XKDR Newsletter - Issue 14
Carbon border tax • Freedom in cross-border activities • Information warfare • Private investments and growth • Events on empowering litigants through data on courts and public procurement
Commentary
The EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to prevent carbon leakage, will enter into application from 1st October 2023, in transitional phases. At present, its zone of application is limited to the steel and aluminum industries. Drawing parallels from the GST system, Akshay Jaitly and Ajay Shah write in the Business Standard about how Indian policymakers should be thinking about carbon tax. In their BQ Prime article, they discuss how Indian firms should deal with the global developments in carbon border tax. Their conversation on the subject with BQ Prime’s Alex Mathew is here.
Freedom in cross-border transactions is one of the key elements behind India’s success story in the Information Technology sector. In 1973, with the enactment of the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act, several regulatory restrictions were imposed on cross-border financial activities. Over time and with economic liberalisation policies, India has moved towards greater openness in cross-border movements of money. However, restrictions and costs on current account convertibility still remain high. In their article in the BQ Prime, Pratik Datta and Ajay Shah argue that the recent changes in the income tax law further restrict the financial freedom of Indians, hampering India’s growth.
With improvements in technology, advanced and large-scale methods of information warfare are being deployed across the world. The influence operations by Russia around the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential elections are a few infamous instances. In his Business Standard column, Ajay Shah outlines the state of information warfare today and speculates that, in the coming days, there will be a shift from credulity to skepticism.
Net fixed assets of firms have declined steadily from 2007-08 to 2021-22. However, private projects under implementation from the CMIE data show sharp gains in 2023. The upsurge in private projects is a positive and hopeful sign for India as it is likely to set off a huge multiplier effect. However, will it be sufficient to kick off a torrid growth episode as seen in the mid-1990s and late 2000s, asks Ajay Shah in his article - Better numbers in private investment projects.
Media
A recent development in the Adani-Hindenburg saga was the Supreme Court’s Expert Committee's conclusion that there was no evidence of a “regulatory failure” on the part of SEBI. In a conversation with Alex Mathew of BQ Prime, Ajay Shah talks about the problems of short-selling regulations in India.
We have published the video of the book talk on "Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government is Holding Indians Back" by Subhashish Bhadra hosted at our office.
Events
Roundtable on Empowering Litigants through Data on Courts
We are hosting an in-person roundtable in Mumbai on 17th June 2023, to showcase a new framework that we have developed in collaboration with Agami, which can potentially help litigants make informed choices using data including that disseminated by courts.
Field Workshop on Public Procurement
We are inviting papers for a field workshop on public procurement that we are jointly hosting with the Chennai Mathematical Institute. The conference will be organized in-person in Mumbai on 25th August 2023.
We welcome your comments and suggestions on our work. Please write them to pavithra.manivannan4@gmail.com. To know more about our work and to collaborate with us visit xkdr.org.