Gurbachan Singh is an independent economist, and visiting faculty at the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), Delhi Centre. He was previously at Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is engaged in research in the area of macro-financial stability. He teaches a course on Finance and Volatility at ISI, Delhi Centre. His writings are simple but in-depth. They are usually theoretical and policy oriented. They include the book ‘Banking Crisis, Liquidity, and Credit Lines’ (Routledge, Abingdon). This book has previously unpublished theoretical research on various aspects of credit lines in the context of macro-financial stability. He had received his PhD from ISI and MA from Delhi School of Economics. He is currently engaged in research on (a) financial advice, and (b) narrow monetary policy, and extended fiscal policy.

There is a widespread view that inflation or inflationary expectations are the only way to overcome the zero lower bound on interest rate. This paper shows that this is not true. It is shown that a tax-subsidy scheme can be used to overcome the zero lower bound on interest rate - without any inflation or inflationary expectations. A simple `old' Keynesian model is used though the treatment is novel and in-depth. The paper ends with a discussion that suggests that the `non-inflation solution' is superior to the `inflation solution' under some conditions.

Manmohan Singh is a senior economist at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in Washington, DC. He was previously with ABN Amro Bank’s emerging market syndicate team (Amsterdam/London). His work experience covers several countries, including the U.K., the U.S., Chile, India, Japan, and more recently, peripheral Europe. Singh continues to write extensively on topical issues, including deleveraging in financial markets; the rehypothecation and velocity of collateral; money, collateral, and central bank QE; shadow banking; and regulatory efforts in moving OTC derivatives to CCPs. On behalf of the IMF, Singh has led workshops for official sector policymakers on strategic asset allocation and regulatory issues. His articles have regularly appeared in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Euromoney, The Banker, RISK, and The Economist, as well as several journals, including the Journal of Financial Market Infrastructures and Journal of Investment Management. Singh received his BS from Allegheny College, Pennsylvania; he holds an MBA and a PhD in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.

What is the New Companies Act:  A Review, by Mr. Pratik Datta, Consultant NIPFP

 

New Companies Act and its Implications:  Mr. M.S. Sahoo, Secretary, Institute of Company Secretaries of India (ICSI)

Dr. Prajapati Trivedi, Chairperson (NA, CWC) & Secretary (Performance Management), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, was invited for a Keynote Lecture on ‘Performance Monitoring and Evaluation System in Government’.

Lack of access to modern energy services is a major impediment to improvement of human welfare globally. Currently, nearly 3 billion people globally rely on the direct burning of solid fuels to meet their cooking and heating needs. Roughly 1.3 billion lack access to electricity with another 1 billion having poor access. Significant efforts over the years have had mixed success in solving these energy access problems. Recently there has been a renewed emphasis on achieving universal access over the next two decades with 2012 declared the United Nations Year of Sustainable Energy for All and now a United Nations Decade of Sustainable Energy for All underway. The recently released Global Energy Assessment and the International Energy Agency have been analyzing the scale of effort needed to achieve universal access and some of the policies that would need to be put in place. This talk will review the results of the Global Energy Assessment and compare them to other efforts to determine what sort of resources would need to be mobilized to provide universal access and some of the institutional issues raised by trying to achieve that goal. This will be followed by a discussion of the role of the private sector and of carbon markets in particular, based on research conducted by our team at the University of British Columbia.

Lack of access to modern energy services is a major impediment to improvement of human welfare globally. Currently, nearly 3 billion people globally rely on the direct burning of solid fuels to meet their cooking and heating needs. Roughly 1.3 billion lack access to electricity with another 1 billion having poor access. Significant efforts over the years have had mixed success in solving these energy access problems. Recently there has been a renewed emphasis on achieving universal access over the next two decades with 2012 declared the United Nations Year of Sustainable Energy for All and now a United Nations Decade of Sustainable Energy for All underway. The recently released Global Energy Assessment and the International Energy Agency have been analyzing the scale of effort needed to achieve universal access and some of the policies that would need to be put in place. This talk will review the results of the Global Energy Assessment and compare them to other efforts to determine what sort of resources would need to be mobilized to provide universal access and some of the institutional issues raised by trying to achieve that goal. This will be followed by a discussion of the role of the private sector and of carbon markets in particular, based on research conducted by our team at the University of British Columbia.

The relationship between the natural environment and human civilisation is complex. It has been exacerbated in the present times by the continued transformation and utilisation of predominantly exhaustible resources to attain economic prosperity. The book Ecological Limits and Economic development: Creating Space provides a comprehensive analysis of the role of ecological constraints in limiting development, and examines how this can be overcome in a sustainable manner. Combining a behavioural analysisv of resource dynamics with normative policy discussions of their sustainable use, it explores the linkages between the biosphere and economic systems in the context of development.. The talk based on the book would point out how ignoring of these linkages - particularly between and ecological limits and economic scale, may lead not only to environmental crisis, but also to devastation of pseudo or unsustainable developmental achievements of the past.

The HDI is calculated using normalized indicators from three domains - education, health and standard of living (or income). The paper evaluates the various measures through a set of axioms with the acronym MANUSH representing Monotonicity, Anonymity, Normalization, Uniformity (balanced growth across domains should be rewarded), Signalling and Hiatus sensitivity (indicating that inequality across domains or the same gap across domain's should be considered worse off as the attainment increases). The old measure of taking a linear average of the three domains satisfies the first three axioms (or MAN) and the current geometric mean approach satisfies the first four (or MANU). We propose an alternative measure that measures the inverse of the shortfall of the distance from the ideal, which satisfies all the MANUSH axioms. Incidentally, MANUSH means human in Bengali and the term can also be rearranged to denote HUMANS.

Half-day workshop on promoting effective utilization of National Clean Energy Fund, supported by SHAKTI Sustainable Energy Foundation.

Half-day workshop on Fiscal-Monetary Coordination.

A three-day conference on Economic Theory and Policy organized in partnership with the Jawaharlal Nehru University and Kagawa University.

Prof. Stanley L. Winer, from Carleton University, gave a lecture on Taxation of Inherited Wealth and Bequests: An Empirical Investigation.

To bring about environmental fiscal reform by mapping capacity issues of policymakers, regulations, academic and research institutions; collating and documenting the tools and practice available for capacity development and review in the material to identify the gaps; and finally suggesting a road map and action plan for capacity development and awareness related activities at the national level.

The 5th Annual Raja Chelliah Memorial lecture on the “Growth-Equity Tradeoff in Tax Policy Design: Evidence from a Large Panel of Countries” was delivered by Jorge Martinez-Vazquez, Regents Professor of Economics and Director of International Studies Program, Andrew Young School of Policy Studies, Georgia State University on November 8, 2012 at IIC, New Delhi. Hon’ble Finance Minister C. Chidambaram chaired the event.

The workshop was organised with the objective of having an informed discussion to help frame the issues of Reference for the fourteenth Finance Commission. The discussion focused on Devolution, FRBM Debt Consolidation and sustainability, GST, Public Expenditure Management, Decentralisation and Special Category.

N.K. Singh, Member of Parliament spoke on “Managing Centre-State Relations” to the audience which comprised of policymaker and acclaimed academics and economic and media.