C. Raja Mohan in The American Interest on India’s strategic directions.
A Reuters report on how Pakistanis are responding to the global backlash against Pakistan.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Matt Ridley has some great insights into economic development.
M. K. [...]

Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express on the problems of getting to an effective State.
Can the courts help get us out of the mess that is Indian labour law? A report in the Indian Express says that the courts are inclined towards penalising striking workers of [...]

The `Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009′ (RTE Act) came into effect today, with much fanfare and an address by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. In understanding the debates about this Act, a little background knowledge is required. Hence, in this self-contained 1500-word blog post, I start with a historical narrative, outline [...]

John Stuart Mill assisted in the triumph of the idea of progress in the 19th Century but he also had concerns about the future that still seem relevant today. Richard Reeves comments: ‘Mill was not a knee-jerk critic of what Ruskin dismissed as the “steam whistle society”, but nor was he a blind advocate of [...]

A perennial debate rages in India, about the merits of the traditional family-run business versus the knowledge of the fancy-pants consultant or MBA. A remarkable paper by a group of economists sheds new light on this question. I wrote a column in Financial Express today titled Are Indian family businesses well run? where I describe [...]

In recent years, an empirical literature has begun to prise apart the management process of universities, seeking to identify the features which cater to excellence. In a previous blog post I summarised five useful ingredients that enable successful universities, from a working paper by Philippe Aghion, Mathias Dewatripont, Caroline M. Hoxby, Andreu Mas-Colell [...]

This follows on from my last post: Do all well-being indicators tell similar stories about human flourishing? The indicators that I looked at did tend to tell similar stories – countries that have high average income levels also tend to have high rankings on other well-being indicators.
The purpose of this post is to extend the [...]

This question arose as I was thinking about the relationship between the determinants of happiness (i.e. survey measures of subjective well-being or SWB) and human flourishing at a national level.
Recent research has been able to explain around 90% of inter-country differences in average SWB in terms of average income levels, enough money for food, healthy [...]

In India, in the fields of health and education, an impressive rise of a private ecosystem has come about. In these fields, the State has tried hard to get back in the game, particularly after the UPA won power in 2004. But the unwillingness of the State to undertake deeper reforms has meant that ultimately, [...]

The Bill and Melinda Gates foundation announced this week that it will grant one of the largest privately sponsored school improvement programs in recent memory — several teacher performance improvement initiatives in more than four states.
The program will focus on efforts to improve teacher’s results rather than simply compensate them on “educational qualifications.”
Announced on Thursday, [...]