Heroes made of CO2; How many national champions are required; Financial inclusion measurement; Firms and cybersecurity
Heroes made of CO2
There is an old idea around pollution arbitrage: production will tend to shift to countries with lax standards. In my column in the Business Standard today, CO2 arbitrage will make heroes, I bring this kind of reasoning to bear on carbon-intensive production in India. It seems that there will be a boom and then a bust.
How many national champions are required?
It is widely felt that physical investment in India has now shifted course into a `national champions’ model where a few business groups get support of the state. In a recent article on the BloombergQuint, Akshay Jaitly and I look at the magnitudes involved, and find that you’d require about 6 to 12 groups that are of the size of the Adani Group, in order to get to the values for investment that are required in the economy. Similarly, very large magnitudes of energy transition investment are required, and it is hard to obtain this from a few national champions. Hence, it is important for Indian policy frameworks to support exuberant investment by thousands of firms.
Financial inclusion: The measurement agenda
For a while now, we have been concerned about the problem of measurement lurking in the field of financial inclusion. On 6 February, Susan Thomas had a column on the BloombergQuint, The problem of greenwashing in ESG investments in finance, which highlights how limitations in measurement are a key choke point.
This is part of a work program with Dvara Research on solving this problem, on finding the required methods for measurement in financial inclusion. There is a novel strategy bringing the inputs-outputs-outcomes approach to solve this question. On this, there is a paper and a new report.
Firms and cybersecurity
Karthik Suresh has an oped on the BloombergQuint on 7 February, How firms can fare better on cybersecurity, where he takes a skeptical view of the state apparatus in this field, and emphasises that the solutions lies within the firms who face these threats.