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Jagdish Bhagwati vs. Amartya Sen: a proxy fight between Modi development and SoniaG dole?

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Indian ExpressSubbarao's tenure 'worst era of performance by RBI governor', says economist Panagariya

Express news service Posted online: Thu Jul 25 2013, 02:41 hrs
New Delhi : The performance of present Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor D Subbarao in managing the monetary policy has been one of the worst in the history of the bank, according to Arvind Panagariya, professor of economics at Columbia University.“I am afraid...this is one of the worst eras of performance by the RBI governor,” Panagariya said in an interview to The Indian Express Editor-in-Chief Shekhar Gupta for NDTV’s Walk The Talk programme.
According to Panagariya, the RBI’s errors compounded the break in the growth “momentum” of the economy, caused by Jairam Ramesh when he was the environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, the current environment minister, and Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
He also said that he “provoked” Nobel laureate Amartya Sen to a debate on India’s economic model.
Panagariya said the RBI made a “huge mistake” in not building up dollar reserves when the rupee had appreciated sharply in 2009-10. “We could have built up our reserves. Now the war chest is too small” to fight the depreciation in the rupee, he said.
Instead, the RBI allowed Indian companies to borrow abroad liberally and raised interest rates consecutively 13 times, he said. “In a way, this new policy started with the current RBI Governor. I am sorry to say, but the timing connects to his tenure. His public pronouncements suggest to me that he really stands behind this policy,” said Panagariya.
Along with the RBI’s sustained increase in rates, the Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council pushed through redistributive programmes which were inefficient and therefore hurt the economy, he said. “Her instincts are right, but the instrumentality used is very harmful,” he added.
Citing the examples of the Right to Education Act and Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, he said such programmes cost money that can only come through growth. But growth opportunities were cut because of the policy paralysis that came to characterise this government, he said. “Using the revenue that was produced by growth and then trying to run it down — this is really under-handed,” he added.
Panagariya said the debate on the Indian economy needs to be opened up to the role of the markets. Commenting on the difference between economists like him and Jagdish Bhagwati on one side (who have strongly espoused the role of free markets where better governance does not mean more governance) and Left-leaning economists like Amartya Sen on the other side, Panagariya said, “We finally provoked him... we said we will question you and you have to answer” instead of just pronouncing on ideas and positions. “Ten years ago. nobody questioned Amartya Sen. Not today. The whole debate has been unleashed,” he said.

On Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s position in this debate, he said: “He is more of a Bhagwati... I think it is his political compulsion that has driven him to this”. He added that “a lot of the Prime Minister’s fault is that he embraced it without providing sufficient opposition... he could have made a lot better effort to persuade the Congress president that this (not pushing reforms) was not a good path”.

http://www.indianexpress.com/story-print/1146404/

No particular affection for either Modi or Rahul: Jagdish Bhagwati

by  41 mins ago July 25, 2013 4:05 PM
Economist  Jagdish Bhagwati has once again attacked Amartaya Sen’s policy prescriptions, just days after  his bitter rant in Mint where he compared Sen  to an “anti-semite.” ( Read more about that here).
Even Business Standard columnist Mihir Sharma in an article yesterday characterised Bhagwati as being petty and personal but awarded him the title of being ‘far more an economist’s economist than Sen’.
In an interview with CNN IBN’s Sagarika Ghosh, Bhagwati criticised Sen for ‘hurting the poor’.
“First, before 1991 reforms by essentially being lukewarm at best and unsupportive of reforms which transformed India and the chances for the poor…200 million people came above the poverty line. Now he’s going to do that again. So he’s the one economist who has hurt the poor twice,” he told CNN IBN.
Jagdish Bhagwati
Jagdish Bhagwati
Bhagwati also attacked Sen for supporting the Food Security Bill as it will increase spending and result in more inflation.
The economist went on to praise Gujarat’s growth model in the interview, but clarified that he has no particular affection for Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
“The issue is not whether I am for growth and he’s somehow like Mother Teresa, in favour of social indicators. We are in favour of social indicators, social progress. The reason why I like the Gujarat model is that growth has taken place on social indicators.”
Earlier this week, Amartya Sen had in a candid interview with CNN IBNsaid he is not in favour of Modi as Prime Minister as he has not done enough to make minorities feel safe.
Bhagwati further clarified that he does not have any particular affection either for Modi or for Rahul Gandhi and the he wants a progressive leader irrespective of the party affiliation.
Interestingly Niranjan Rajadhyaksha in this column for Mint wrote that the Jagdish Bhagwati versus Amartya Sen battle is really a proxy fight between Modi versus Sonia Gandhi.

