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The 6th C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2018

Measuring the Wealth of Nations

Sir Partha Dasgupta, one of India’s most eminent economists and globally recognized for his vast contributions to both theory and applied research in economics, delivered NCAER’s 6th C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture at the Nehru Memorial Library Auditorium, Teen Murti, in New Delhi, on February 9, 2018.  The Honourable Union Finance Minister, Shri Arun Jaitley, was invited as the Guest of Honour .The distinguished audience included eminent economists, senior civil servants, prominent media persons, industry analysts, and students.

In his Deshmukh Lecture, Professor Dasgupta explored a conceptual framework that offers a unified language for both thinking about intergenerational sustainability and the key policy issues that must be addressed for increasing the current well-being of the citizens of a country.  He showed why when we talk about the economic growth of a country we should mean the growth in its wealth (which is the social worth of an economy’s entire stock of capital assets including reproducible capital, human capital, and natural capital), not growth in GDP, nor improvements in the many ad hoc indicators of human development that have been proposed in recent years. He argued that GDP and other adjusted GDP measures do not measure true economic growth, which should be about expansion in the capacity to produce goods and services.  GDP is not able to do that because it only measures production or income in a given year.

Professor Dasgupta also explored the notion that by poverty we should mean low levels of wealth, not income, and that the distribution of well-being ought to be judged in terms of the distribution of wealth, not income. Professor Dasgupta noted that, “The concept of wealth asks us to extend the idea of investment well-beyond its conventional usage. This perspective has radical implications for the way national accounts are prepared and interpreted.”

His Lecture, which can be viewed here, concluded with a sketch of recent publications that have put the perspective to work by tracking wealth accumulation in contemporary India and, more tentatively, in a sample of over 120 countries from which the India data was drawn.

Dr Shah concluded, “Wealth accounting is increasingly needed to complement GDP, even though it will not replace it. Flow variables like GDP, are directly related to current well-being.  Stock variables, like inclusive wealth, are instead related to potential intergenerational well-being.  An increase in inclusive wealth implies that future citizens will inherit a larger productive base and could therefore enjoy potentially higher levels of well-being, even though this cannot be guaranteed because we don’t know the future.  Government statistical offices need to increasingly create annual balance sheets measuring the value of natural and human capital. Citizens can then use the wealth measures to hold their government more accountable for the policies it implements. Without wealth accounting, all citizens can do is to look at growth rates of GDP per capita and hope that they will keep going up indefinitely.”

Professor Dasgupta’s research interests have covered welfare and development economics, the economics of technological change, population, environmental and resource economics, the theory of games, the economics of undernutrition, and the economics of social capital. He has published extensively in all these areas.

NCAER instituted the C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture series in 2013 in memory of one of India’s most eminent pre- and post-Independence economists and a founding father of NCAER in 1956, Sir Chintaman Dwarakanath Deshmukh.

About Partha Dasgupta

Sir Partha Dasgupta, FRB, FRS, is the Frank Ramsey Professor Emeritus of Economics at the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; Visiting Professor at the New College of the Humanities, London; and Professorial Research Fellow at the Sustainable Consumption Institute, University of Manchester. He taught at the London School of Economics during 1971-1984 and moved to Cambridge in 1985, where he served as Chairman of the Faculty of Economics during 1997-2001. During 1989-92 he was also Professor of Economics, Professor of Philosophy, and Director of the Program in Ethics in Society at Stanford University.  He was an Andrew D. White Professor-at-Large at Cornell University during 2007 to 2013.  Since 1999 he has been a Founder Member of the Management and Advisory Committee of the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics based in Kathmandu. In 1996 he helped establish the journal Environment and Development Economics, published by Cambridge University Press, with the aim of publishing original research at the interface of poverty and the environmental-resource base.

Professor Dasgupta has won numerous awards in economics and was named Knight Bachelor by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 2002 for services to economics. He has been a Fellow of the Econometric Society (1975); Fellow of the British Academy (FBA, 1989); Honorary Fellow of the London School of Economics (1995); Honorary Member of the American Economic Association (1997); Distinguished Fellow, CES, University of Munich (2011); and President of the Royal Economic Society (1998–2001), and the European Economic Association (1999), among others. He graduated in Physics from Hansraj College, Delhi University in 1962 and in Mathematics from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1965, and then did his PhD in Economics from Cambridge under James Mirrlees.  He has been awarded Doctorates Honoris Causa by Wageningen University (2000), Catholic University of Louvain (2007), Faculte Université Saint-Louis (2009), University of Bologna (2010), Tilburg University (2012), Harvard University (2013), and the University of York (2017).

