programme officer at the Spencer Foundation in Chicago for several years before returning to India in 1996 to join Pratham as part of the leadership team. There, she led the organisation’s research and assessment efforts, which have included the internationally acknowledged Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) since 2005, and served as director of the ASER Centre in New Delhi for 10 years.

In 2008, she was the inaugural recipient of the Maulana Abul Kalam Shiksha Puraskar Award conferred by the Government of Bihar, India. Over the years, she has represented Pratham and ASER Centre in various national and international forums and is a member of committees both in India and abroad. She writes frequently on education in India and enjoys creating books and stories for children.

Karthik Muralidharan is the Tata Chancellor’s Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). He is a Research Associate of the NBER, and on the Board of Directors of the Poverty Action Lab at MIT where he is co-chair of the education research program. His research spans development, public, and labor economics with a focus on improving the quality of public expenditure – especially in the social sector.

Born and raised in India, Prof. Muralidharan earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University (summa cum laude), an M.Phil. in economics from Cambridge University (ranked first), and a Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University.

About the Moderator:

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“Saving Indian Capitalism from its Capitalists” featuring Pranab Bardhan

November 24, 2020March 25, 2022Global Economic Governance Events, India, James Foster, Past Events

Wednesday, December 9th, 2020

11 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. EST

This was the fourth webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The fourth event, “Saving Indian Capitalism from Its Capitalists” featured Pranab Bardhan, Professor of Economics at University of California-Berkeley, with Jean Dreze of Ranchi University and Michael Walton of the Harvard Kennedy School as discussants. The discussion was moderated by Professor James Foster, with an introduction by Dr. Ajay Chhibber.

There are often conflicts in the interests of capital, between the individual capitalist and the capitalist class as a whole, or between the short-term and long-term interests of capital. In this talk Prof. Bardhan will give examples of this from the Indian debates on labor reform, health policy, policy relating to vocational education, and from the adverse effects of the growing concentration of capital and wealth distribution.

The Indian Government recently enacted a major labor reform that has been widely acclaimed in the business press and by many reform-mongering economists. The attempt to bring some order to the tangled mess that the old labor laws were in is welcome, as is more ‘flexibility’ in labor employment, but as part of a package deal with a reasonable scheme of unemployment benefits for workers; instead the new laws make the already insecure life of workers even more insecure. Capitalists envisioning a longer horizon should be aware that an insecure, disgruntled and unstable labor force is a sure bet for low productivity. Health Policy and Vocational Education also show cases where a more prudent corporate sector would have encouraged serious alternatives; this will be elucidated in the talk.

More broadly, in India the data suggest that corporate concentration and inequality in wealth distribution are galloping, and this is bound to have a negative effect on overall productivity and innovations, which is against the long-term interests of capitalism, even though it may give a boost to short-term earnings of individual capitalists. Compared to some other capitalist countries, India is more of a crony oligarchy that is cozy with the current regime, which is not conducive to a healthy development of capitalism in India. Nor is the rise in inequality that exacerbates demand deficiency, or the brazen dilution of environmental regulations that poisons and uproots community life.

About the Speakers:

Pranab Bardhan is Professor of Graduate School at the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

He was educated at Presidency College, Kolkata and Cambridge University, England. He had been at the faculty of MIT, Indian Statistical Institute and Delhi School of Economics before joining Berkeley. He has been Visiting Professor/Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford, and London School of Economics. He held the Distinguished Fulbright Siena Chair at the University of Siena, Italy in 2008-9. He was the BP Centennial Professor at London School of Economics for 2010 and 2011. He got the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1982.

He has done theoretical and field studies research on rural institutions in poor countries, on political economy of development policies, and on international trade. A part of his work is in the interdisciplinary area of economics, political science, and social anthropology. He was Chief Editor of the Journal of Development Economics for 1985-2003. He was the co-chair of the MacArthur Foundation-funded Network on the Effects of Inequality on Economic Performance for 1996-2007.

He is the author of 16 books and editor of 14 other books, and author of more than 150 journal articles including in leading Economics journals (like American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal, American Economic Journal, Journal of Development Economics, Journal of Public Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Oxford Economic Papers, etc.).

