A wonderful Xmas gift: 13 hours of load-shedding in Nepal!!

12-14 hours of load-shedding. That’s a Xmas gift from the government to the Nepali people!

Faced with acute shortage of power in the country, the government declared “power crisis” in the country. This means use of electricity on hoarding boards is banned. Too bad for the advertisement industry! The government has encouraged use of compact fluorescent lamp (CFL). It has also given subsidies on import of such lamps, initiated generation of 200 MW electricity from thermal plants, and is trying to import electricity from India. There is a shortage of 3.8 million units of electricity in the country. Moreover, the government has waived red tapes for investors willing to immediately invest in power plants below 50 MW.

Why so late? Why did not the leaders heed to this impending crisis earlier? Corruption? Lack of visionary leaders? More here. Compare the state of energy production in Bhutan and Nepal and you’ll realize how messed up is the political system in Nepal to forge a consensus in a unified energy plan for the country. Note that, Nepal has a comparative advantage in the production of hydro electricity. Why not exploit it rather than scrambling to resuscitate the beleaguered export-oriented firms?

Assessments needed:

[1] the fallout of power crisis on the advertisement industry

[2] the effect of [1] on advertisement revenue for newspapers and online news portals

[3] the effect on price of diesel due to increase in demand for use in thermal plants

[4] the effect of this crisis on the industrial output

[5] the effect of this crisis on FDI

[6] the effect of this crisis on private sector demand for new hydropower plants

[7] the effect of this crisis on the price of alternatives like candle, lamp, biogas generation

The mechanics of growth

Abhijit Banerjee explains the mechanics of growth:

The problem is that for a business to rise beyond its many competitors—the thousands of fruit vendors in Chennai---it has to have something special about it: The product (P) must be different or the quality (Q) must be especially high, or the firm must have special reputation for reliability (R) or the scale of operations (S) must be large enough to generate significant cost savings. And each of these requires a combination of special skills and substantial amounts of money, both beyond the reach of all but a few poor or even not so poor business owners.

It is these PQRS businesses that generate the good jobs that other aspire to, and the earnings that come out of them lead to other businesses and so on. This, to a first approximation, is my vision of the process of how growth happens. It is what China has managed to do very successfully and Africa will have to find a way of doing.

Consider this particular feature of self-employed, self-sustaining, (and stagnant at lowest equilibrium)  business model in the developing countries (“follow-the-herd” business model):

It turns out that the businesses of the poor are also poor businesses: The typical business has zero paid employees and no machines in almost every country where we have data and where we have the information to be able to calculate this, what the household earns from the business is less than what they would earn on the lowest end of the labor market. They are in effect buying a job and not particularly good job at that.

Isn’t this just a reflection of the fact that they do not have enough capital to run a proper business? Yes and no. These businesses are certainly undercapitalized, but the businesses of those who are significantly richer (those who live on $6 to $10 a day, for example) really do not look all that different from these. Moreover the amounts of money invested in these businesses are so tiny that a family living on three or four dollars a day per capita, could easily double or treble their capital stock in a year by simply halving what they spend on tea or cigarettes.

Dean Karlan and Sendhil Mullainathan, in a recent paper, put this point rather starkly. They study fruit vendors in Chennai, India, who make about two to three dollars a day by buying fruit in the morning on credit and paying it back at night. It turns out that the interest rate they pay is 5% per day and at that rate, saving the ten cents they spend on tea for just one day would allow them to pay back their entire loan in six months (the power of compound interest) and add a dollar a day to their earnings. Yet most of them seem to be permanently stuck in their business model.

More praise for Keynes

Martin Wolf writes, “We are all Keynesians now.” [This exact sentence was used by Krugman and Stiglitz in the beginning of their past columns. In fact, this has been a popular starting sentence among writers who want to discuss the connection between Keynesianism, present financial crisis, and increasing government spending in the economy!]

Three relevant Keynesian stuff, according to Wolf:

The first, which was taken forward by Minsky, is that we should not take the pretensions of financiers seriously. “A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined in a conventional way along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him.” Not for him, then, was the notion of “efficient markets”.

The second lesson is that the economy cannot be analysed in the same way as an individual business. For an individual company, it makes sense to cut costs. If the world tries to do so, it will merely shrink demand. An individual may not spend all his income. But the world must do so.

The third and most important lesson is that one should not treat the economy as a morality tale. In the 1930s, two opposing ideological visions were on offer: the Austrian; and the socialist. The Austrians – Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek – argued that a purging of the excesses of the 1920s was required. Socialists argued that socialism needed to replace failed capitalism, outright. These views were grounded in alternative secular religions: the former in the view that individual self-seeking behaviour guaranteed a stable economic order; the latter in the idea that the identical motivation could lead only to exploitation, instability and crisis.

I like the second one: that economy cannot be analyzed in the same way as an individual business. This also means sum of individual units does not equal to a whole, i.e. the sum of outputs generated from self-interested individual’s actions does not equal to the output generated from one big player’s action. Micros do not add up to macro!!

And, very nice (and comforting) words about Keynes:

Keynes’s genius – a very English one – was to insist we should approach an economic system not as a morality play but as a technical challenge. He wished to preserve as much liberty as possible, while recognising that the minimum state was unacceptable to a democratic society with an urbanised economy. He wished to preserve a market economy, without believing that laisser faire makes everything for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

…Yet Keynes would have insisted that such approaches are foolish. Markets are neither infallible nor dispensable. They are indeed the underpinnings of a productive economy and individual freedom. But they can also go seriously awry and so must be managed with care.

Again, not that Keynes did not say markets don’t work. He said markets do not always work, so government should fill the gap. He treated markets and governments not as substitutes but as some form of complementary forces.

