Results for “subramanian” 26 found
India Fact of the Day
In India, for example, the number of taxpayers in relation to voters in the economy has been about 4-4.5% for a long time.
That is from an in-depth discussion about the Indian economy between Karthik Muralidharan and Arvind Subramanian (Chief Economic Adviser, Government of India). The reference is to income tax, of course. It’s a great discussion and the best place to begin if you want to understand the Indian economy today.
Good news from India
U.S.-based economist Arvind Subramanian is poised to be named as chief economic adviser to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government, two sources at the finance ministry said on Friday.
There is more here, via David Wessel. Here are previous MR posts on Subramanian.
What’s the best sentence ever formed?
That was the topic of a recent Quora forum (by the way may I officially announce that Quora seems to have succeeded? Would it be so bad to spend less time with your Google Reader and more time browsing Quora?), and here was the top pick:
“I do not know where family doctors acquired illegibly perplexing handwriting; nevertheless, extraordinary pharmaceutical intellectuality, counterbalancing indecipherability, transcendentalizes intercommunications’ incomprehensibleness.”
(Dmitri Borgmann, Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities. Scribner, 1965)
This is a ‘rhopalic’ sentence: A sentence or a line of poetry in which each word contains one letter or one syllable more than the previous word.
File under “Very good sentences’! If I understand the Quora system correctly, that was from Ramnath Ragunathan.
Nishit Jain has the runner-up:
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
No, really. There’s a whole Wikipedia page on it – Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
The sentence’s intended meaning becomes clearer when it’s understood that it uses the city of Buffalo, New York and the somewhat-uncommon verb “to buffalo” (meaning “to bully or intimidate”), and when the punctuation and grammar is expanded so that the sentence reads as follows: “Buffalo buffalo that Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.” The meaning becomes even clearer when synonyms are used: “Buffalo-origin bison that other Buffalo bison intimidate, themselves bully Buffalo bison.”
The entire thread is worth reading, and in your spare time you can ponder why most of the best answers come from individuals with names from the subcontinent. Here is the contribution of Veekas Shrivastava, listed as an elementary school chess player (retired):
A little grammar puzzle:
“that that is is that that is not is not that is it is it not”
Correctly punctuated: “That that is, is. That that is not, is not. That is it, is it not?”
Here is from Sugavanesh Balasubramanian:
“However, this valorous visitation of a by-gone vexation, stands vivified and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.”
So there.
Assorted links
1. How fast are driverless cars on the race track?
2. The Vatican newspaper runs five articles about the new James Bond film.
3. Renders the Taco-Copter totally obsolete.
4. BusinessWeek profile of Scott Sumner.
5. Biafra was also not a good idea.
6. Acemoglu and Robinson respond to Subramanian, and good Flickr photostream of North Korea, and is this guy, a possible defector from the West, tweeting from North Korea?
Assorted links
1. ECB document on virtual currency schemes (pdf).
2. Is this the most brilliant computer vs. computer chess game ever? It is so brilliant you might not even be thrilled by it. That’s your fault.
4. How dangerous is dental floss? Waxed or unwaxed? And, as Peter Thiel suggests, have we lost the ability to solve big problems?
5. Subramanian reviews Acemoglu and Robinson.
6. Is it my imagination, or is Mitt getting in a few Straussian pokes at Catholicism here? And Wonkblog does up a Romney tax calculator.
The Iceland dust-up
There has been enough coverage that I won’t summarize the entire debate, suffice to say that Krugman offered a picture like this:
Some writers from the CFR (I am not completely sure how to attribute authorship), offered this picture, along with some analysis and links (and further pictures). The key point is that the second picture considers a longer time horizon, and all of a sudden the relative performance of the different countries has changed:
They argue that in this light, looking over the longer time horizon, the Icelandic story appears mediocre rather than impressive relative to some of the other small countries. A few points:
1. Arvind Subramanian argues we should look at per capita growth and also PPP vs. market exchange rates, read here.
2. Arvind’s point aside, that the pictures give different impressions is more important than either picture taken alone.
3. The second picture brings value-added to the debate, and it suggests stories which the first picture taken alone does not. I’ll come back to that.
4. The debates have mixed together a few different questions, such as “how well have the countries done?,” “how well have the countries’ policies done?,” and “should we be looking at both pictures?” Since the answer to the first two is obviously agnostic — too soon to tell — I will focus on the last of these questions and the answer is yes, we definitely should be looking at both pictures.
Krugman’s response, once you get past the inappropriate insults, doesn’t serve up much. He has arguments against the view “Don’t look at the first picture” but no good arguments against “Look at both pictures very carefully and integrate.”
Ryan Avent offers a more polite response here. He focuses on convergence (maybe we should have expected the Baltics to have outperformed Iceland, so a tie means Krugman wins), but this estimate suggests the fixed exchange rate did not really cost the Baltics much in the way of convergence points. In any case I fear the goalposts are being shifted and what we know about convergence and its speed is iffy anyway; for instance anyone worried about bad monetary policy, and opposing 1980s style RBC theories, should be a convergence pessimist for the short run.
Most importantly, there is still no argument against looking at both pictures in a serious way.
So what additional thoughts come to mind looking at the second picture, which you might not get so much from the first picture alone? Here are two:
a. Some countries simply may be more volatile than others, and this may or may not have to do with their policy responses. I’ll note Cowen’s Second Law, namely that there is a literature on this and the people who work in that literature consider this to be a plausible proposition (which does not mean it is here the operative explanation, however).
b. The size of an initial run-up, possibly bubbly at that, is correlated with the size of the later collapse and also the difficulty of recovering from that later large collapse.
There is a literature on that too, start here, it is not an absurd proposition by any means.
