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Public Lecture by Barry Eichengreeen, Distinguished Visiting Professor, NCAER

Barry Eichengreen, Distinguished Visiting Professor at NCAER, and Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, delivered a public lecture titled, “The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance”, at the Amex Hall, Delhi School of Economics, University of  Delhi, on Friday, August 5, 2022.

The lecture was organised by NCAER in collaboration with the Delhi School of Economics (DSE). The opening remarks were delivered by Dr Poonam Gupta, Director General, NCAER, and Dr Aditya Bhattacharjea, Professor of Economics, DSE. The lecture was moderated by Dr Pami Dua, Professor and Director, DSE. The focus of the lecture was the purported slow decline of the dominance of the US dollar, which is ostensibly giving way not to another major currency like the Chinese Renminbi, the Euro or the British pound, but to a swarm of midget currencies, including the Canadian dollar, Australian dollar, and Swedish Kroner, among others. He also discussed whether the dominance of the US dollar was boosting or hurting the global economy.

Professor Barry Eichengreen is George C. Pardee and Helen N. Pardee Chair and Distinguished Professor of Economics and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1987. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor at NCAER. He is a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Research Fellow of the Centre for Economic Policy Research (London, England). In 1997-98 he was Senior Policy Advisor at the International Monetary Fund. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (class of 1997).

Professor Eichengreen has held Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships and been a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto) and the Institute for Advanced Study (Berlin). From 2004 to 2020, he served as convener of the Bellagio Group of academics and officials. He is a regular monthly columnist for Project Syndicate.

Professor Eichengreen was awarded the Economic History Association’s Jonathan R.T. Hughes Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 2002 and the University of California at Berkeley Social Science Division’s Distinguished Teaching Award in 2004. He is the recipient of a doctor honoris causa from the American University in Paris, and the 2010 recipient of the Schumpeter Prize from the International Schumpeter Society. He was named one of Foreign Policy Magazine’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers in 2011. He is a past president of the Economic History Association (2010-11 academic year).

The 4th TN Srinivasan Memorial Lecture

Professor Michael R. Kremer directs the Development Innovation Lab at the University of Chicago, where he is a University Professor. He is the joint winner of Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel (Economics Nobel Prize) 2019, for “the experimental approach to alleviating global poverty”.

Professor Kremer’s work focuses on innovation, including in education, health, water, finance, agriculture. He has also worked extensively on how to design institutions to accelerate innovation, including through Advance Market Commitments (AMC) and social innovation funds.

Professor Kremer actively translates his academic work into real-world programs. He helped to design an AMC for a pneumococcal vaccine. Subsequently three vaccines have been approved, and rolled out in 60 countries, saving an estimated 700,000 lives. As part of the Accelerating Health Technologies group, he conducted research and advised governments and international organizations on how to accelerate vaccination against COVID-19. His work on school-based deworming informed India’s national deworming day, which treats over 275 million children each year. His work on safe drinking water led to the Dispensers for Safe Water Program, which reaches 4 million people via the NGO Evidence Action. He is a co-founder of Precision Agriculture for Development, which leverages digital technology to improve productivity and incomes for millions of small-holder farmers in 10 countries, including India. He is a co-founder and serves as Scientific Director of USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures (DIV), an open, tiered, evidenced-based fund that supports innovation for development.

The programme includes welcome and introductions by Rajendra S Pawar and Karthik Muralidharan.

The India Policy Forum 2022

NCAER hosted its annual flagship event, the India Policy Forum (IPF) from July 12-13, 2022. The event was held in person at the India International Centre and NCAER in New Delhi.

Every summer, the NCAER IPF brings to New Delhi a unique combination of intense scholarship and policymaker engagement through this forum that aims to promote rigorous empirical economic policy research on India through commissioned papers, which are then published in the form of an annual volume. In addition, the IPF also features public lectures by eminent experts and roundtable discussions on critical issues.

The 19th edition of the IPF was attended by a galaxy of eminent policymakers, economists, academics, and researchers. The proceedings at the conference deliberated on five research papers, covering a range of diverse sectors and subjects, including entrepreneurship, banking, disease surveillance, trade, services, and ways to accelerate formal jobs and wages through larger firms.

Commenting on the 19th IPF, the NCAER Director General, Dr Poonam Gupta stated, “The IPF stands out for the vigorous review and state-of-the-art analysis of key economic issues of concern to India. It is heartening to the distinguished gathering collected here to engage with each other at the Conference in person after three years when the COVID health crisis had compelled us to switch to the digital mode.”