Professor Partha Dasgupta has an old association with NCAER going back to his youth.  His father, Professor A K Dasgupta, himself an eminent economist, was the Deputy Director-General of NCAER during 1958-62 when Partha Dasgupta attended Delhi University.

About C D Deshmukh

Sir Chintaman Dwarakanath Deshmukh was the first Indian to be appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 1943, was part of the official Indian delegation to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that led to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and served as Governor, RBI, until 1949. He served as the Union Finance Minister during 1950 to 1956 under Prime Minister Nehru, and was a founding member of NCAER’s first Governing Body in 1956. He later served as Chairman of the University Grants Commission and as the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, during which time he also founded the India International Centre. He was honoured by the President of India with the Padma Vibhushan in 1975. NCAER is privileged to honour the memory of C. D. Deshmukh as part of its more than 60-year legacy.

Previous Lectures:

The 5th C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2017 by Dr Vijay Kelkar
The 4th C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2016 by Dr Raghuram Rajan
The 3rd C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2015 by Dr David M. Malone
The 2nd C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2014 by Prof Arvind Panagariya
The Inaugural C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2013 by Prof Kaushik Basu

Impact of SEZs on Poverty and Human Well-being in Undivided Andhra Pradesh

On Friday, January 19, 2018, NCAER invited Aradhna Aggarwal, Chair Professor, Indian Studies, Department of International Economics and Management, Copenhagen Business School and held a lecture, “Impact of SEZs on Poverty and Human Well-being in Undivided Andhra Pradesh”. Nilotpal Goswami, Director General, CAG was the discussant for the seminar.

Professor Aggarwal’s joint paper with Ari Kokko, on SEZs, reveals that the passage of the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) Act in 2005 marked a significant development in the Indian economy, as it helped mobilise private investment for industrialisation for the first time in India’s post-Independence economic history. However, the subsequent proliferation of SEZs sparked off a fierce debate in both academic and policy circles over the usefulness of such zones. There were serious concerns about the displacement of farmers necessitated by land acquisition for SEZs, loss of fertile agricultural land, huge revenue loss to the exchequer and the adverse consequences of uneven growth. Despite the persistent controversy and voluminous literature on the subject over the past decade, there is little empirical evaluation of the social impacts of SEZs. In this backdrop, this study evaluates the impact of SEZs on poverty with special reference to undivided Andhra Pradesh, the state with the largest number of SEZs, especially in the manufacturing sector. The authors examine how the presence of SEZs affects human well-being in the wider economy, and estimate the average and distributional effects of SEZs. Their findings point to a positive average treatment effect on the levels of real per capita expenditure in SEZ districts, and to suggestive evidence that people living in urban areas are the major beneficiaries. The preliminary findings of the paper thus do not seem to support the views that Indian SEZs are no better than the status quo or that the country would have been better off in the absence of these zones.

Aradhna Aggarwal, former Senior Fellow at NCAER, is currently Chair Professor, Indian Studies, Department of International Economics and Management, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, and Advisory Professor, Yunnan University, Kunming Province, China. Aradhna is keenly interested in industry, technology, international trade and investment related issues and has published extensively on these issues. She taught Economics at the University of Delhi from August 1982 to January 2014. During this period, she also had an opportunity to serve at NCAER, Institute of Economic Growth, and Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations. She worked as an external consultant to international agencies like UNESCAP, ADB, UNDP and the World Bank; the Ministries of External Affairs, Commerce and Information Technology, Government of India; and RIS, among others. She is the principal author of the Kerala Perspective Plan 2030 prepared by NCAER for the Kerala Government. Aradhna received her MA in Economics from Delhi University, and PhD in Industrial Economics from the Delhi School of Economics.

Aradhna’s co-author for the paper is Ari Kokko, Professor and Director of Asia Research Centre in the Department of International Economics and Management, Copenhagen Business School, where he focuses on the role of trade and foreign direct investment in the development process. He has been an advisor and consultant to a number of national governments and international organisations in the Nordic region. He received his BSc in Economics and Economic History from Lund University, Sweden, and his PhD in Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics. He was also awarded an honorary doctorate in Economic Sciences by Tartu University, Estonia.

PRIndex: A Global Indicator of Citizens’ Perceptions of Property Rights

Malcolm Childress
Co-Founder and Executive Director, Land Alliance

&

David Spievack
Lead Research Architect for PRIndex, Land Alliance

 

NCAER is organizing first of its 2018 seminars on “PRIndex”, a global indicator of citizens’ perceptions of the security of property rights, with Malcolm Childress, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Land Alliance, Inc., and David Spievack, Lead Research Architect for PRIndex, also at Land Alliance.  PRIndex aims to fill the information gap about individual perceptions of property rights by creating a baseline global dataset to support the achievement of secure property rights around the world.