Here is an old article from Time magazine, which put Keynes’ picture on its cover page and named him Person of the Year in 1965. More here.

Economic impact of AIDS and policy interventions

Devarajan and Goldstein discuss how economics can be used to fight AIDS. Economics matters because it involves allocating scarce resources to multiple uses in the fight against AIDS.

Noting that earlier work on the economic impact of AIDS, which treated it as a shock to labor supply, showed only mild effects, we pointed to recent work that examined the effects on the transmission of human capital across generations (parents’ providing for their children’s education, for example), which showed much larger effects on economic growth—including the possibility of an economic collapse in three or four generations.

More here. One interesting stuff they discuss is the outcome of various policy interventions in the fight against AIDS. Training program for teachers in Kenya was the most expensive among all the interventions but it produced no significant reduction in teen pregnancy. However, information campaigns for Kenyan teenagers to learn about high HIV prevalence among adult males was the least expensive and it produced 32% drop in teen pregnancies.

Nepal Maoists’ civilian militia wages war against the independent media

They did it again! In fact, they did, have been doing, and will do it repeatedly till they shed off militant mentality!!

The Maoists’ war against the media is reaching its apogee. The Maoists, who are currently running the government, affiliated trade union stormed the building of Himal Media, which publishes the popular Nepali Times and Himal Khabarpatrika, and beat up the journalists and vandalized their office. The media house has been particularly critical of the Maoists’ excesses, especially its trade union and militant youth organization named as YCL. These two extralegal organizations lack discipline, have been terrorizing industries and business executives at a time when the whole industrial base in grounded due to domestic inefficiencies and global recession, and are pretty much above the law.

Several journalists were injured when the police baton charged a peaceful rally against the excesses of the Maoists’ affiliates. The UN, human rights organizations, civil society, and other media houses have condemned the supererogatory acts of the Maoists.

It is ironical that the Prime Minister Prachanda, the chief of Maoists party, who parrots media freedom and rule of law, has declined to admit that his party’s militant miscreants were responsible for the heinous act against the media. This is surprising because almost all the reports that came out yesterday clearly mentioned two names closely associated with the ruling Maoists-affiliated unions and personnel. The government’s spokesperson and communication minister says he is oblivious to the marauding act of its cadres (all the major newspapers published news condemning the act…does the communication minister follow newspapers?). What a HYPOCRISY?

Get it straight: The Finance Minister is parroting high revenue and growth for the country. However, he fails to realize that foreign investors are scared to invest in Nepal due to YCL’s and the Maoists Unions’, who have demanded higher minimum wage and better working conditions that is beyond affordability given razor thin profit margin of the industries. Many garment firms have already disappeared and the few remaining are on the verge of closing down due to labor problems and lack of price competitiveness. Imposing a higher minimum wage means increase in cost of production, which will further erode price competitiveness and could potentially lead to wiping off of the whole garment and textile industry.

Furthermore, if exports and imports decline, then the expected revenue collection would be a day-dream. One can imagine how much loss the country will have to endure do to the crisis. The ADB has estimated that one day of industry closure (due to bandhs and industry closures) costs at least $100,000 to the state coffers. Add the 10-plus hours of load-shedding every day and its impact on the manufacturing sector, you will discover that the total loss would be much more than the one hundred thousand dollars. My preliminary estimation points this figure to over $300,000 every day.

I can go on and on about the effect of the YCL’s stupidity and belligerent trade unions on the national economy but due to interest of time, I will save further discussion for later posts.

The bottom-line: the imbecility and lack of discipline of the YCL, and moronic attitudes of the trade unions, especially their unjust demands given the fragility of our industries are costing the nation dearly. The revolution in the name of worker’s welfare is nothing more than a politically motivated, opponent-smearing, and populist campaign implicitly sanctioned by the Maoists party itself. No where in the world has a nation progressed by waging a war against the independent media and the private sector. This is a perfect recipe for economic and political downfall. Even the elite planning commission of the nation is politicized. The Maoists government is making probably the biggest policy blunder in the history of the country by politicizing appointment in the NPC, which is supposed to be filled with experts conversant with the economic condition of the country. No words to describe their double standard behavior!

STOP taking advantage of the working class for your own benefits. STOP the excesses. STOP the madness. DISBAND the private militia. CRIMINALIZE the politically indoctrinated trade unions whose demands go well beyond the accepted norms. CEASE mobilization of belligerent youths to promote Maoists interests. STOP messing up with the independent media and the private sector.

Growth accelerations and decelerations in Western Africa

Here is a new working paper from the IMF:

The growth literature has had problems explaining the "sub-Saharan African growth dummy" in cross-country regressions. Instead of taking the usual approach of focusing on long-run growth and assuming that sub-Saharan countries have homogenous parameters in growth regressions, we concentrate our analysis on episodes of growth turnarounds (identifying growth accelerations, decelerations, and collapses) and use only West African countries in our sample. The driving force of growth turnarounds are estimated by analyzing external shocks, political and institutional changes, economic reforms, and indicators particularly relevant to the region. Using probits for a group of 22 Western African economies for the period 1960-2006, we find that growth accelerations are most clearly associated with external shocks, economic liberalization, political stability, and closeness to the coast; decelerations occurred during short-lived regimes and when corruption indices weakened; and collapses are linked to external shocks, falling domestic credit, and proximity to the coast. We then identify policy implications.

Nice discussion about the (Barro model)  cross-country panel growth regressions, growth accelerations, growth decelerations, and growth collapses in the context of a region where all these three episodes of growth are visibly seen over the past several decades.

Conditional Cash Transfer in the Philippines

 

More about the CCTs here.