He has also contributed essays to popular outlets like New York Times, Scientific American, Financial Times, Die Zeit, Boston Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, Project Syndicate, Yale Global Online, Times of India, Economic Times, Business Standard, Bloomberg Quint, Hindustan Times, Ideas for India, Economic and Political Weekly, Indian Express, Ananda Bazar Patrika (in Bengali), etc. From 2018 he has started writing a periodic column for a New York-based blog, 3 Quarks Daily.

Jean Dreze studied Mathematical Economics at the University of Essex and did his Ph.D. at the Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi. He has taught at the London School of Economics and the Delhi School of Economics, and is currently Visiting Professor at Ranchi University as well as Honorary Professor at the Delhi School of Economics. He has made wide-ranging contributions to development economics and public policy, with special reference to India. His research interests include rural development, social inequality, elementary education, child nutrition, health care and food security. Jean Drèze is co-author (with Amartya Sen) of Hunger and Public Action (Oxford University Press, 1989) and An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions (Penguin, 2013)”, and also one of the co-authors of the Public Report on Basic Education in India, also known as “PROBE Report”.

Michael Walton is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, where he has taught since 2004 and is a visiting fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, Delhi. He also works with the non-profit IMAGO Global Grassroots whose goal is to take established grassroots organizations to the next level, working especially in India, Latin America and the United States. In addition to core teaching in HKS’ MPA in International Development, he leads the signature on-line course on Policy Design and Delivery. Michael was VKRV Rao Professor at the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore in 1998 and 1999, and visiting professor at the Delhi School of Economics in 1998. Before academia, Michael worked for 20 years at the World Bank, including on Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Zimbabwe. While there he led two and worked on two other World Development Reports (on Poverty in 1990 and 2000, on Labor in 1995, and Inequality in 2005). Book publications include co-edited volumes on Culture and Public Action, and No Growth without Equity? on Mexico. Current research in India, includes work on Self Help Groups and on scaling up of social enterprises of the Self Employed Women’s Association. Michael is also a dancer. He has a B.A. in Philosophy and Economics and an M.Phil. in Economics from Oxford University.

This event was sponsored with the Sigur Center for Asian Studies.

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Theory and Practice: The Economics of Implementation and India’s Covid-19 Response

October 29, 2020March 25, 2022India, Past Events

Thursday, November 12, 2020
9:00 am – 10:30 am EDT
WebEx

This was the third webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The third event, “Theory and Practice: The Economics of Implementation and India’s Covid-19 Response” featured Rohini Pande, Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center at Yale University, Ravi Kanbur, T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, and Jayati Ghosh, former Chair of the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning at the Jawaharal Nehru University.

The onset of Covid-19 has changed the trajectory of global poverty reduction, especially in South Asia. India is now predicted to see large increases in the number of people living in extreme poverty. And, in an environment of low economic growth, this heightened socio-economic inequality is likely to persist unless the state can redistribute adequate resources towards the poor. As a short-run response during the lockdown, India announced gender-targeted cash transfers and increased free food rations. However, with the `unlocking’ of the economy now near complete, the Indian state is largely relying on labor markets, undergirded by the employment guarantee program in rural areas, to provide the poor and vulnerable the resources they need. How well did India’s social protection system protect the vulnerable in the short-run? What did we learn about the relative success of food versus cash transfers when state capacity is low? In the medium-run, are labor markets succeeding in protecting the poor? How are the less powerful – especially women – faring in the covid-19 economy? Looking ahead, how should we factor in considerations of state capacity and accountability in evaluating policy proposals, such as Universal Basic Income and urban employment guarantees? Or, in devising policies to eventually put an end to the pandemic?