Property rights are a cornerstone of both economic development and social justice. However, there is no well-established methodology to-date to measure and reasonably compare property rights as perceived by citizens over time and across countries. Building on initial pilot data collected from nine countries including Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Greece, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Peru and Tanzania in 2016 and 2017, PRIndex plans to collect data from an additional 36 countries across the world in 2018, creating the world’s first comprehensive account of people’s perceptions and opinions of property rights. The presentation will recapitulate the history of PRIndex, discuss results from its most recent round of testing in India, Tanzania, and Colombia, and share current plans and timelines for 2018.

PRIndex is an initiative supported by the Omidyar Network and DFID, the UK Department for International Development, and implemented by Land Alliance in association with Gallup, Inc.  Land Alliance is a think-and-do tank that tests new approaches to defining and managing rights, shares expertise and best practices globally, and supports groups working to scale the solution of land issues. It works to find solutions to the complex development challenges of cities, rural landscapes and forests by aligning local, national and international resources.

Malcolm Childress is an economist and land administration specialist with 30 years of experience working with land tenure and property rights systems. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of Land Alliance and co-director of the Global Property Rights Index initiative with the Open Data Institute. He was Senior Land Administration and Policy Specialist in the World Bank from 2003-2014, and previously a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Land Tenure Center.  He has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

David Spievack is Lead Research Architect, PRIndex. He has 25 years of market research experience in Japan and the United States, leading market research and analytics and a number of multinational research initiatives at both PayPal and VISA. Since leaving VISA in 2015, David has been a research and strategy consultant for a number of for-profit, non-profit, and impact investing firms. In addition to supporting the property rights team at Omidyar Network, David has written on multiple subjects, including the preconditions and drivers of empowerment, privacy and informed consent, resilience theory, systems thinking, and anti-establishment politics in the United States. He received his BA, MA and MPhil in History from Columbia University.

PRIndex: A Global Indicator of Citizen’s Perceptions of Property Rights


NCAER organized a seminar on “PRIndex”, a global indicator of citizens’ perceptions of the security of property rights, with Malcolm Childress, Co-Founder and Executive Director of Land Alliance, Inc., and David Spievack, Lead Research Architect for PRIndex, also at Land Alliance. PRIndex aims to fill the information gap about individual perceptions of property rights by creating a baseline global dataset to support the achievement of secure property rights around the world. Deepak Sanan, Senior Advisor, NCAER was the discussant for the seminar. The seminar was attended by NCAER research team and invited guests from institutiosn across the city.

Property rights are a cornerstone of both economic development and social justice. However, there is no well-established methodology to-date to measure and reasonably compare property rights as perceived by citizens over time and across countries. Building on initial pilot data collected from nine countries including Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Greece, India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Peru and Tanzania in 2016 and 2017, PRIndex plans to collect data from an additional 36 countries across the world in 2018, creating the world’s first comprehensive account of people’s perceptions and opinions of property rights. The presentation will recapitulate the history of PRIndex, discuss results from its most recent round of testing in India, Tanzania, and Colombia, and share current plans and timelines for 2018.

PRIndex is an initiative supported by the Omidyar Network and DFID, the UK Department for International Development, and implemented by Land Alliance in association with Gallup, Inc. Land Alliance is a think-and-do tank that tests new approaches to defining and managing rights, shares expertise and best practices globally, and supports groups working to scale the solution of land issues. It works to find solutions to the complex development challenges of cities, rural landscapes and forests by aligning local, national and international resources.

Malcolm Childress is an economist and land administration specialist with 30 years of experience working with land tenure and property rights systems. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of Land Alliance and co-director of the Global Property Rights Index initiative with the Open Data Institute. He was Senior Land Administration and Policy Specialist in the World Bank from 2003-2014, and previously a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Land Tenure Center. He has a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

David Spievack is Lead Research Architect, PRIndex. He has 25 years of market research experience in Japan and the United States, leading market research and analytics and a number of multinational research initiatives at both PayPal and VISA. Since leaving VISA in 2015, David has been a research and strategy consultant for a number of for-profit, non-profit, and impact investing firms. In addition to supporting the property rights team at Omidyar Network, David has written on multiple subjects, including the preconditions and drivers of empowerment, privacy and informed consent, resilience theory, systems thinking, and anti-establishment politics in the United States. He received his BA, MA and MPhil in History from Columbia University.

