Recent asset price movements; Learning by doing and procurement

Recent asset price movements

The last week has been a dramatic time for global asset prices. There was a good inflation number in the US, and the results of the `midterm’ elections in the US unfolded. In my column in the Business Standard today, I try to parse these developments, and think about the implications for the world economy and for India.

Learning by doing and procurement

There are two rival views of the Indian state. On one hand is the view that the Indian state is pretty good at mobilising creative responses on the fly when faced with new situations, with `solving bespoke problems in mission mode’. Recent examples of such fire-fighting include demonetisation, GST and the pandemic. On the other hand is the more traditional view of state capacity: capabilities emerge very slowly, there is learning by doing, and practice makes perfect under the pressure of accountability mechanisms.

Aneesha Chitgupi, Abhishek Gorsi and Susan Thomas have an article Learning by doing and public procurement in India, on 5 November on The Leap Blog, which examines procurement expenditures of many government departments. This is part of the research program at XKDR Forum on public procurement. They find that departments that do not have a sustained engagement with procurement are more likely to have bigger procurement underspend. This is consistent with the traditional view of state capacity as a slow process of developing organisational capacity.