About the Panelists:

Rohini Pande is the Henry J. Heinz II Professor of Economics and Director of the Economic Growth Center, Yale University. She is a co-editor of American Economic Review: Insights. Pande’s research is largely focused on how formal and informal institutions shape power relationships and patterns of economic and political advantage in society, particularly in developing countries. She is interested in the role of public policy in providing the poor and disadvantaged political and economic power, and how notions of economic justice and human rights can help justify and enable such change. Her most recent work focuses on testing innovative ways to make the state more accountable to its citizens, such as strengthening women’s economic and political opportunities, ensuring that environmental regulations reduce harmful emissions, and providing citizens effective means to voice their demand for state services. In 2018, Pande received the Carolyn Bell Shaw Award from the American Economic Association for promoting the success of women in the economics profession. She is the co-chair of the Political Economy and Government Group at Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), a Board member of Bureau of Research on Economic Development (BREAD) and a former co-editor of The Review of Economics and Statistics. Before coming to Yale, Pande was the Rafik Harriri Professor of International Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, where she co-founded Evidence for Policy Design. Pande received a Ph.D. in economics from London School of Economics, a BA/MA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University and a BA in Economics from Delhi University.

Ravi Kanbur is the T.H. Lee Professor of World Affairs, International Professor of Applied Economics and Management, Professor of Economics, Cornell University. He researches and teaches in development economics, public economics and economic theory. He has served on the senior staff of the World Bank including as Chief Economist for Africa. He has also published in the leading economics journals, including Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, Review of Economic Studies, Journal of Economic Theory and Economic Journal. He is Co-Chair of the Food Economics Commission and Co-Chair of the Scientific Council of the International Panel on Social Progress. The positions he has held include: Chair of the Board of United Nations University-World Institute for Development Economics Research, member of the OECD High Level Expert Group on the Measurement of Economic Performance, President of the Human Development and Capability Association and President of the Society for the Study of Economic Inequality.

Jayati Ghosh taught economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi for nearly 35 years. From January 2020 she will join the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, USA. She has authored and/or edited 19 books (including “Never Done and Poorly Paid: Women’s Work in Globalising India”, Women Unlimited, New Delhi 2009; the co-edited “Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, 2014, “Demonetisation Decoded”, Routledge 2017 and “Women workers in the informal economy”, Routledge forthcoming) and nearly 200 scholarly articles. She has received several prizes, including for distinguished contributions to the social sciences in India in 2015; the International Labour Organisation’s Decent Work Research Prize for 2010; the NordSud Prize for Social Sciences 2010, Italy. She has advised governments in India and other countries, including as Chairperson of the Andhra Pradesh Commission on Farmers’ Welfare in 2004, and Member of the National Knowledge Commission of India (2005-09). She is the Executive Secretary of International Development Economics Associates, an international network of heterodox development economists. She has consulted for international organisations including ILO, UNDP, UNCTAD, UN-DESA, UNRISD and UN Women and is member of several international commissions, including the International Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation (ICRICT) and the Commission for Global Economic Transformation of INET. She writes regularly for popular media like newspapers, journals and blogs.

About the Organizers:

James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper (with Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke) is one of the most cited papers on poverty. It introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was employed in targeting the Progresa CCT program in Mexico. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Amartya Sen; on the distribution of human development with Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Miguel Szekely; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu.

Professor Foster’s work underlies many well-known social indices including the global Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) published annually by the UNDP in the Human Development Report, dozens of national MPIs used to guide domestic policy against poverty, the Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (WEAI) at USAID, the Gross National Happiness Index of Bhutan, the Better Jobs Index of the InterAmerican Development Bank, and the Statistical Performance Index of the World Bank.

Ajay Chhibber is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Institute of International Economic Policy, George Washington University and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, the Atlantic Council, Washington DC. He was earlier Director General, Independent Evaluation Office, Government of India and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), India. He held senior positions at the UN as Assistant Secretary General and Assistant Administrator, UNDP and managed their program for Asia and the Pacific. He also served in senior positions at the World Bank. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University, a Masters from the Delhi School of Economics. He taught at Georgetown University and at the University of Delhi.

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India’s COVID-19 Challenge: Outcomes and Options

September 29, 2020March 25, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, India, Past Events

Thursday, October 15, 2020
10:30 am – 12:00 pm EDT
WebEx

This was the second webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The second event, “India’s COVID-19 Challenge: Outcomes and Options” featured Raghuram Rajan, Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago, and Bina Agarwal, Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the University of Manchester. The discussion was moderated by Professor James Foster, with an introduction by Dr. Ajay Chhibber.

