Dr. Vinod Mishra is Senior Lecturer, Monash Business School, Department of Economics, Monash University, Australia.

Until recently, factors determining the decisions made by microfinance institutions (MFIs) to extend loans to business start-ups had not been explored. Recent evidence shows that MFI performance with regards to funds issued for small business start-ups depends on MFI-level characteristics such as profit orientation. We argue that these decisions do not only depend on MFI-specific practices or characteristics, but also on the role that ethnic diversity plays. Using data on microfinance lending activities for business start-ups, we examine the impact of ethnic diversity on microenterprise start-ups. Results show that ethnic diversity negatively affects the provision of financial capital for business start-ups. 

The seminar will deal with some aspects of a 63-year study of the performance of the Indian economy from 1950-51 to 2013-14. Certain aspects of the detailed empirical analysis carried out for the author’s forthcoming book, ‘Capital and Capitalism: India’s Journey’ (Oxford University Press, 2017) will be presented. First, the transformation of the structure of Indian economy over a 63-year-period from 1950-51 to 2013-14 will be presented and discussed. The implications of these changes for future national development, in the light of global economic and technological changes, will be discussed. Second, an evaluation of the productivity of the industrial sector of the economy for a 63-year-period from 1950-51 to 2013-14 will be presented and discussed. A specific evaluation of the impact of industrial productivity on economic growth over the last six decades of India’s Independence will also be presented and the implications of these results discussed in light of the current policy thrust on the manufacturing sector. Hence, the relative importance or unimportance of the manufacturing sector for sustained economic growth in the future will be assessed. Third, an evaluation of the determinants of industrial productivity in India over the six decades will be presented. Finally, the seminar will deal with the evolving dimensions of technological change and its impact on India’s economic growth performance.

The National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi is organising a seminar on "Emerging Issues in State Finances Post-Fourteenth Finance Commission: Analysis of State budgets", as part of the IDRC (International Development Research Centre, Canada) project on "Intergovernmental Fiscal Transfers in India". Click here for details of the project.

Dr. Pinaki Chakraborty, Professor, NIPFP, will deliver a presentation on "Analysis of State Budgets of 2016-17: Key Findings", at the event. Participating dignitaries include Shri Ratan P.  Watal, Principal Adviser, NITI Aayog (Awaiting confirmation); Shri Ashok Lavasa, Finance Secretary & Secretary (Expenditure), Government of India; Shri Gobind Mohan, Principal Resident Commissioner, Govt. of Sikkim; Shri S. Krishnan, Principal Secretary, Govt. of Tamil Nadu & Chairman, Fifth State Finance Commission, Tamil Nadu; and Shri P. P. Ghosh, Director, Asian Development Research Institute, Patna; Shri Sumit Bose, Vice-Chairman, NIPFP and Dr. Rathin Roy, Director, NIPFP.

Shri Dilip Asbe is the Chief Operating Officer of National Payments Corporation of India(NPCI).

Detailed profile

National Payments Corporation of India(NPCI) is mandated by the Reserve Bank of India to run retail payment systems. It is improving the National Electronic Clearing Service into an Automated Clearing House. It has launched Rupay Cards. It has pioneered faster payments in india through Immediate Payment Service and the recently launched Unified Payment Interface. All these initiatives are promoting digital payments in the country.

Dr. Anupam Saraph has to his credit, the design of at least two identification programs and has researched the UID’s functional creep since its inception. He has been dissecting the myths of what it is or is not. He has also tracked the consequences of its linkages on databases that protect national security, sovereignty, democratic status and the entire banking and money system in India. He has also highlighted the implications of its use for targeted delivery of cash subsidies from the Consolidated Fund of India. In his seminar he will provide a quick introduction to the devastating impact of the UID number on development programs, national security and the governability of India.

Identity frauds and organised crimes are facilitated when identification documents are not based on a compelling logical framework. Unfortunately, most identification documents are issued adhoc and through a confusion of approaches, technologies and intentions. A logically compelling framework for the issue of identity or address documents is discussed along with the consequences for the individuals, organisation, nation and the world at large when identity documents are not issued on any such framework. In this seminar, he will provide a quick introduction to the devastating impact of the UID number on development programs, national security and the governability of India. Talk is based on the attached paper.

At the seminar, the participants will showcase new research in various fields of health care, along with policy recommendations. This will include health care regulation, health information systems, the implementation of health-related schemes, non-communicable diseases, etc. 

