The evenings are hard; Electricity and Tamil Nadu public finance; Unintended consequences and criminalising cheque bouncing; XKDR Forum; Eps 35,36 of Everything is Everything
The evenings are hard
Every evening, the solar energy users come back to the grid asking for power. Coping with this demand in the present policy paradigm is difficult, and there are important economic forces that will make things worse. In my column in the Business Standard yesterday, The evenings are hard, I describe the mounting difficulties of grid managers. These difficulties will not be overcome through better execution.
The electricity chokepoint in Tamil Nadu public finance
Charmi Mehta, Radhika Pandey, Renuka Sane and I have a new paper out. We undertake a debt sustainability analysis of Tamil Nadu, with the conventional fiscal data and after consolidating in the electricity utilities. We look back at three experiences of fiscal distress in history and obtain thumb-rules for what distress looks like and how it manifests itself. Projections under business-as-usual resemble these scenarios in some respects. Fiscal distress is material to electricity policy and electricity policy is material to fiscal distress.
The consequences of criminalising cheque bouncing
In 1988 the Parliament introduced jail time for bouncing a cheque. In a recent article on The Leap Blog, Shubho Roy and I think about the incentive implications of this. We sketch the numerous unintended consequences that flowed from this decision, many of which reflect the limitations of the intellectual community of that era. When decriminalisation is weighed, some of these will play out in reverse.
XKDR Forum
We are recruiting in economics, quantitative and policy research at XKDR Forum. And, here is Issue 23 of the XKDR Newsletter.
Eps 35,36 of Everything is everything
Episode 35 is on hiking. Episode 36 is The long road to change. It builds on `the policy pipeline’ from Kelkar & Shah 2022.