Dr. Ravindra M Srivastava is the Environment, Science, and Technology Unit Chief at the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi. He has previously served in Pretoria, South Africa, Karachi, Pakistan, and Madras, India, and will be posted to Dubai, UAE in 2019.  Prior to joining the U.S. Foreign Service, he spent over a decade in operating wastewater and water treatment plants and managing such utilities in the United States. For several years he taught at colleges and universities in the U.S. and India. Trained as a civil engineer at IIT Madras,Ravi traveled to the U.S. for further education, receiving his M.S., and Ph.D. In civil and environmental engineering from Iowa State and University of Illinois, respectively, and MBA from Colorado State University. He was born in Jhansi districtict, UP, brought up in Amritsar, Punjab, and educated in Madras, Tamil Nadu.

National Consultation on Child Budgeting in India: Towards better investments for the Realization of Children’s Rights. SAVE the Children  is organizing in collaboration with NIPFP and National Coalition for Education (NCE), with an aim to understand the need for budget analysis for ensuring better investments for the Realization of Children’s Rights embedded in the SDGs and to mobilize key decision makers and parliamentarians for advocating towards adequate financing for children. Participation by invitation only.

Dr. Satyendra Kumar Gupta, Assistant Professor, Indian Institute of Management, Rohtak.

This research establishes that the emergence and persistence of intrastate conflict incidence since 1960 are influenced by regional agro-ecological factors captured by the extent of variation in potential crop yield. Our results based on cross-country and grid-level analysis indicate that higher potential crop yield variability within a country that is exogenous to both human intervention and regional culture increases the likelihood of intrastate conflict. Our findings are robust to the inclusion of various geographical, institutional, and potentially confounding economic development correlates.

Meyyappan Nagappan is a Leader in the International Tax practice at Nishith Desai Associates. He is a Pemanda Monappa Scholar and has graduated from Cambridge University with a Masters of Law with specialization in International Taxation. He was awarded the International Bar Association Taxes Committee Scholarship-2018 to present his paper on taxing the digital economy at the IBA conference in Rome. He completed his Bachelors in Law from NALSAR and has done extensive work advising some of the biggest tech companies on tax and structuring issues apart from publishing academic articles on taxation of digital economy. Prior to joining Nishith Desai Associates, he worked in the Chambers of Mr. Mohan Parasan, Solicitor General of India between 2010 – 2014; and was involved in some of the landmark international taxation disputes, direct and indirect taxation disputes in India during the time. He has also been a regular speaker in multiple conferences in India and abroad on issues relating to taxation of digital economy, GAAR, MLI, artificial intelligence and blockchain. He also leads the tax policy, impact investment, social finance and GST practice at NDA.

Digitalisation is rapidly transforming the economy. Experts are now examining the implications of this for tax law. Considering the nascent stage at which the digital economy is, tax law is likely to be impacted by the manner in which privacy laws are enacted in India. Further, research has only recently begun into understanding the economic value created by newer intangibles and other assets, such as customer data, that highly digitalized companies use to generate tremendous profits. At the same time, measures to tax the digital economy are being adopted by jurisdictions around the world on the shared moral premise that adequate taxes are not being paid in their respective jurisdictions. This shared sentiment appears to be giving way to inefficient unilateral withholding taxes that undermines the international tax treaty framework. Further, while the focus today may be on highly digitalized companies, the principles laid down today would affect all companies as their business models undergo increasingly inevitable digitalization. The talk will focus on the interplay between morality, privacy and economics with international tax law centered around the current debate on digital economy.

Malavika is project head for the Future of Finance Initiative at Dvara Research. She is a lawyer with experience in policy and strategy. Her work looks at the challenges for user protection at the intersection of technology, finance and inclusion. Her previous experience includes work with a global law firm, stints with the Financial Markets Law Committee established by the Bank of England, and in social finance for Acumen and Big Society Capital. She graduated with an MPhil in Public Policy from the University of Cambridge and completed a five-year undergraduate law-degree at the National Academy of Legal Studies and Research (NALSAR), Hyderabad. Malavika was a 2018 fellow of the Chevening Financial Services fellowship at King’s College London, and a 2016 fellow of the On Purpose social enterprise leadership programme.

