http://www.business-standard.com/article/opinion/arvind-panagariya-narendra-modi-s-real-report-card-113102801007_1.html
My initial reaction:
I am sorry to say Aravind is a hack. I have disagreements with folks, but when I heard this man for the first time some seven years ago, I was thoroughly let down.
Taking his lines one by one and finding faults is a waste of time. He is a man of crdentials with bureaucrtic success, like Nick Stern but with a thousandth of Nick's competence.
Maybe the tenth. Why should I play Nick up so much?
Give economists some numbers and s/he will give you any story you pay for.
Been ther, done that.
Taking his lines one by one and finding faults is a waste of time. He is a man of crdentials with bureaucrtic success, like Nick Stern but with a thousandth of Nick's competence.
Maybe the tenth. Why should I play Nick up so much?
Give economists some numbers and s/he will give you any story you pay for.
Been ther, done that.
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Someone else posted disagreement with Panagariya and a praise for Bhagwati. So my answer:
Bhagwati was my teacher and had an animus toward Sen for decades. Panagariya can't match him in any way.
Sen isn't fraud, he is a philosopher with frequent errors in empirical work with numbers and interpretation. He and JNB have ideological feuds that can only be understood as 1960s CPM vs Swatantra Party (though neitherwere party members).
At one level, their disagreements are simple - AKS says, "You can't have sustainable growth without humnac capital." JNB says, "You won't have the money to invest in human capital if you didn't have tax revenues from growt." To describe AKS as an egalitarian and JNB as a proponent of trickle down is crude; neither has much knowledge and understanding. They move around in high penthouse circles, read academic claptrap and give lectures or fight.
Panagariya probably carries JNB's water bottle. I would rather listen to Ted Cruz any day.
Sen isn't fraud, he is a philosopher with frequent errors in empirical work with numbers and interpretation. He and JNB have ideological feuds that can only be understood as 1960s CPM vs Swatantra Party (though neitherwere party members).
At one level, their disagreements are simple - AKS says, "You can't have sustainable growth without humnac capital." JNB says, "You won't have the money to invest in human capital if you didn't have tax revenues from growt." To describe AKS as an egalitarian and JNB as a proponent of trickle down is crude; neither has much knowledge and understanding. They move around in high penthouse circles, read academic claptrap and give lectures or fight.
Panagariya probably carries JNB's water bottle. I would rather listen to Ted Cruz any day.
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Then the original poster challenged me to rebut Panagariya's conclusions:
As I said, I find Arvind below my intellectual dignity to even criticise. But I can put out some fundamental problems with this rhetorical nonsense that flows from "eminent economists" whose brains stopped years ago.
For one, poverty comparisons that do not take into account different consumption baskets and price structure. Poverty of the salt producers in Kutchh or the western coast of Gujarat is different from that of the urban slum dwellers that from Bihar or Konkan landless laborers.
Two, positives or negatives are difficult to associate with an individual. In particular when there is a mixed economy or, in case of Gujarat, a heavily private-sector oriented economy, a good part of it from investments in other parts of the country or the world (but whose returns to the investor get counted as Gujarati income if s/he is resident there.) When folks came down on NaMo for low nutrition levels, I did argue that the poor chap had little to do with it, that social and economic injustices are deeply ingrained in Indian culture and there are many reasons the poor are also victims of mal/under-nutrition. (One of which is urbanization and different consumption basket, price structure, etc.) So, Arvind's writing about NaMo report card is pure bakwas and would have been even if it concluded the opposite. (You may remember I didn't like the report from the RBI Governor's committee either. Perhaps that exchange was on the Dianuke site and not with you.)
Third, there are many determinants of nutrition and weight, and government actions as such play no direct role unless there are special rations and school meals. India's first school meal program was started in Gujarat by the Congress CM Madhavsinh Solanki and what you might be seeing in the ICDS data is that the NEXT generation of children - i.e., children of those who got school meals in the 1970s and 1980s - are simply healthier children and suffer less events of weight loss. It may also be that this subsequent generation effect also shows up in greater school enrollment rates, in turn contributing to a long-term trend of virtuous cycle.
Fourth, the Muslim poverty rate is difficult to analyze without additional demographic data. Could be that poorer Muslims have left Gujarat. Or that Muslim businesses have concentrated in some sectors - say, poultry-farming and selling eggs and chicken, which pious Gujaratis merrily eat but would not stoop to killing the birds - that have grown rapidly along with the wealth.
I don't know where to stop. Yes, Arvind is just the most moronic Indian economist I have had the pleasure to listen to, but there are many more of them.
There is a market in nonsense. Nicholas Stern down. Panagariya is crowing about the "Gujarat story". Without knowing a bit about Gujarat history. That Gujarat didn't exist until 1960 and that the entrepreneurs of Mumbai took away some of the talent from southern Gujarat, Saurashtra and Kutchh and in turn created a "Gujarat story" that is essentially Mumbai in origin (with Gujarati speakers and readers distributed among Parsis, Muslims, Hindus, Christians because of incomes and education levels).
It is Bhagwati - from Ahmedabad but a Mumbai student, then in Cambridge - who has this imagined "Gujarat story" of market liberalism that Panagariya has been parroting and BJP has found useful. A lot of Bhagwati's passion, in turn, derives from his opposition to Sen's "Kerala model", again equally imagined (but attractive to a Bengali with fondness for Communism because in the late 1950s, CPM had the power in Kerala).
So these are Central Planning vs. Market Liberalism fights of two overly arrogant men in their 80s. I don't think they or their chamchaas (Panagariya) will have an iota of a difference in the polls. Economists like roaming around with puffed chests and crowing "It's morning, it's morning", then believing it's them who wake the world, not sunlight.
Roosters also have to be made into dinner.
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They were looking for state GDP growth rates, remembering Punjab used to have the highest GDP per capita in 1991. My response:
Don't bother with state GDP per capita (can be looked up easily on the web). Distributional issues are more important for electoral politics and the HDI indicators of Gujarat are disappointingly low, at least until 2010 when I last looked.
Anyway, there is no denying Gujarat growth, or for that matter most other states'. What I found interesting was that the the delta or the second delta in some cases was lower for Gujarat than for other states in both state GDP as well as other indicators.
But then, too, I know how these indicators are derived and what the conceptual and methodological issues are, so inter-state comparisons need to be made carefully and not for the purposes of boasting or ashaming.
Gujarat government also is said to facilitate new ideas from NGOs; I don't know enough to say much.
Check out http://indiasanitationportal.org/.../statecity-news/gujarat.
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