A paper by Professor Tarun Khanna on “Science-based Entrepreneurship in India: A Policy Glass (as yet) Quarter-Full” reveals that the entrepreneurship in India is heavily circumscribed in a handful of sectors and a gaping lacuna is the lack of science-based entrepreneurship. Science is the fuel for innovative entrepreneurial economic output, which requires universities and institutions of higher learning to promote science and vibrant local ecosystems that allow the translation of science into entrepreneurship.

In a paper titled, ‘Privatization of Public Sector Banks in India: Why, How and How Far’, presented on 12 July 2022, the authors Dr Poonam Gupta and Dr Arvind Panagariya made a case for privatisation of all public sector banks (PSBs) except the State Bank of India. This is because private banks have emerged as a credible alternative to PSBs with substantial market share and the status quo will result in further erosion of the market share of PSBs toward oblivion, while impeding India’s economic growth and inflicting substantial costs onto the depositors, firms, taxpayers and the government as their majority owner.

A paper on “Lessons from Disease and Economic Surveillance during COVID in India” by Professor Anup Malani uses the lessons learned during the current pandemic to suggest ways to gather intelligence for the next pandemic in India and stresses the value of population-level surveillance; understanding the incentives and disincentives for surveillance and reporting; and, tailoring policy to the results of surveillance.

While chairing the session on ‘The US-China Trade War and India’s Exports’, on 13th of July 2022, Mr B.V.R. Subrahmanyam, Secretary, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, highlighted the gaps and pain points in the country’s trade promotion policy. He stated, “Exports do not merely represent a one-way process but this is a two-way street, as it also includes imports….Although the Government has initiated large-scale restructuring in the exports arena, it still needs to do much more to exploit the available windows of opportunity because India is currently in a sweet spot with all external stakeholders wanting India to succeed in this area.”

The authors of a paper “India’s Services Sector Growth: The Impact of Services Trade on Non-tradable Services” find strong evidence to suggest that an increase in tradable services employment leads to an increase in non-tradable services employment and increases the number of firms in non-tradable services.

A Policy Roundtable at the event on  ‘Accelerating Formal Jobs, Higher Wages, and Larger Firms’, focused on a critical issue facing the country, the need for accelerating the creation of formal jobs and higher wages through larger firms for boosting economic growth. Mr Rajesh Aggarwal, Secretary, Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship, pointed out, “Data suggests that though we are skilling people in the rural areas, we find that these people migrate to the urban areas for employment….In this context, we must remember that clusters will grow, urbanisation will increase, and globalisation will continue unchecked, and any policy on skilling and job generation needs to keep these dynamics in mind.”

According to Mr Sanjeev Sanyal, Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, the issue of generation of more intuitive and better-paying jobs lies in the evolution of “Agglomeration economies versus economies of scale, [as the former] are a reality.” He concluded, “This is also a political economy challenge, in view of the fact that the high-paying jobs are presently concentrated among the highly educated people in the urban areas.”

Day 1 of the Conference ended with the IPF Annual Lecture on ‘Trade Policy for the Twenty-first Century’, delivered by Professor Anne Krueger, Senior Fellow at the Johns Hopkins University, Emeritus Professor at Stanford University, and former First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. This session was chaired by Professor Arvind Panagariya, Columbia University and former Vice Chairman of NITI Aayog.

What does the Evidence Show? Consumption, Poverty and the Labour Market in India – 2011/12-Present

This webinar hosted Dr Surjit S. Bhalla, Executive Director for India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan at the IMF, and Dr Tirthatanmoy Das, Associate Professor in the Economics and Social Sciences Area at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. Dr Amit Basole, Associate Professor of Economics and Head, Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University, was the discussant. The discussion was moderated by Dr Sonalde Desai, Distinguished University Professor, University of Maryland and Professor, NCAER.

The presentation is available on this webpage

The authors discussed their paper which examines household and individual level data from a number of major data sources, including CPHS, NSSO, and PLFS. The paper evaluates the data, and data sources, for the information contained therein on some major policy issues – for example, the state of extreme poverty, the functioning of the labour market, etc. The findings are fivefold. First, the authors’ analysis of the PLFS indicates that newly introduced education-based sampling schemes do not necessarily influence results. Second, a detailed analysis suggests that the sampling weights in the CPHS should be treated with extreme caution. The decline in extreme poverty using CPHS data appears to be larger than popularly believed, and consumption growth is larger than that reported by CPHS. Fourth, CPHS shows significantly lower female participation rates compared with other surveys, while the male labour force participation rates are more comparable rates. Fifth, the non-parametric bounds of CPHS labour force participation rates for men are similar to those of PLFS; however, for women, the non-parametric estimates are radically dissimilar.