Bhagwati versus Sen: What's going on?

7 things you should know in the Bhagwati vs Sen slugfest

 and  are the two Indian economists most respected for their work. Both have worked on a broad spectrum of issues, though Sen is best known for his work on public choice and development and Bhagwati for his work on trade. Both are liberal, neoclassical economists, who support deregulation and disapprove of existing subsidies.

Yet, minor disagreements between them have amplified into a shouting match — well, a one-way shouting match, with Bhagwati repeatedly attacking Sen in public and in print, and Sen expounding on his point through interviews and op-eds, largely without mentioning Bhagwati or his views.

In a way, this isn’t surprising: Bhagwati has long disapproved of Sen. Also, both have competing, co-authored books in the market. In his latest broadside against Sen, Bhagwati managed to mention his book frequently, insisting in it, he had proved how Sen was anti-growth, a point many reviewers surprisingly failed to mention.

But that doesn’t entirely explain why the dispute has really taken off. One reason, of course, is Sen has spoken about food security, released a book on Bihar and expressed a preference that Narendra not become prime minister. This immediately meant the luminous intellectuals of the internet, and those in the respectable media that followed their lead, immediately assumed he somehow represented the .

Meanwhile, Bhagwati’s co-author, , had praised Gujarat’s growth in several pieces. That immediately made Bhagwati Modi’s best friend and any further difference between the two could be conveniently slotted into the pre-prepared Modi-versus-Congress mould apparently compulsory for news stories today.

If there’s anything worth taking away from what has become an increasingly unseemly and uninformative spectacle, it is the sobering realisation that academics continue to be divided over the simple mechanisms of how growth can be achieved — purely through deregulation, as Bhagwati would argue, or with a simultaneous push to education and health, as Sen wants.

Here’s the basic checklist on who said what, whether it was true, and the real differences and similarities between Sen and Bhagwati:

Do Bhagwati and Sen have similar stature as academics?
Sen won a Nobel Prize for his work on social choice and welfare but Bhagwati is a path-breaking trade theorist. Sen’s PhD students have included Kaushik Basu; Bhagwati’s, Paul Krugman.

In fact, Bhagwati is far more an economist’s economist than Sen, who at Harvard, for example, had an office at the philosophy department, not in the economics department. Sen is unique in that he is also one of the most respected living academic philosophers and a close associate and fellow teacher of both the left-of-centre John Rawls, the leading philosopher of the 20th century, and libertarian icon Robert Nozick.

Is Sen close to the Congress and Bhagwati to the ?
Actually, Sen was awarded the Bharat Ratna by an NDA government in 1999, though some sections of the Bharatiya Janata Party want it taken away now because he has said he doesn’t think Narendra Modi should be PM; a belief in Modi’s spotless virtue is not known to be a necessary qualification for the award.

Bhagwati, meanwhile, has fellowships named for him at Columbia University, paid for by the Indian taxpayer — set up in 2010, at the direction of the UPA government (it is unusual for such to be named after a member of the university’s faculty). Both Bhagwati and associate Arvind Panagariya—who holds the, yes, Jagdish Bhagwati Chair in Indian Political Economy at Columbia—have frequently talked about their long interaction and friendship with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

So, in a word, no! The desire to impose a politically partisan lens on an academic disagreement shows how shallow and debased is the understanding of economics in the Indian public sphere, as well as how devoid of thought-provoking content is the actual political debate between the Congress and the BJP.

Is it really Sen versus Bhagwati?
No. It’s Bhagwati versus Sen. Sen has almost completely avoided commenting on Bhagwati’s views, although Bhagwati has become increasingly personal and petty in his attacks on Sen.

Sen broke his Bhagwati-as-Voldemort rule in a recent letter to The Economist. The liberal British magazine had run a review of Sen and Jean Dreze’s new book; the reviewer happened to mention Bhagwati in passing, without specifying that he, Bhagwati, was right and Sen was wrong. This was a red rag to Bhagwati, who wrote Sen only paid “lip service” to growth. This was too much for Sen, who wrote, explaining he did his PhD on how to stimulate growth, and the first collection of his essays, published in 1970, was titled Economic Growth. In fact, Sen is perhaps the greatest living scholar of the original philosopher of the free market, Adam Smith.

Sen must regret his moment of weakness, because Bhagwati then wrote an article for Mint that basically returned, even more harshly, to his complaints about Sen. Bhagwati’s books are littered with disparaging remarks about Sen; indeed, reading between the lines of his last book reveals even more such remarks, some of these from resentments that date back to the early 60s, when both were young professional economists in New Delhi.