India has been hit hard by the Coronavirus. Today it has amongst the highest number of cases world-wide and daily rising death rates. One of the world’s strictest lockdowns in March, with no warning, flattened the economy instead of flattening the Covid-19 curve. In Q1 FY 2020-21 (April to June), India’s GDP fell by almost 24%, while the FY 2020-21GDP growth is projected to be between -5% and -10%, amongst the largest drop globally. The economy was already ailing prior to Covid, with growth falling for 7 previous quarters. COVID will set it back further, perhaps by at least 5 years and push millions out of work and into poverty. India’s ambitious goal of becoming a $5 Trillion economy by 2025 seems a distant dream now.

The lockdown also forced millions of urban migrants to return to their rural homes, under great hardship, carrying with them the virus and the despair of joblessness. India’s woefully inadequate public health system is now overwhelmed. Central and State finances are in deep trouble and the GST (as a sign of Cooperative Federalism) is beset with intense political friction. The already struggling financial system is likely to sink even deeper into the mire. The Rs 20 Trillion (10% of GDP) package announced by the government with much fanfare under the Atma Nirbhar Bharat Abhiyan (Self-reliant India scheme), is too small – especially its fiscal component -to repair the economic damage or revive livelihoods. The package includes a series of reforms in agricultural markets and labor markets as well as a greater push for “ Make in India”. But will these reforms help India at this stage?

India is between a rock and a hard place. Did it have to get so bad? Is there any good news? A silver lining anywhere? Is there scope for some transformative change? Or do we, as with the virus, have to brace ourselves to “live with” this economic downturn for a long stretch ahead?

Our distinguished panelists discussed these challenges and possible options and solutions.

About the Panelists:

Raghuram Rajan is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. He was the Governor of the Reserve Bank of India between 2013 and 2016, and also served as Vice-Chairman of the Board of the Bank for International Settlements between 2015 and 2016. Dr. Rajan was the Chief Economist and Director of Research at the International Monetary Fund from 2003 to 2006.

Dr. Rajan’s research interests are in banking, corporate finance, and economic development, especially the role finance plays in it. He co-authored Saving Capitalism from the Capitalists with Luigi Zingales in 2003. He then wrote Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, for which he was awarded the Financial Times-Goldman Sachs prize for best business book in 2010. His most recent book, The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State hold the Community Behind was published in 2019.

Dr. Rajan was the President of the American Finance Association in 2011 and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Group of Thirty. In 2003, the American Finance Association awarded Dr. Rajan the inaugural Fischer Black Prize for the best finance researcher under the age of 40. The other awards he has received include the Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics in 2013, Euromoney magazine’s Central Banker of the Year Award 2014 and The Banker magazine’s Global Central Banker of the Year award in 2016.

Bina Agarwal is Professor of Development Economics and Environment at the Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, UK, and former Professor and Director, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. She has been President, International Society for Ecological Economics; Vice-President, International Economic Association; President, International Society for Feminist Economics; and held distinguished positions at the Universities of Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, Michigan, Minnesota, and the New York University School of Law. Dr. Agarwal’s publications include the multiple award-winning book, A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge University Press, 1994), Gender and Green Governance (OUP, 2010) and Gender Challenges (OUP, 2016), a three volume compendium of her selected papers on Agriculture, Property, and the Environment. Her pioneering work on gender inequality in property and land and on environmental governance, has had global impact. Her many awards include a Padma Shri, 2008; book prizes; the Leontief Prize 2010; Louis Malassis Scientific Prize 2017; and the International Balzan Prize, 2017.

About the Organizers:

James E. Foster is the Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs, Professor of Economics, and Co-Director of the Institute for International Economic Policy at the George Washington University. He is also a Research Associate at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative at Oxford University. Professor Foster’s research focuses on welfare economics — using economic tools to evaluate and enhance the wellbeing of people. His joint 1984 Econometrica paper (with Joel Greer and Erik Thorbecke) is one of the most cited papers on poverty. It introduced the FGT Index, which has been used in thousands of studies and was employed in targeting the Progresa CCT program in Mexico. Other research includes work on economic inequality with Amartya Sen; on the distribution of human development with Luis Felipe Lopez-Calva and Miguel Szekely; on multidimensional poverty with Sabina Alkire; and on literacy with Kaushik Basu.