Public Choice Economics uses the insights of economics to explain political processes such as elections and bureaucracy. It explains that the probability of "market failure" must be compared with the probability of "government failure", in order to make rational choices about what should be done by governments and  what should be done by markets. This session introduces the field of Public Choice and its origins. This is a talk where we take a closer look at the history of ideas in Public Choice, how it developed over the last three centuries, who were the thinkers, what were the building blocks that were introduced, and what present day public policy relevance does the theory has for us.

Kumar Anand leads the research team at Free A Billion in Mumbai.

Detailed profile

This session revisits independent India’s economic history, especially the first two decades. What were the policies that were implemented by the leaders of the time? What was the thinking and motivation behind some of these policies? Why is it that rapid industrialisation did not lead to a corresponding improvements in the general living standard of Indians? An answer to some of these questions are attempted, which contradicts the prevailing mainstream opinion on some of these matters. It is often believed that ideas of economic freedom and reforms are “not Indian” and have been imported from the ‘West’. However, research into modern Indian history showcases the rich indigenous liberal tradition that stood against ideas of a centrally planned economy. This session also briefly presents an overview of such a tradition, which remains largely overlooked or forgotten today.

NIPFP is organising a seminar to deliberate and discuss the impact of the changed fiscal scenario in lieu of the 14th Finance Commission recommendations and restructuring of the Centrally Sponsored Schemes, on the Health Expenditure commitments of the Centre and States. These changes have initiated a process of overhaul of the fiscal architecture at both Central and State levels. The motivation for the seminar is to bring together researchers and stakeholder to share their views and initiate a dialogue.

The India Gold Policy Centre, IIM Ahmedabad and the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy is organising the first Senior Economists Roundtable on "Tax Levy and its implications on India's Gold Ecosystem" on October 17, 2016. The roundtable will host a panel comprising of Dr. Saurabh Garg, Joint Secretary (Investments), Ministry of Finance, Prof. Arvind Sahay, Head, IGPC, Prof. Ashish Nanda, Director IIM Ahmedabad, Prof. Errol D’Souza, Dean (Faculty), IIM Ahmedabad, P.R. Somasundaram, Managing Director, India World Gold Council, Dr. Rathin Roy, Director, NIPFP, Dr. R. Kavita Rao, Professor, NIPFP, Dr. Ajit Ranade, Corp. Economic Cell, Aditya Birla Group, Girish Vanvari, Partner & Head – Tax, KPMG, Johnson Lewis, MD and Head – Sales and Trading, The Bank of Nova Scotia,  Saumyakanti Ghosh, Chief Economic Advisor, State Bank of India, Surjit Bhalla, Chairman, Oxus Investments, Dr. Venkatachalam Shunmugham, Chief Ecomomist, MCX and R.K. Anand Dy. General Manager (Economist), Punjab National Bank.

Sandeep Parekh is the founder of Finsec Law Advisors, a financial sector law firm based in Mumbai.

Detailed bio

Sanjay Jain is an active volunteer with iSPIRT and is an active member of the Open API, and the cashless India teams.  He has been working with the NPCI to define the next generation payment systems (the Unified Payment Interface), as well as with regulators and other bodies to help entire processes go paperless.  He has been one of the key contributors to help create, and evangelize various govt open APIs, which are collectively referred to as the India Stack.  He was earlier the Chief Product Manager at the UIDAI.

Shruti Rajagopalan is an Assistant Professor of Economics at State University of New York, Purchase College and a Fellow at the Classical Liberal Institute at NYU School of Law.

Detailed bio

What explains the nature and volume of interest-group activity in the judiciary in recent decades? The existing literature has attributed this shift to the increasing power of the Indian Supreme Court; fractured legislatures; coalition politics; changes in ideology; greater emphasis on positive rights, etc. I explain this by examining the incentives faced by interest groups while choosing the judiciary as the forum for rent seeking. Unlike the typical explanations from the perspective of the judiciary supplying the changes in rules; the talk offers a demand-driven explanation, analyzing the incentives of interest-groups seeking rule changes.

Prof. Jeffrey Hammer is a Visiting Professor in Economic Development at Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University. 

Detailed bio

Pravesh Sharma, Visiting Senior Fellow, ICRIER.

