Distant thunder in the world economy; Government contracting; Regulation; Industrial policy done right

Indian and global macro

My column in the Business Standard today is Distant thunder in the world economy.

Government contracting

One element of the emerging field of government contracting is the problem of associated litigation. The first measurement of this field has been done in the article Litigation in public contracts: some estimates from court data in The Leap Blog by Devendra Damle, Karan Gulati, Anjali Sharma and Bhargavi Zaveri on 26 May.

Regulation

SEBI famously put out a group of “WhatsApp orders”. Rajat Asthana, Renuka Sane and S. Vivek analyse these from the viewpoint of the regulatory process, in an article An analysis of the SEBI WhatsApp Orders: Some observations on regulation-making and adjudication in The Leap Blog on 27 May.

RBI banned the storage of credit card data for subscriptions, where a merchant could e.g. use credentials every month for a subscription payment. Renuka Sane, Bhargavi Zaveri and I analysed this regulation. We have a paper and a short summary. We argue that such a ban is unwise, and that it is inconsistent with emerging jurisprudence on the checks and balances surrounding regulators.

Industrial policy, done right

The Indian drugs industry has a supply chain vulnerability with the requirement of Chinese APIs. Himani Chandna had written in The Print about the difficulties of conventional `industrial policy’ solutions to this. We published an extract from a forthcoming book, which has an idea on how to do this better: India's supply chain vulnerability with Chinese APIs: Industrial policy vs. sophisticated policy design by Gautam Bambawale, Vijay Kelkar, Raghunath Mashelkar, Ganesh Natarajan, Ajit Ranade, Ajay Shah.