Surjit S. Bhalla is Executive Director for India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Bhutan at the IMF (Nov. 2019). He has served as part-time member of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Economic Advisory Council, Chairperson for the Ministry of Commerce High Level Advisory Group on Trade and Economic Adviser to the Fifteenth Finance Commission, Government of India. In addition, he is a regular Invitee to the Aspen Institute Program on World Economy, USA, 2002-present. Dr Bhalla has taught at the Delhi School of Economics and served as executive director of the Policy Group in New Delhi. Since 1999, he has been on the governing board of NCAER. He has worked as a research economist at the RAND Corporation, the Brookings Institution, and at both the research and treasury departments of the World Bank, and as a consultant to Warburg Pincus. He has also worked on Wall Street in Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs. He holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton University, a Masters in Public and International Affairs from Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University, and a BSEE degree from Purdue University.

Tirthatanmoy Das is an Associate Professor in the Economics & Social Sciences Area at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore. He is also a Research Fellow at IZA Institute of Labor Economics and a Fellow at the Global Labor Organization. Before joining IIMB, he was an Assistant Professor of Economics at Temple University (2012-2014) and the University of Central Florida (2014-2017). His research spans topics in labour economics, econometrics, health economics, and behavioural economics. He has also contributed to policy research on the Indian labour market, including the background reports submitted to the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India (EAC-PM). He received an MA and a PhD in Economics from the State University of New York at Binghamton, an MA from Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a BSc from the University of Calcutta.

Amit Basole is Associate Professor of Economics and Head, Centre for Sustainable Employment, Azim Premji University. Prior to joining Azim Premji University, he taught at Bucknell University and the University of Massachusetts, Boston. His research interests include labour and structural change, poverty and inequality, and the economics of artisanal knowledge. He is the lead author of the State of Working India report. He has a PhD in Economics from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Sonalde Desai is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland and Professor at NCAER, and Director of NCAER’s National Data Innovation Centre. She is a demographer whose work deals primarily with social inequalities in developing countries with a particular focus on gender and class inequalities in human development. While much of her research focuses on South Asia, she has also engaged in comparative studies across Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa. She has published articles in a wide range of sociological and demographic journals including American Sociological Review, Demography, Population and Development Review, and Feminist Studies. Dr Desai leads the India Human Development Survey and is serving as President for the Population Association of America for 2022.

Dr Mridul Saggar, the new IEPF Chair Professor

NCAER is delighted to announce the appointment of Dr Mridul Saggar as the Investor Education and Protection Fund Authority (IEPF) Chair Professor at NCAER. He joins the Chair today. The Chair has been established with the support of the Investor Education and Protection Fund Authority under the Ministry of Corporate Affairs in the Government of India. Dr Saggar will lead a group focused on research and policy outreach in the broad area of regulatory and public policies, including concerns about investor education and protection and financial sector reforms. He is expected to contribute widely to the IEPF Chair activities through his research and engagement with economists, financial market participants, policy makers, and regulators, while dealing with investors and investor education at the Centre and in the States, interacting with various stakeholders including donors and the media.

The NCAER Director General, Dr Poonam Gupta stated, “We feel privileged to have Dr Mridul Saggar as the NCAER IEPF Chair Professor. He brings to the position tremendous expertise in the macroeconomics, financial markets and banking space. He is also a distinguished academic and researcher in these areas. We look forward to him expanding NCAER’s research agenda with special focus on investor education and protection, making a significant contribution to its intellectual legacy.”

A central banker for three decades, Dr Saggar has extensive experience in various central banking functions. Prior to joining NCAER, he was the Executive Director, Reserve Bank of India (RBI), overseeing the central bank’s monetary policy and economics research functions. He was also one of the six members of the RBI’s Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) in charge of taking collegiate decisions on policy interest rate and the monetary policy stance as also of its Financial Markets Committee (FMC) that takes decisions on its financial market operations. Earlier, he has served as the Head of the International Department of RBI, representing India at various international bodies/G20 Working Groups/Task Forces.

His research interests cover macroeconomics, international finance, monetary policy and monetary operations, international financial architecture and international economic relations, global financial regulatory reforms, financial inclusion, national accounts, and agriculture policy.

Mridul Saggar holds a doctorate degree from Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Mumbai, and has been a fellow at the Princeton University, NJ, USA. He has published widely in leading refereed national and international journals and has taught and delivered guest lectures at various eminent academic and professional institutions in India and abroad.

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