Detailed bio

The launch of the National Agriculture Market (NAM) in April 2016 by the Prime Minister signalled the first serious resolve of the NDA government to address the challenge of creating a unified national market for agricultural produce. It was expected that the launch of the e-marketing portal seeking to virtually integrate physical mandis would be vigorously followed up by the government to create an alternative buying option for farmers by the time the kharif marketing season came up in October this year. However, the early progress of e-NAM suggests a familiar lapse into hesitation and confusion, as the roll out remains sluggish and legacy players in agriculture trade prepare to reap the real harvest of a (so far) bountiful monsoon. This talk seeks to throw light on the fate of NAM in the larger political economy of agriculture marketing, especially at the State level, and uses past experiences of similar reform initiatives to predict some likely outcome scenarios.

Prof. R. K. Sharma is an alumnus of the prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi.

Detailed bio

Dr. Gopinath N. Shenoy is a medico-legal consultant who exclusively appears for doctors in consumer courts and medical councils all over India.

Detailed bio

The speaker will be sharing his experience as member of the National Consumer Disputes Redressal Commission (NCDRC) on the Medical malpractice and the existing regulations and the involvement of enforcement agencies in streamlining medical practice. He will concentrate on four key areas: (i) disclosures mandated by law; (ii) referral practices and commissions; (iii) consent; and (iv) duty of physician towards patients - all in terms of protecting the patients, especially, where they spend; how and on whom they spend; when they spend; and, are these logical?

Joshua Felman is currently stationed in Delhi, working as a long-term expert provided by the IMF.

Detailed bio

In a famous paper, Blanchard and Leigh (2013) discovered that there was a strong link between fiscal consolidation projected in Spring 2010 and subsequent growth forecast errors. They interpreted this link as indicating that forecasters had used multipliers that were far too low. This paper argues that this interpretation was not correct. The real problem was that forecasters failed to foresee the euro area crisis.

Mr. Samir Shah is the Managing Director & CEO, NCDEX.

Detailed bio

Indian agricultural market structure is characterised by over 7000 markets (APMCs). Each market in most states (other than a few states which have started the reform process) act as disconnected markets where a skewed market structure exists with an average of only 4-5 buyers to every seller. This deprives the small and marginal farmer from effective access to markets. We believe that 'right to market access' should be a cause that needs to be championed for farmers in India. 'Right to market access' means the ease with which a farmer can sell across grade, location and time. NCDEX Group and Government of Karnataka pioneered the beginning of this program of 'right to market access' through a reform program by building the first ever State Agri Market (SAM) initiated a few years ago. More recently Government of India has initiated an e-NAM project to set up a National Agri Market. Agri futures have been developed by NCDEX over the last 13 years. How can we build an effective market structure that integrates NAM, SAM, Futures seamlessly?

Dr. Arun Gadre and Dr. Abhay Shukla are authors of the book, Dissenting Diagnosis. Dr Arun is a Gynaecologist by training and practicing, and is a full time author currently. Dr. Abhay Shukla, is an Internal Medicine Specialist working at SATHI, an NGO aimed at creating awareness and promoting social aspects of healthcare service delivery.

Complaints about the state of medical care are increasing in today's India; whether it is unnecessary investigations, botched operations or expensive, sometimes even harmful, medication. But while the unease is widespread, few outside the profession understand the extent to which the medical system is being distorted. Dr. Arun Gadre and Dr. Abhay Shukla have gathered evidence from seventy eight practicing doctors, in both the private and public medical sectors across six states and across 23 fields of medicine (including traditional), to expose the ways in which vulnerable patients are exploited by a system that promotes unscrupulous medical practices. Drawing on the frank and courageous statements of these seventy-eight doctors dismayed at the state of their profession, Dissenting Diagnosis lays bare the corruption afflicting the medical sector in India and sets out solutions for a healthier future.The duo will be talking on how medical malpractice has pushed India to face poverty, how regulatory insufficiency has pushed medical personnel to promote "Hospital Mall" culture in medical practice.

Liliana Rojas-Suarez is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development.

Detailed bio

Devesh Roy is a Research Fellow in the Markets, Trade and Institutions Division of the International Food Policy Research Institute, New Delhi.

Detailed bio

Sunil Abraham is the Executive Director of Bangalore based research organisation, the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS).

