Current issues, Macroeconomics, Regulation

Current issues

I wrote an article in the Business Standard today, where I peer into the coming year or two, and argue that there will be a greater role for external financing in India. This has interesting implications for policy makers, for financial firms and for non-financial firms.

Everyone agrees that we need more testing for Covid-19. On 12 April, I wrote an article describing the four pathways through which testing can help inform decision making by private persons and in public policy. We should be careful about the class of questions that each of these datasets can answer.

On 7 April, Rajeswari Sengupta and Josh Felman analysed the RBI actions of 27 March in monetary policy and banking regulation.

On 6 April, Smriti Parsheera wrote about the difficulties associated with front line officials implementing a lockdown.

Public health works best when the people trust the state. As an example, new initiatives on using computer technology to do better on contact tracing and isolation are attractive, but this requires a citizenry that is trusting enough to install apps that are controlled by the government. Enacting a good privacy law is required for getting to this. Rishab Bailey, Vrinda Bhandari, Smriti Parsheera and Faiza Rahman analyse the draft Personal Data Protection Bill (Part 1, Part 2) and find shortcomings.

Macroeconomics

In 2017, Josh Felman, Ila Patnaik and I developed a new estimator for Exchange Market Pressure. On 6 April, Madhur Mehta and others got version 2.0 of the dataset out. This covers 135 countries, for the period from 1/1996 to 11/2018.

Regulation

The Parliament has given regulators in India expansive powers, and for a long time, the courts were generally deferential to regulators. On 10 April, Pratik Datta and Varun Marwah have an article where they show two landmark orders by the Supreme Court (calls dropped, on TRAI, and cryptocurrency ban, by RBI). These mark the beginning of jurisprudence that reshapes the regulators of India.