Ajay Chhibber is a Distinguished Visiting Scholar, Institute of International Economic Policy, George Washington University and Non-Resident Senior Fellow, the Atlantic Council, Washington DC. He was earlier Director General, Independent Evaluation Office, Government of India and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), India. He held senior positions at the UN as Assistant Secretary General and Assistant Administrator, UNDP and managed their program for Asia and the Pacific. He also served in senior positions at the World Bank. He has a PhD from Stanford University, a Masters from the Delhi School of Economics. He taught at Georgetown University and at the University of Delhi.

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Fiscal Dominance: A Theory of Everything in India

August 4, 2020March 25, 2022Development Economics and Poverty Alleviation Events, Global Economic Governance Events, India, International Finance Events, Past Events, Seminar

Wednesday, September 9, 2020
10:00 am – 11:30 am EDT
WebEx

Read Prof. Acharya’s responses to our discussants here.

This was the first webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invited you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The first talk in the Envisioning India Series was “Fiscal Dominance: A Theory of Everything in India” and featured Viral V. Acharya of NYU-Stern.

He discussed the following: Financial stability is perhaps the most important prerequisite for stable growth. It is surprisingly also the most compromised one. Encouraging cheap credit and rapid balance-sheet growth in the financial sector is a temptation that many governments find hard to resist to register well on the short-run growth scorecard. Post 1991 reforms, India undertook an upward and onward march in economic progress for close to two decades. Since then, lack of financial stability has emerged as its Achilles’ heel. The reasons for this are many but a first and foremost contributor has been the increasing dominance of banking and financial sector regulation by the unyielding deficit situation of the consolidated government balance-sheet. Reining in this fiscal dominance requires not just a strengthening of the institutional framework of financial sector regulation but also the right balance between the role played by the government, the central bank, the markets, and the private sector in the economy.

About the Speaker:

Viral V. Acharya is the C.V. Starr Professor of Economics in the Department of Finance at New York University Stern School of Business (NYU-Stern) and an Academic Advisor to the Federal Reserve Banks of New York and Philadelphia. Viral was a Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) during 23rd January 2017 to 23rd July 2019 in charge of Monetary Policy, Financial Markets, Financial Stability, and Research. His speeches while at the RBI will release in the end of July 2020 in the form of a book titled “Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India” (SAGE Publications India), with a new introductory chapter “Fiscal Dominance: A Theory of Everything in India”. Viral completed Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai in 1995 and Ph.D. in Finance from NYU-Stern in 2001. Prior to joining Stern, he was at London Business School (2001-2008), the Academic Director of the Coller Institute of Private Equity at LBS (2007-09) and a Senior Houblon-Normal Research Fellow at the Bank of England (Summer 2008). Viral’s primary research interest is in theoretical and empirical analysis of systemic risk of the financial sector, its regulation and its genesis in government-induced distortions, an inquiry that cuts across several other strands of research – credit risk and liquidity risk, their interactions and agency-theoretic foundations, as well as their general equilibrium consequences. He has published articles in the American Economic Review, Journal of Finance, Journal of Financial Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Review of Finance, Journal of Business, Journal of Financial Intermediation, Rand Journal of Economics, Journal of Monetary Economics, Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, and Financial Analysts Journal. He is currently associate editor of the Review of Corporate Finance Studies (RCFS, 2011-) and Review of Finance (2006-), and was an editor of the Journal of Financial Intermediation (2009-12) and associate editor of the Journal of Finance (2011-14).

Discussants:

Liaquat Ahamed is the author of the critically acclaimed best-seller, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World, about central bankers during the Great Depression of 1929-1932. The book won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for History, the 2010 Council on Foreign Relations Arthur Ross Gold Medal, and the 2009 Financial Times-Goldman Sachs Best Business Book of the Year Award. Ahamed was a professional investment manager for twenty-five years. He has worked at the World Bank in Washington, D.C., and the New York-based partnership of Fischer Francis Trees and Watts, where he served as chief executive. He is currently a director of the Putnam Funds. He is on the board of trustees of the Journal of Philosophy, the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and a former trustee of the Brookings Institution and the New America Foundation. He has degrees in economics from Harvard and Cambridge.