Is Sen anti-reform? Is Bhagwati anti-public funding of schools?
No, and no. Sen has often and publicly argued in favour of greater liberalisation, ending red tape, labour law reform, and cutting fuel, power and fertiliser subsidies. It may be convenient for both his friends and enemies to paint him as some kind of socialist but he isn’t. Meanwhile, Bhagwati has also argued for a second track of reform in social sector areas, though he would prefer public money be spent on, say, school vouchers that let poor parents pay for private schools.

Has either of them soured on the India growth story and blamed the UPA?
No. Both are unfazed by the fall in India’s growth rate. Sen argues it has fallen as much as its competitors; Bhagwati has blamed tight monetary policy and the freeze-up in clearances following outrage over scams, adding many government proposals could reverse the slide. Both of these are, pretty much, what the government also claims.

So, what’s the real difference between Sen and Bhagwati’s policy prescriptions?
Merely a difference in emphasis! Sen would like more public funding (as distinct from public provision) of basic goods; Bhagwati argues this is secondary to focusing on growth.

Why? Sen says growth depends on creating a dynamic workforce capable of learning on the job, which needs health and education. Bhagwati believes laissez-faire growth will raise incomes sufficiently for the workforce to be able to invest in their own health and education. Of course, both these mechanisms can be true. In fact, both probably are true, which means the differences are even smaller than is claimed — just a question of which can work faster and more effectively. One path can hardly be abandoned for the other; both mechanisms will need government attention. Nor is either major political party likely to act on only one mechanism, at the cost of the other.

So, why all the fuss?
As I said: duelling books; people who don’t bother to read the duelling books but instead read headlines written by journalists who haven’t bothered to read the duelling books, or only partially understood these, and the eternal quest in the Indian media to make absolutely everything relate to Narendra Modi versus .

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Wednesday, July 24, 2013 | 11:34 AM IST

There is nothing to panic about growth: Amartya Sen

Interview with Economist and Nobel laureate

Nobel Prize-winning economist , who has just written An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions with , tells Mihir S Sharma that he doesn’t understand why his book has received an angry reaction, or why he is being called anti- and pro-redistribution.

Is it startling to discover that you are being called a  socialist?

It is very strange indeed. Perhaps some of this reaction is because of anxiety over growth, but there is nothing to panic about, really.

Brazil and South Africa are doing less than 1%; we have fallen in growth terms exactly as much as China has. The rising economy is Indonesia – but that is relevant to our story because they are benefiting from a much better education and  base than we have.

Was the nature of India’s high growth in the 2000s problematic?

If you haven’t got an educated and healthy  force, by nature your growth will be concentrated in a small group of sectors, like IT or specialised auto parts and so on – and that is not a good basis for the expansion of demand in the economy. Nor does it allow the possibility of what the Chinese have – a labour force that can build anything, from alarm clocks to safety pins to “Native American” souvenirs.

Your book says India’s real wages have been stagnant. But we have just learnt of a sharp decrease in poverty and a startling increase in rural wages in recent years.

Well, remember that the educational base has suddenly been expanded a great deal in the past nine years. So you’d expect a bump from that. In addition, with learning-by-doing, you’d expect some maturity to come in, helping productivity increase. But compare things to China – even though real wages are rising, they have continued to be competitive despite the rise in wages.

If we had a 7% rise in wages, we wouldn’t be competitive at all. China can survive it only because its workers are educated, they can help China go up the value chain, and the economy take off – as happened in Europe, in Japan quite rapidly and in Korea even more rapidly. And to do that you need many other things first. Certainly, India’s labour regulations have been counter-productive.

But won’t growth itself take care of it?

There isn’t a single place where growth has taken off without an educated and healthy workforce.

You are being called the creator of the  Bill.

Yes, I don’t know why. That is indeed a paternity suit I’m currently fighting. People are accusing me of being the father.


The Bill is supposed to address malnutrition. But could some of the symptoms of malnutrition actually be caused by poor sanitation?

Or by poor healthcare. I quite agree with that. But you should ask: if the proportion of malnourished were halved, would it change the need? Of course not. Let me say I don’t necessarily believe undernourishment is overstated. I do believe that sanitation and primary healthcare are as important as nourishment.

But are not undernourishment statistics overstating the problem? Look at Bangladesh, where most other child health indicators have improved far beyond ours, but they have child malnourishment and stunting statistics close to India’s.

There are other intriguing problems with Bangladesh too. Three. One is this about child nourishment. Another is – well, their schooling indicators show great success, their mean years of schooling is higher than India’s, but they have a problem with the quality of their education.

