The India Policy Forum 2015

The India Policy Forum, in its 12th continuous year in 2015, is organized by NCAER in New Delhi in July every year in a long-running partnership with the Brookings Institution in Washington DC. Its objective is to promote rigorous empirical research on Indian economic policy with commissioned papers, an annual two-day conference leading to a volume, the India Policy Forum Volume published by SAGE, and the annual IPF Lecture. The IPF explores and provides insights on India’s rapidly evolving and often tumultuous economic transition and the underlying policy reforms that are driving it.

The 2015 IPF held on July 14-15 commenced with Keynote Remarks by Rajiv Mehrishi, Finance Secretary, Ministry of Finance, Government of India and a member of NCAER’s Governing Body. The IPF featured an exciting mix of five papers and a Policy Roundtable on “The Challenge of Financing Infrastructure in India”, moderated by Suresh Prabhu, Union Minister for Railways, Government of India. A highlight of the 2015 IPF was the IPF Lecture delivered by Arvind Panagariya, Vice-chairman, NITI Aayog (and until his appointment in January 2015, a Nonresident Senior Fellow at NCAER), on “Economic Policies and Outcomes in India: A Retrospective”. Please see the detailed 2015 IPF Program, which also has videos of the sessions and the associated papers and slide presentations.

The topics that IPF papers have dealt with over the years cover a broad sweep of macro, international, and sector challenges that the Indian economy has faced and the many successes and failures of policymaking over the past several decade. IPF research papers are invited on the strength of their policy-relevance and represent some of the best empirical research on India being done globally. The annual IPF Volume is currently the most highly ranked economics journal out of India based on RePEc citation counts. As interest and research on Indian economic policymaking grows, a far cry from the situation in 2004 when NCAER launched the IPF, our future plans include a call for papers.

Two international research panels of India- and overseas-based researchers with an abiding policy interest in India supports this initiative through advice, active participation at the annual IPF Conference, and the search for innovative papers that promise fresh insights. An international Advisory Panel of distinguished economists provides overall guidance. Shekhar Shah, Arvind Panagariya and Subir Gokarn are the editors of the 2014-15 volume, released at the IPF 2015 by Arvind Panagariya.

The IPF has been generously supported by a select group of Indian corporate partners that over the years have included the Tatas, HDFC, Reliance Industries, SBI, HSBC, IDFC, and Citibank. This support reflects their deep institutional commitment to rigorous high-quality policy research in India that helps promote informed policy debates and sound, evidence-based policymaking.

IPF Advisory Panel: Shankar N. Acharya, Isher J. Ahluwalia, Montek S. Ahluwalia, Pranab Bardhan, Jagdish Bhagwati, Barry Bosworth, Willem H. Buiter, Stanley Fischer, Vijay Kelkar, Mohsin Khan, Anne O. Krueger, Ashok Lahiri, Rakesh Mohan, Arvind Panagariya, Raghuram Rajan, Shekhar Shah, T.N. Srinivasan, Nicholas Stern, and Lawrence H. Summers.

IPF Research Panel: Abhijit Banerjee, Kaushik Basu, Surjit S. Bhalla, Mihir Desai, Shantayanan Devarajan, Esther Duflo, Subir Gokarn, Jeffery S. Hammer, Vijay Joshi, Devesh Kapur, Kenneth M. Kletzer, Robert Z. Lawrence, Rajnish Mehra, Dilip Mookherjee, Karthik Muralidharan, Urjit Patel, Ila Patnaik, Indira Rajaraman, M. Govinda Rao, Ajay Shah, Nirvikar Singh, Rohini Somanathan, Tarun Ramadorai, and Arvind Virmani.