Rakesh Mohan is one of India’s senior-most economic policymakers and an expert on central banking, monetary policy, infrastructure and urban affairs. Most recently he was executive director at the International Monetary Fund in Washington, D.C., representing India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan, and chairman, National Transport Development Policy Committee, Government of India, in the rank of a Minister of State. He is also a former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India. As deputy governor he was in charge of monetary policy, financial markets, economic research and statistics. In addition to serving in various posts for the Indian government, including representing India in a variety of international forums such as Basel and G20, Mohan has worked for the World Bank and headed prestigious research institutes. He is also Senior Advisor to the McKinsey Global Institute and Distinguished Fellow of Brookings India. Mohan has written extensively on urban economics, urban development, Indian economic policy reforms, monetary policy and central banking.

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Diagnosing and Addressing India’s Post-2011 Growth Slowdown

January 5, 2020March 28, 2022Economics of Ultra-Poverty Events, India, Past Events

Friday, January 22nd, 2021
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m. EST
WebEx

This was the fifth webinar in the “Envisioning India” series, co-sponsored by the Sigur Center for Asian Studies and the Institute for International Economic Policy. It is a platform for dialogue and debate. We invite you to engage with us in this series of important discussions.

The “Envisioning India” series is organized under the stewardship of IIEP Co-Director James Foster, Oliver T. Carr, Jr. Professor of International Affairs and Professor of Economics, and IIEP Distinguished Visiting Scholar Ajay Chhibber. The fifth event, “Diagnosing and Addressing India’s Growth Slowdown Since 2011” featured Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah. The talk was based on their book In Service of the Republic: The Art and Science of Policy-Making in India, named a Top 20 Book of 2020 by Bloomberg. Ashima Goyal from IGIDR and Devesh Kapur from SAIS provided discussant remarks. The discussion was moderated by Professor James Foster, with an introduction by Dr. Ajay Chhibber.

India’s GDP has crashed in 2020 due to the pandemic – but it was showing a decline even before that. Private investment surged in India from 2003 to 2012, and has declined thereafter. In 2020 rupees, the stock of under implementation private projects has dropped from Rs.83 trillion in 2012 to Rs.35 trillion today. The most important puzzle in Indian economics today consists of diagnosing and addressing the disenchantment of the private sector, the change in conditions when compared with the high growth of the 1991-2011 period. Most GDP growth, and almost all jobs, are made when private persons choose to invest in building firms. What happened to the promise? Where have we faltered? How do we change course? How do we overcome the dangers of the middle-income trap and get rich before we grow old? What do we need to do to make our tryst with destiny?

This requires going back to first principles, in public economics and public administration, to rethink the foundations of public policy in India, to rethink the concept of the Indian state and its engagement with private persons. Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah wrote an ambitious book, “In service of the Republic: The art and science of economic policy“, around these questions.

About the Authors:

Vijay Kelkar served the Government of India as petroleum secretary, finance secretary and chairman of the Thirteenth Finance Commission of India. He also served as director of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and as executive director of the International Monetary Fund. In 2011, the President of India conferred the Padma Vibhushan upon him. He has a masters from the University of Minnesota and a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.

Ajay Shah has worked at the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy, the Indira Gandhi Institute for Development Research, the Ministry of Finance and the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP). His areas of research include economics, law and public administration. He has a BTech in aeronautical engineering from IIT, Bombay, and a PhD in economics from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

About the Discussant:

Ashima Goyal, professor IGIDR, Mumbai, is widely published in institutional and open economy macroeconomics, international finance and governance, edits a Routledge journal, has received many fellowships, national and international awards, is active in the Indian public debate with a monthly column at Hindu Business Line, and has a served on several boards and policy committees including the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. Currently she is a member of the Monetary Policy Committee of India’s Central Bank.

Devesh Kapur, is the Starr Foundation South Asia Studies Professor and Director of Asia Programs at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University. His recent books include Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education; The Other One Percent: Indians in American; Rethinking Public Institutions in India, The Costs of Democracy: Political Finance in India and Regulation in India: Design, Capacity, Performance. Prior to joining Johns Hopkins, he held appointments at the Brookings Institution, Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania. He holds a B. Tech in Chemical Engineering from IIT (BHU) Varanasi; an M.S. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Minnesota; and a Ph.D. in public policy from Princeton.

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