And the third is that, while women’s agency has been improving, they have not been able to secure safety for their workplaces. These are things I really want to think about. And, as is often the case, how I think about that is to ask Jean to think about that. So he’s off to Bangladesh soon. [Laughs]

You’ve worked with Jean Dreze a long time.

Our first book was  and Public Action, in 1989. He was very young. He was in the Indian Statistical Institute then. I knew his father, and I knew that Jacques Dreze’s son – some hippie type, I had been told – was in India, but actually doing something productive at ISI.

And then he wrote to me, this letter about my poverty and famines book. He said: in order to show there was no causal connection between food availability and famine, it wasn’t enough to just show cases where there had been famine without any food availability problems.

You should have also considered cases where there has been a food availability problem, but no famine. I was in Finland for the summer, then, and I had a very little research money, so I told him to come and work on it. It is very easy to buy Jean, because he doesn’t know how to charge. He came, and eventually a book came out of it.

What about the distortions that giving people physical entitlements of grain causes to their diet, and to cropping patterns?

Absolutely, that’s a proper – a serious objection. Even in the book, we are not anti-cash at all. I am also a big supporter of Aadhaar. Whether you give benefits in cash or in kind, you have to know who the poor are, you have to identify them.

Earlier you had nothing with which to approach the state...

There is some legitimacy to the opposite side of the argument, that what if it is the state approaching you, knowing all your data. I have some libertarian sympathies – giving that sort of power to someone, it worries me. But for those who have nothing, it is an entitlement: then Aadhaar is pro-freedom, and not anti-freedom.

You have argued in your book that power subsidies need to be ended, and people should pay the proper price for power. But you also say more investment is needed – but we have more than enough capacity in the power sector now, it’s a question of inputs...

It may not be. I think that may be wrong – it is more likely a question of reforming the organisation, and correcting subsidies.

People are saying you’re for redistribution.

That’s totally illogical. Look, using taxes to pay for public services open to all is not redistribution, anyone can come. I’m not a believer in means-testing, either. I know it saves too much money, but it gives too much power to those who can say no, you do not qualify.

In any case, most times, the money doesn’t really come from taxing the rich, it comes from corporations. Don’t think of it as rich and poor. It’s not for the poor, it’s for everyone; and the money is not from the pockets of the rich, it’s from corporations who will also eventually benefit. To call me in favour of redistribution is to enter Derrida-like territory, to reinterpret terminology.

India’s a democracy. Why isn’t there a demand for better utilities through politics and voting?

That question’s quite central to determining how democracy can make a difference, what is it that we must change. So far, we have had the lazy thought of assuming that people don’t know the connection between public services and not just how the lives of the poor will go, but why that is the very basis of high and sustained economic growth. That’s our point, and we have the examples of Japan and China and Korea and so on.

After all, some of the kind of products that we are thinking of making – how will the individual perceive his ability to make them? In China, they can take on, say, the making of solar panels, because they have people who can read and write and count and follow instructions and talk with people.

Can any individual here imagine that they can go and make solar panels on their own? It has to be a collective or a corporation effort. The absence of the ability to make solar panels, of other people making solar panels, can make individuals wonder what do I gain from an education – but that’s an illusion, isn’t it?

Why aren’t Indian companies lobbying for better public utilities then?

Going into a new area is much harder than continuing to do just what you’ve done for a long time. In India, we’re particularly like that. We can get stuck doing the same thing, instead of the rude courage that is needed.

Gandhi vs Modi is actually Sen vs Bhagwati

Behind the political fight scheduled for 2014 is a duel of economic ideologies between Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati

BJP leader Narendra Modi and Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi. The debate between two of the finest Indian economists—Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati—reflects the deeper question facing the country’s political leaders. Photo: AFP & Getty Images
Mumbai: Bhagwati versus Sen may not have the same resonance as Modi versus Gandhi, but behind the political fight scheduled for 2014 is a duel of economic ideologies.
The protagonists of this cerebral combat are Jagdish Bhagwatiand Amartya Sen, without a shred of doubt two of the finest Indian economists ever.
The political hue to the intense debate between the two old friends ofManmohan Singh is another reason why the ongoing intellectual scuffle between the two brilliant economic minds deserves to be followed.
Indeed, if Sen and his long-time collaborator Jean Drèze are supporters of the entitlement-led public schemes launched by the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government, then Bhagwati and his long-time collaborator Arvind Panagariya are admirers of what they call the Gujarat model.
Sen is a strong supporter of the proposed right to food law while Bhagwati has lashed out at it. Drèze is a member of the powerful National Advisory Council that has the ear of Congress presidentSonia Gandhi. And Panagariya has written in support of the economic policies of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
The academic paths of Sen and Bhagwati have not crossed in their long careers. They earned their fame in different areas. Bhagwati has made seminal contributions to trade theory. Sen did his best work in social choice. The two—along with peers such as Partha Dasgupta,T.N. Srinivasan and Avinash Dixit—have made contributions to economic theory that are on par with the best in the world.

