XKDR Newsletter - Issue 25
Metrics on Bombay High Court • Global economic environment • Political business cycle • Wealth tax/estate duty • Indian investments • National development
Probability of disposal and hearings at the Bombay High Court:
In earlier work, we reported our findings on 3 questions in the field of litigant decision making for suits and commercial suits filed before the Bombay High Court, between September 2021 to December 2022. We have now updated our dataset upto December 2023:
OP-ED & COMMENTARY
In his column in the Business Standard, Ajay Shah writes on,
Firms in a tough global environment. The four forces reshaping international trade are - the ‘third globalisation’, carbon border taxes, Chinese government subsidies, and unsystematic movements on trade policy. He suggests that strategy formulation on the part of firms will be the most important site of activity moving forward.
Paths to a political business cycle. He considers whether an old idea (political uncertainty) and a new one (non-random completion of infrastructure projects) could matter. Each of these ideas impacts upon macroeconomic conditions with a different set of dates relative to the election date. He suggests that understanding them, and taking a stand on each of these conjectures, will help us form a view about Indian macroeconomics in 2024.
Resurrecting the wealth tax and estate duty. He writes on the Indian experience with these taxes, the opportunity cost of building a sound tax system, and why these taxes work poorly. He argues that the focus should be on growth (with emphasis on the median income) and not redistribution.
VIDEOS AND PODCASTS
New episodes of XKDR’s YouTube series Big Ideas - conversations with some of the leading thinkers of today:
The balance between the State and the individual, with Amit Varma: Ep 10
Trading strategies in the age of machine learning, with Pradeep Yadav: Ep 11
Building blocks of the health system, with Amrita Agarwal: Ep 12
New episodes of Ajay Shah’s YouTube show Everything is Everything with Amit Varma are out:
Four Papers That Changed The World: Ep 41
The Populist Playbook: Ep 42
Six More Stories That Should Be Films: Ep 43
Maps Are Magic: Ep 44
EVENTS
We hosted two seminars -
"Are foreign investors ‘rolling the dice’ on their India investments?" by Arvind Chari. He spoke on “From INDIA – ‘I will Never Do It Again’ to TINA – ‘There Is No Alternative’”. It included foreign investment trends, sentiment and under-allocation.
"Off-ramps of the four-lane highway to prosperity" by Lant Pritchett. He spoke on the reasons why growth stops (and even reverses) due to tensions between economic progress and the other dimensions of national development, particularly politics and state capability.
We also hosted a book talk -
"The Dirty Dozen: India's twelve biggest corporate defaulters” by N. Sundaresha Subramanian. In the book, he investigates the cause and impact of India’s chronic bad loan issue. Recording the economic misadventures of Vijay Mallya, Nirav Modi and Jatin Mehta, among others, he lays bare the intricate maze of financial chaos, political plunder and malpractices that ail the country’s corporate landscape.
Karthik Suresh was a speaker at a panel discussion on “The world order in transition: wars, foreign interference, and geopolitics” organised by the University of Navarra, Spain, on April 19. He spoke on foreign information manipulation and interference. The other speakers at the event were Dinesh Patnaik, the Indian Ambassador to Spain; Guillermo Anguera, Deputy Director General at the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs; Srabani Roy Choudhury, Professor of International Relations at Jawaharlal Nehru University; Javier Gil of ICADE, Madrid; and Gonzalo Villalta, Shahana Thankachan, and Gabriela Fajardo of the University of Navarra.
XKDR Forum is an inter-disciplinary research and policy organisation harnessing knowledge and capabilities across diverse fields of economics, law, public administration, engineering, statistics and science. We welcome your comments and suggestions on our work. Please write them to us here.