Welcome to the Proposals Library of AltKuznets Advisors Pvt Ltd., Your Sustainability Nirvana !

Capitalism, Efficiency and Equity Ganga Prasad G. Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar Prasad Rao? Criticizing Capitalism? It must be the end of Time! Well, may be, but even in the US, the bastion of capitalism, economists, environmentalists and social thinkers have begun to question the Capitalism as the 'panacea for all ills' (See “Is Capitalism courting long-term disaster?”). True, capitalism embodies some of our most cherished values: competition and free markets (though, not exactly), incentives, innovation, and excellence; yet, one cannot wish away its fundamental problems as has been revealed over time. First, by trading the entire future of firms on the stock market, one of its primary institutions, capitalism encourages profit bubbles and short-trading that sucks away all future rents leaving behind, on one hand, a large group of long-term investors waiting decades for the growth that must materialize for them to realize profits and, on the other, managers who must find...

Ganga Prasad Rao http://myprofile.cos.com/gangar When young, there was a 'pata nahi kis ration ka (khana) khaya' joke – a reference to how certain boys were much healthier than others (sometimes without the appetite to show for it). Those were the days when the public distribution system (PDS) served a useful purpose of providing essentials to citizens (during war time), and guarded them from hoarding and exorbitant prices. For those of us who are 'fresh', the PDS is a government sponsored network of 'fair price shops' that are fed from Central warehouses by a fleet of contracted trucks and backed by a Ministry, bureaucrats, officials and accountants, who keep track of the meticulous task of feeding subsidized essential household items to millions across the country. Last time I checked, they sold grains, flour, sugar, kerosene and perhaps cooking oil. Citizens merely need to apply for a 'green card', and stand in line, sometimes for a few hours (good pl...

SOFTLANDING Ganga Prasad Rao http//myprofile.cos.com/gangar How often have we heard of 'softlanding' the economy? Of course, we all know what it means – to bring the economy to a sustainable rate of expansion by increasing the interest rate after a period of loose monetary policy. The risk, as perceived by policy makers, is that too much and/or too fast a rise in interest rate could crash the economy in to a recession. Indeed, Keynesian economists have made a profession of macro-economic intervention to raise growth and then seek to softland it when the economy grows unsustainably. But that's not my point. My argument concerns the nation's economy as a whole. Every emerging economy wishes to grow and grow fast. Yet, perennial growth at more than a couple percent points is 'demanding' in every sense of the word. Do we put our industry on a growth path that exhausts natural resources, inflates prices and exacerbates a million social and environmental externalities...

Global Thinning is a Good Global Warming Policy Ganga Prasad G. Rao In the good ol' days as an Economist at API, despite all the gassing in my office (apparently, something to do with 'spy key', 'gas key' or 'criminal key'?), I made a list of ideas to impress the twelfth floor into sponsoring my green card (I should have known better!). Any way, one of those ideas was that population control was likely a very effective global warming policy. Come to think of it, population growth is an exponential process. Add to it the human desire to live it up, and what you have it is a 'double exponential' growth of demand for various goods and services, each requiring extraction of raw materials, processing, packaging and transportation, not to mention collection and disposal of waste post-consumption. The GHG emissions from these activities can only add to the existing inventory. And, since we are not waiting for glaciers to show up at our doors (if you know wh...

‘Coz it Benefits me Analysis ! Ganga Prasad Rao For decades, cost-benefit analysis (CBA), or benefit-cost analysis (depending on your perspective!) has ruled the roost among policy makers who use and advocate it for evaluating the economic attractiveness of policy alternatives and options. The principle is simple: evaluate all incremental economic costs and all incremental economic benefits of alternatives over the baseline or status quo and choose the one that yields the highest incremental net benefits. In reality however, the application of CBA has been clouded by a myriad issues. These concern the definition of costs, measurement of benefits, discount rates, social preferences, compensation to ‘losers’ and so on. All impact studies recognize costs and benefits spread across space and time, first round and second round effects, as well as distributional impacts. Yet, not many studies examine the performance of CBA under various administrative, constitutional, political and electoral...

Poverty, Population, Politics and the Environment:The Unholy Tangle Ganga Prasad G. Rao Ever wondered why our country has no place for the 'clean and green' parties? Why do political parties assiduously avoid anything that could remotely be termed 'green'? Because being ‘green’ signifies a rich economy and the poor masses will not vote for a party seen as anti-poor. Every rupee spent on pollution control and cleanliness is, as they rightly, self-deceptively or wrongly perceive, taken off the bowls of the poor. (So say the communists; I wonder if the 'right' is behind them. Strange bedmates indeed! Why, that's a conspiracy you'd never suspect!). Little wonder that being green is a stigma no political party would risk! But the tragedy does not stop there. In our country, we care for the poor. We subsidize their education, their health, their food, their electricity and their transportation. Nothing wrong with that. They deserve help in an opportunistic soc...