Enforcement of data protection regulations present some unique challenges, like a market-wide enforcement perimeter and difficulty in identifying contraventions of laws or regulations and harm caused by such contraventions. Taking these factors into consideration, we propose a model of enforcement based on risk-based supervision and the use of a range of responsive enforcement tools. This model attempts to move away from a focus on post-data breach sanctions and considers how the regulatory community might act to minimize contraventions of the data protection regime. As part of this model, we propose a methodology to identify those entities which potentially pose a higher level of risk, to both individuals and the system, when personal data held by them is breached. We also have set out a range of enforcement tools that the regulator may utilize to both prevent and mitigate the effects of a compromise of individuals personal data, as well as some features of institutional design and intersectoral co-ordination required for effective enforcement.

Dr. Paul Burke is an energy economist at the Australian National University’s Crawford School of Public Policy. He has been closely engaged in the study of energy transitions and the design of climate policies in Australia and throughout the Asia-Pacific. Dr Burke is currently working on a research project on the policy environment for zero-carbon energy in India and Indonesia. He holds a PhD in Economics from the Australian National University and a Bachelor in Agricultural Economics (Honours I) from the University of Sydney.

One-third of Australia’s coal-fired power stations closed during 2012–2017, with most of the remainder expected to close within the next two decades. Most new generation capacity is in the form of solar and wind. In this paper we conduct an event study to assess the local unemployment effects of the coal-fired power station closures. We use monthly regional labour force survey data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics. We find that there has on average been an increase in local unemployment of around 0.7 percentage points after closures of coal-fired power stations, an effect that tends to persist beyond the months immediately after closure. In the context of the overall variation in regional unemployment rates, however, the implications are relatively modest. The findings raise questions about appropriate policy responses for dealing with local structural adjustment issues facing coal-reliant communities. Implications for the Indian context will be discussed.

The objective of the seminar is to understand emerging issues in State finances based on State Budgets 2018-19 in a comparative perspective. Analysis of this year’s budgets of the States assume critical relevance as fiscal imbalances at the State level are on the rise. Also there is a need for better understanding of post GST scenario in States. The analysis would also highlight emerging issues in State Finances in light of the terms of Reference of the Fifteenth Finance Commission.

NIPFP is organising a brief discussion on "Why does Fiscal Federalism matter?"  The event is being organised in collaboration with the World Bank on August 01, 2018 at 10.30-11.30 a.m. in the Auditorium. The Country Director, World Bank, India Country office and Prof Roy Bahl,  Prof. Paul Bernd Spahn, Bob Searle and Jonathan Coppel, Marcelin Joanis, and David Savage, alongwith select senior officials from the Country office will be coming for the interaction.

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Dr. John Echeverri-Gent is an Associate Professor in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia.  He is author of The State and the Poor: Public Policy and Political Development in India and the United States and co-editor of Economic Reform in Three Giants: U.S. Foreign Policy and the USSR, China, and India. He has written many articles in comparative public policy and the political economy of development. His current research project is on “The Political Economy of India’s Financial Sector Reform in Comparative Perspective.” He is a member of the editorial board of Political Science Quarterly. He has served as consultant to the World Bank and USAID. He was chair of the American Political Science Task Force on Difference and Inequality in Developing Societies and treasurer of the American Institute of Indian Studies. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. in Political Science from the University of Chicago. 