Detailed bio

This talk will reflect on several aspects of the Aadhaar project from a technical perspective. First, there will be a reflection on biometrics as a unique, identification and authentication technology. Second, there will be a critique of open washing by the UIDAI through their adoption of free software and open standards and finally there will be an analysis of alternative technical solutions and architecture which will allow India to harvest the benefits of identity management without the harms and risks of centralized biometrics.

Detailed bio

Dinesh Thakur, Sciformix Corporation.

Detailed bio

A bank account is widely regarded as the first step toward financial inclusion of the poor. Among other benefits, funds deposited in a bank account are observed to lead to higher savings. However, the existing literature does not investigate whether the savings are productively used. Using nationally representative samples, to ensure generalizability of our findings, and exploiting special features of National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) of India, our empirical tests consistently indicate that households that receive NREGS wages through bank spend significantly less on education than other comparable households that receive cash payment. The findings suggest that the poor face constraints in accessing their bank accounts regularly. Further, such constraints affect discretionary expenses, including educational expenses which are discretionary for the very poor, more than essential expenses such as food expenses. Additional tests for other discretionary and non-discretionary expenses provide corroborating evidence.  The results are consistent between standard OLS and instrumental variable regressions designed to correct for omitted variable bias.   

Post-Doctoral Fellow in Economics at the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi.

We study the role played by social networks in facilitating effective group based collective action, especially for a group heavily underrepresented in politics across the globe, i.e., women. We look at participation in local village meetings in rural India (Gram Sabhas) as the context of our study. To overcome the usual endogeneity challenges we focus on a factor that affects women’s social network formation and yet, is presumably not directly related to their political behavior - their membership in a Women Only Self Help Group (WOSHG). We first show that past membership in a WOSHG positively affects a woman’s present meeting attendance rate, and that it is not driven by household selection on observables. Using past existence of any WOSHG in a village as an instrument for past membership we then show that the result remains the same, while there is no such effect on men’s meeting attendance. At the village level, this significantly changed the gender composition of meeting attendees in women’s favor, which in turn resulted in more women preferred public goods (such as water, sanitation, health) being provided. We provide evidence in favor of the social network story as opposed to other mechanisms driving the results. This work highlights an unintended benefit of expanding SHGs in rural India by looking at its effect on the local politics.

Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore.

The goal of this seminar is to unpack the underlying friction between the need to facilitate due diligence in share acquisition transactions that could place inside information in the acquirer’s hands, and at the same time to ensure that such information is not misused by the acquirer to the detriment of the other shareholders, a matter that insider trading regime regards as sacrosanct. In analysing and seeking to resolve this tension, the speaker draws upon examples from three jurisdictions, namely the United Kingdom (UK), Singapore and India. The core argument is that from a theoretical perspective the due diligence objective of acquirers can be reconciled with the goals of the insider trading regime in order to preserve the interests of the target shareholder as long as certain restrictions are placed on the conduct of the acquirer.

Over the past decade, the subject of “network neutrality” has remained one of the central debates in Internet policy and governance. It has raised new questions about the impact of network neutrality on the design and architecture of the Internet, privacy and user rights and the future of communications networks. Governments all over the world have been investigating whether legislative or regulatory action is needed to limit the ability of providers of Internet access services to interfere with the applications, content, and services accessed by users on their networks.

Earlier this month, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) released a regulation prohibiting discriminatory tariff for data services based on content, initiating regulatory intervention on network neutrality in India. The regulation was preceded by an extensive consultation exercise that saw spirited public participation and academic debate on the issue.

In this context, the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi is organizing a “Symposium on Network Neutrality in India: Discriminatory Pricing and Beyond” on 4th March, 2016 in New Delhi, India from 4.30 to 7.30 PM. The discussions will be followed by dinner.

The symposium will be attended by the Chairman and senior officials from TRAI, key policy makers, academicians, entrepreneurs and stakeholders from the telecom industry. Our aim is to generate a high quality discussion on TRAI's regulation on discriminatory tariff and its implications for stakeholders. The symposium will also focus on the fundamental question of bridging the digital divide and expanding access to the Internet in India. In addition, we will brainstorm on the next steps towards a legislative framework  for network neutrality in India.

Michael Keen is Deputy Director of the Fiscal Affairs Department of the International Monetary Fund, where he was previously head of the Tax Policy and Tax Coordination divisions. Before joining the Fund, he was Professor of Economics at the University of Essex and visiting Professor at Kyoto University. He has led technical assistance missions to nearly thirty countries on a wide range of issues in tax policy, and consulted for the World Bank, European Commission, and the private sector. He has served on the Board of the National Tax Association in the U.S., and on the editorial boards of American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, International Tax and Public Finance (of which he was joint founder), Journal of Public Economics, the Review of Economic Studies and many other journals. He is co-author of books on The Modern VAT, the Taxation of Petroleum and Minerals, and Changing Customs.