Bhagwati and Sen are also gifted polemicists, commenting extensively on public policy. It is in the latter role that they have often crossed swords.
The debate between the two is an intricate one. But a simplified version would be as follows: Bhagwati believes that strong economic growth has directly improved the lives of poor Indians while Sen argues that India’s successful growth record has been tarnished by abysmal levels of human development.
The solutions also differ. Bhagwati has been a strong votary of free markets, and was a critic of Indian economic policy as far back as 1969. Sen is more statist in comparison. Bhagwati argues that India needs reforms to push growth. Sen believes growth is meaningless without government spending on human capabilities.
In a powerful speech he gave to Indian parliamentarians in 2010, Bhagwati argued that it was a myth that reforms had not helped the poor. He said: “Politicians would do well to strengthen the conventional reforms, which I call Stage 1 reforms, by extending them to the unfinished reform agenda of the early 1990s. In particular, further liberalization of trade in all sectors, substantial freeing up of the retail sector, and virtually all labour market reforms are still pending. Such intensification and broadening of Stage 1 reforms can only add to the good that these reforms do for the poor and the underprivileged… These conventional reforms have also generated revenues which can finally be spent on targeted health and education so as to additionally improve the well-being of the poor: these are what I call Stage 2 reforms which were, let me remind you, in the minds of our earliest planners.”
Now compare this with what Sen wrote in an article published this month in The New York Times, once again warning against an overarching obsession with economic growth: “For years, India’s economic growth rate ranked second among the world’s large economies, after China, which it has consistently trailed by at least one percentage point. The hope that India might overtake China one day in economic growth now seems a distant one. But that comparison is not what should worry Indians most. The far greater gap between India and China is in the provision of essential public services—a failing that depresses living standards and is a persistent drag on growth.”
The Bhagwati-versus-Sen debate bubbles up to the surface every now and then, drawing others into the fray. One prime example is an online debate in 2011—illuminating and entertaining in equal measure—that drew contributions from several top economists, after Sen told the Financial Times, soon after the Bhagwati lecture in defence of reforms, that it was “very stupid” to focus so heavily on growth while India had such high levels of malnutrition.
The online debate soon became a fist fight between the warring camps, with some like Kaushik Basu bravely trying to establish a middle ground.
“I believe that the differences between Sen and Bhagwati are less substantive than what is popularly made out to be. On a variety of important policy matters, they use different languages but say very similar things. My only worry is that even on this Sen and Bhagwati will agree that I am wrong,” Basu wrote.
Economics journalist Martin Wolf was blunt: “Obviously, higher incomes are a necessary condition for better state-funded welfare, better jobs and so forth. This is simply not debatable. Indeed, only in India, do serious intellectuals dream of debating these issues.”
More recently, Sen rather dramatically told journalists that they should confront parliamentarians with data on the number of deaths, one thousand a week, that a delay in passing the food security Bill, which has now been pushed through a presidential ordinance, will cause.
“I often say in jest that serious economists are handicapped in policy debates in India because their opponents feel entitled not only to their arguments but their own facts as well! And here I was facing the same from Sen,” Panagariya told The Economic Times. Bhagwati challenged Sen to a public debate on the issue.
The battle of ideas is not just that. Sen has for long held up the Kerala model as an ideal, while his critics have pointed out that the southern state had relatively better human development indicators even before independence, and its lead has nothing to do with policy since 1947. Bhagwati is more impressed by the Gujarat model based on rapid economic growth, while critics of Modi rarely tire of pointing out how Gujarat lags in human development indicators.
Interestingly, the two rival pairs of economists have new books out presenting their solutions for India. In Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries, Bhagwati and Panagariya again present growth as the panacea for all of India’s problems. The book came out a little before An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, where Sen and Drèze once again prescribe large-scale, state-run social programmes that are adequately monitored as the solution.
The battle of ideas featuring the two great economists in some ways captures a deeper question facing Indian political leaders: should India aim for growth that will lift incomes or should it first address social issues such as inequality and malnutrition that will eventually hinder growth?

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