India’s equity markets have been transformed from the backwaters of the global market with outdated trading technologies and regulatory institutions to world class institutions using cutting edge technology.  At the end of 2017, National Stock Exchange and the Bombay Stock Exchange had the ninth and tenth largest domestic market capitalization in the world, and they operated settlement and regulatory standards at the global cutting edge.  At the same time, India’s market for corporate bonds lagged far behind global standards.  In 2013, the value of Indian corporate bonds as a percentage of GDP was only 5.4% trailing far behind not only economic powerhouses like Republic of Korea (77.5%), Singapore (37%), Hong Kong (31.4%), and China (13%), but also less successful economies like Malaysia (43.4%) and Thailand (15.9%). More than 94% of corporate debt was raised through private placement rather than on the open market. This talk develops a political economy approach to explain why India’s equity markets have rapidly developed and its corporate debt market has not. 

This paper estimates the causal effect of fiscal rules on political budget cycles in a sample of 67 developing countries over the period 1985-2007. We exploit the geographical pattern in the adoption of fiscal rules to isolate an exogenous source of variation in the adoption of national fiscal rules. Based on a diffusion argument, we use the number of other countries in a given subregion that have fiscal rules in place to predict the probability of having them at the country level. We find that in election years with fiscal rules in place, public consumption is reduced by 1.65% point of GDP as compared to election years without these rules. Furthermore, the effectiveness of these rules depends on their type, their institutional design, whether they have been in place for a long time and finally on the degree of competitiveness of elections.

The RXIL TReDS presentation will cover what is TReDS, RXIL background, TReDS arrangement, how it works, key benefits for participants, key challenges – regulatory and non-regulatory, road map ahead and new initiatives undertaken.

Senior Resident Representative, IMF

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjUbCOQztK5gKwklrfcQpxOAOxgAirJeL

Dr. Shesadri Banerjee is Assistant Professor in Economics at the Madras Institute of Development, Chennai.

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One of the well documented stylized facts on Indian macroeconomy is the weak and incomplete transmission of monetary policy. In view of the empirical evidence from literature (Kletzer, 2012; Mishra et al. 2016), we examine if the frictions of the bank-led credit market can explain such low pass-through of monetary transmission mechanism. We address the research question using a New Keynesian business cycle model with Indian economy specific features of liquidity constrained population, competitive labour market and reserve requirements of the bank. We incorporate a variety of real (TFP, investment specific technological change, and fiscal policy) and nominal (interest rate shock) shocks to the prototype economy in order to understand the propagation mechanism and quantify the variance decomposition of shocks. Combining the methods of calibration and estimation, the baseline parameterization is configured and validated with second order moments of the data. Our model identifies the critical role of financial frictions in the transmission process, and explains the co-movements of interest rates, incomplete pass-through and adjustment mechanism of the real, nominal and financial variables for a positive interest rate shock. 

America has gone through a major health care reform that is now under attack. The speaker will review the background to reform, what reform did and where the US goes next.

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Ms. Katie Welsh is the Assistant Commissioner, Indirect Tax - Risk and Strategy, Australian Taxation Office; and Mr. David Pullen is Manager, Indirect Tax and Not-for-profit Unit, The Treasury, Australian Government.

Subhra K. Bhattacharya is an assistant professor in the department of economics at Shiv Nadar University. He has completed his PhD in Economics from Iowa State University. His primary research area is public economics and his current research focuses on private provision of public good by strategic individuals and optimal corrective taxation. He is also working on public economics issues in environment, and one of his current work in progress focuses on designing optimal institutional arrangement to tackle trans-boundary pollution. Detailed Bio.

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Dr. Rohit Azad is Assistant Professor, Centre for Economics Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Detailed Bio.

Can growth in India be simultaneously made equitable and environmentally sustainable? The recent pattern of high growth in India has been unequal even as serious questions have been raised about its ecological sustainability. In contrast to that, this paper argues for an alternative growth trajectory which answers the question in the affirmative. We propose an Energy Policy with Equity (EPE), which fundamentally changes the energy mix of the Indian economy towards greener forms of energy as well as guarantees universal access to energy thus generated to the entire population.