Deepak Sanan recently retired from the Indian Administrative Service, where he was attached to the state of Himachal Pradesh. He held senior positions in public finance, land governance, and the water and sanitation sectors at both the state and national levels. He also had significant tenures in the health, urban development and power sectors. Currently, he is an advisor for projects on water and sanitation and land governance at a number of institutions in India. He has been a Consultant with the World Bank, IFAD, DFID, IDS Sussex and AusAid. He has also served as the India Country Team Leader in the Water and Sanitation Program (South Asia) at the World Bank. Mr Sanan has been writing regularly on Centre-State relations, in particular, on creating incentives for more effective use of Central funds to overcome State budget constraints and improve governance. He has published extensively and presented papers on these issues at a number of conferences across India. Mr Sanan received his MA in Politics (IR) from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, and BCom (Hons.) from Delhi University.

A Brainstorming Session on Methodologies for Collection of Time Use Data

A brainstorming session on ‘Methodologies for Collection of Time Use Data’, organised by NCAER’s newly set up National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), was held at NCAER, New Delhi, on January 12, 2018. Apart from Shekhar Shah, Director-General, NCAER, and Sonalde Desai, Senior Fellow, NCAER and Director of NCAER’s newly set up National Data Innovation Centre (NDIC), the session was attended by pioneers and researchers in the collection of time use data in India, including Rakesh Maurya, Director, CSO, MoSPI; Devaki Jain, eminent writer and feminist economist; Ashwini Deshpande, Delhi School of Economics; J.P. Bhattacharjee and Sachin Kumar, NSSO; Shambhavi Srivastava, IFMR Lead; and Ellina Samantroy, V.V. Giri National Labour Institute.

The context of the session was the increasing interest in women’s care work burden, which has necessitated collection of time use data and analyses of how women spend their time. This has, in turn, led to advocacy for better measurement of women’s Work Participation Rates and changes in the way the NSSO captures women’s domestic activities and subsidiary work status. In recent years, the Government of India has affirmed its commitment to Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to the implementation of the Resolution on Statistics on Work, Employment and Labour Underutilisation. Data on time use is a key component of both. The report by a NITI Aayog task force on collection of employment data also calls for regular time use surveys. However, conducting time use surveys can be both expensive and time consuming.

The session was initiated by Dr Sonalde Desai, who said that generation of new ideas for data collection on time use is a seminal requirement for data collection, in general, as it reflects the changes in the demand and supply of data, and also entails the use of technology for reducing the cost of data collection. She anticipated that the innovative ideas generated at this session would contribute significantly to the NDIC work on time use in the near future. The technical session was chaired by Professor A.K. Shiva Kumar, Adviser, UNICEF.

Professor Indira Hirway, Director, Centre for Development Alternatives, in her presentation, outlined the importance of data collection in time use studies, which provide detailed information on how individuals allocate their time on activities listed under the System of National Accounts (SNA), non-SNA activities, and personal activities. This data is also important for analysing human capital formation, and for examining the critical concerns of an economy related to various parameters like poverty and unemployment, and for incorporating this work in the designing and monitoring of policy. In addition, such data helps in studying the care economy comprising both paid as well as unpaid work, in order to understand the workforce and ensure that no activity, paid or unpaid, is left out of the estimation and valuation of work. She also discussed the various components and types of time use surveys, and how they can be supplemented by independent 24-hour diary surveys. She pointed out that India was one of the first countries in the developing world to conduct a national time use survey using a 24-hour time diary in 1998-99, which has helped in policy designing and development of analytical tools pertaining to various areas of study including employment and unemployment, time poverty, valuation of unpaid work in satellite accounts, gender budgeting, analysis of macroeconomic and social policies and programmes. She concluded her presentation by enlisting the challenges faced by researchers in collecting time use data in the country and the possible ways of overcoming these challenges.

A presentation by Professor Liana Sayer, Director of the Maryland Time Use Laboratory and Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, followed. She averred that the challenges being discussed at the workshop are also being faced by researchers on time use in the USA. The various issues raised by Professor Sayer included the strategies adopted in the US to produce data on productive labour and childcare; the application of time use research for understanding employment and family relationships; linkages of time use patterns on a long-term basis; evaluation of care versus leisure activities; use of new technologies to collect and harvest time use data; and the possibility of combining the survey on time use with other surveys to ensure a better response from the target audience.

Thereafter, the participants discussed on matters such which included; NSSO’s plans to bring out a more systematic survey module for time use to enable more scientific and comprehensive area sampling and stratification of households; treating a past NCAER-NSSO study as a benchmark for identifying best practices in the field; need to assess the time spent by women in simultaneous activities by examining different context variables; employment of different coding techniques and joint appointment of male and female investigators for household interviews; and use of advanced investigative tools and modern data collection methods like computer-assisted personal interviews (CAPI) to evolve simple yet rigorous methods of collecting time use data without compromising on the quality of the data.

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