By the way, did I mention a 2009 IMF Staff Report which concluded that Latvian “output exceeded potential by 9 percent in 2007.”? That supports the relevance of b) and possibly a) as well, and it discriminates against Krugman’s story of the peak being a point reattainable through policy management.
I take Krugman to be suggesting something like c): all the relevant information for understanding performance is contained in post-bust policy, so we needn’t look at earlier years and in fact doing so may mislead us.
Yet this attempts to pre-settle the dispute by putting all of the explanatory burden on post-crash policy. In general commentators often overattribute results to policies and in any case we should not build in this bias a priori.
Are you a fan of Dani Rodrik’s “every country is different” hypothesis? If so, you probably should think that both graphs are important. Country characteristics don’t morph away overnight, so earlier data points should matter for understanding current policy results.
If we look carefully at both pictures, I say we still don’t know what is going on, but we do have a richer sense of the possibilities.
From now on these two pictures should be shown and considered together.
Assorted links
1. Relative Irish bond yields, read the comments also, more on Ireland, and more on Greek banks.
2. Is China’s dominance a sure thing? (pdf, and where does that seven percent growth assumption come from anyway?)
3. Is oil constraining economic growth? And Richard Posner as pessimist.
4. Han Solo markets in everything (“The Empire will compensate you if he melts”)
Assorted links
1. A politically incorrect Indian economics professor who teaches summer school at Harvard; here is Wikipedia.
2. Arbitrage! A lottery that can be beaten.
4. An excellent Interfluidity post on how we thought we were wealthier than we were, and why it matters.
5. Scott Sumner’s culture report.
6. What does the debt deal mean for health care? And winners and losers in the deal.
New Blog: Private Development
Tim Harford, who recently guest blogged on Marginal Revolution, is now blogging regularly at a new project of the World Bank, The private sector development blog. The blog also features Pablo Halkyard who was "born in Brazil …raised in the Himalayas, grew up in Washington, studied in Lima, has a British passport,
though claims to be Chilean." An ideal pair to write on development!
Here is a post from Tim.
[Regarding] Nancy Birdsall, Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian’s piece from July/August Foreign Affairs (now syndicated to the New York Times).
It does sprawl a bit but there are more useful ideas in there than in a
bookshelf full of the worthy stuff we development types produce. For
instance:For
every leader who demands a bribe, there is usually a multinational
company or a Western official offering to pay it. For every pile of
illicit wealth, there is usually a European or American financial
institution providing a safe haven for the spoils.So:
…categorize
certain regimes as corrupt or "odious." Companies that deal with such
regimes would risk losing their claims to repayment if later on a
lawful government decided to default on the debt passed down by its
unlawful predecessor.Also:
Even
small relaxations of work-visa restrictions generate large income gains
for workers from poor countries (as well as for the world economy).
What is especially appealing is that the gains in income go directly to
the workers, rather than through imperfect distribution channels (as
with trade in goods) or through governments (as with aid).
Back to the Future of Iraq
In the weeks after the Iraq war “concluded” there was lots of discussion about reforming the economy. But the opening of the second front pushed those plans into remission. I hope that it is not yet too late to leave Iraq with better economic institutions. Yet as we seek a way out, our influence diminishes and the chance that the war was fought for nought increases. I was pleased, therefore, to see Nancy Birdsall of the Center for Global Development and Arvind Subramanian, a division chief at the International Monetary Fund try to push reform back onto the agenda.
As the United States, the United Nations, and the Iraqi Governing Council struggle to determine what form Iraq’s next government should take, there is one question that, more than any other, may prove critical to the country’s future: how to handle its vast oil wealth. Oil riches are far from the blessing they are often assumed to be. In fact, countries often end up poor precisely because they are oil rich. Oil and mineral wealth can be bad for growth and bad for democracy, since they tend to impede the development of institutions and values critical to open, market-based economies and political freedom: civil liberties, the rule of law, protection of property rights, and political participation.
Can Iraq avoid the pitfalls that other oil-rich countries have fallen into? The answer is yes, but only if it is willing to implement a novel arrangement for managing its oil wealth with the help of the international community…. the Iraqi people should embed in their new constitution an arrangement for the direct distribution of oil revenues to all Iraqi households — an arrangement that would be supervised by the international community.
The article is in the latest edition of Foreign Affairs, it is well worth reading but if you don’t have a subscription you can find a more succint version of the argument here.
Thanks to Dave Meleney for the pointer.
All Oil to the People!
In an economy based on labor, leviathan government faces an inherent, albeit weak, constraint – tax and regulate too much and you will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs (or the goose will run away). But in an economy based on oil the goose can’t run away and is almost impossible to kill. As a result, natural resource based economies tend to be corrupt, war-stricken, and slow growing. After 35 years and some 350 billion dollars in oil revenues the people of Nigeria, for example, have had no increase in per-capita GNP.
Iraq is another case in point, which is why it’s crucial that we not squander the opportunity to create new institutions for getting oil wealth away from governments and into the hands of the people. Norway and Alaska distribute revenue from “stabilization funds” but these appear not to be very effective, especially in countries that begin with weak institutions. Economists Xavier Sala-i-Martin and Arvind Subramanian argue in favor of direct payments of revenues to citizens but I think Vernon Smith, our colleague and recent Nobel prize winner, offers the best approach – distribute shares, real ownership, in the oil producing lands to every citizen.
Aside from the benefits to the Iraqi’s can you imagine what a great public relations boost this would be to the United States? In one swoop, we would credibly demonstrate to the Muslim world that the war was not about our rapacity, provide for a thriving domestic economy in Iraq, and lay the foundations for a stable democracy.