Barun Mitra is a commentator on current affairs, with a particular interest in economic development, environmental issues, democracy and property rights. He has been published widely in newspapers around the world. He is the founder of Liberty Institute, an independent think tank based in Delhi. One of his current areas of interest is to explore ways of making policy proposals politically viable.  Together with ARCH Vahini, they developed the website Right to Property, with the aim of helping some of the remote rural communities document and map their claims over land and forest resources under the Forest Rights Act, 2006.

Detailed bio

This is an attempt to examine the background of the key WTO disputes which triggered a policy shift in India towards the State playing a more proactive role in encouraging the building of trade-related legal capacity. In particular, the talk will focus on the features of the unique trade-related capacity model chosen by India and how it differs from the alternate models established by other major developing countries that have an active profile in WTO dispute settlement. By undertaking such an analysis, the speaker seeks to explore as to how the Indian model is more geared towards hybrid policy making in contrast to other trade-related legal capacity models.​

Abstract source

The public lecture series present the basic principles of public economics as it applies to the health sector in developing countries. It identifies the characteristic market failures related to health and healthcare, examining three broad categories of policies:

1) public goods, preventive and promotive services

2) primary, curative, health care and

3) hospital based care or insurance.

Going somewhat beyond standard economics, it compares the potential welfare improvement of the different categories of interventions to their relative difficulty of implementation to discuss priority setting given practical constraints.  While g​​eneral in scope, most examples are drawn from Indian experience and research.

Charles and Marie Robertson Visiting Professor in International Economic Policy and Lecturer in Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University, USA.

Every IMF global forecast expresses disappointment that growth has come in lower than expected but then goes on to promise that a pick up is around the corner. This has now gone on for 7 years. Why? The story forecasters tell always centers around some exceptional event just before the forecast. That is no longer credible. Do other stories: such as financial disruption and secular stagnation hold up? Or is this a simpler tale of a long-term decline in global productivity growth that was obscured by a global bubble, which has yet to fully burst? 

https://www.princeton.edu/ceps/workingpapers/248mody.pdf

Scott Jacobs is a leading global expert and author with 30 years of experience in regulatory reform and good business environments. He is Managing Director of Jacobs, Cordova & Associates, an international corporation specializing in regulatory reform solutions. He organized and directed the OECD Program on Regulatory Reform from 1995-2001, where he wrote many of the recommended regulatory practices that are now used as worldwide benchmarks. He has worked with over 90 developing and industrialized countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas in designing and implementing some of the largest regulatory reforms in the world and as well as targeted policy/sectoral reforms.

Paul A. Volcker senior fellow for international economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Washington. Detailed CV can be accessed at http://www.cfr.org/experts/environmental-policy-international-finance-congresses-parliaments-national-legislatures/sebastian-mallaby/b4452

The talk will be based on the biography of Alan Greenspan by Sebastian Mallaby, to be published in September 2016.

How rapidly is the relative and absolute position of emerging countries in the world economy changing and what impact is it having?  What is India's role compared to other fast-growing and sizable countries, especially China?  What do these patterns suggest about the possible role in the future about these countries, including India? We introduce the Global Consumption and Income Project, which makes possible an unprecedented portrait of the changing levels of consumption and income of persons over time, within and across countries, around the world, and use it to address these questions.

Professor in Public Policy, School of Public Policy and Administration and Department of Economics, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.

In this paper we argue that the composition of Indian state government expenditures, particularly the ratio of private goods publicly provided used to target swing voters and special interest as a proportion of total state expenditures, is a decreasing function of real per capita income and the level of political competition (holding constant other demographic and cultural influences). These hypotheses are then tested on a panel of 14 Indian states over the fiscal years 1987/88 to 2011/12. The long run results of three alternative ARDL models are broadly consistent with the proposed hypotheses, particularly the relationship between the private good share of state expenditures and real per capita incomes. They suggest that rising incomes and more effective political competition work together to improve a state’s policy mix and to the extent that general welfare enhancing policies prove effective, economic growth and development becomes at least partially endogenous.