Transportation investments and urban development

"Connectivity is destiny", so says a nice NYT article on the ambitious Crossrail project in London. I  am very sympathetic. The article nicely captures the power of planned transportation investments in transforming the fortunes of neighbourhoods and keeping cities chugging as engines of economic growth.

Crossrail, the roughly 70 miles and $20 bn railway project, is Europe's largest infrastructure project, and which would cut crucial travel times by half and carry twice the number of passengers as London subway. Its objectives are nicely summarised,

Crossrail was intended as a kind of democratizing corrective, at once shrinking the city and expanding on a vision of London as a great, inclusive metropolis. While it will whisk bankers at new speeds from their office towers and multimillion-dollar aeries to Heathrow, it will also help millions of now-marginalized, lower-income workers, unable to afford runaway home prices in and around the center of the city, to live in cheaper neighborhoods often far from their jobs... Crossrail now promises to bring six million people and 80 percent of London’s corporations within an hour’s commute of the airport, up from three million and 50 percent today. 

London has been remarkably successful in adapting and even re-inventing itself to meet the demands of emerging economic challenges,

While Londoners love to moan about their public transit network, by comparison New York has barely managed to construct four subway stops in about a half-century and its aged, rapidly collapsing subway system now threatens to bring the city to a halt... During the past three decades, London has been transfigured by wild growth, much of it the consequence of government-sustained megaprojects: Along with Crossrail, there have been the stupendous renovations to King’s Cross and St. Pancras Stations, the wholesale invention of Canary Wharf, the addition of the Jubilee subway line, the Olympic makeover at Stratford in East London and the expansion of Heathrow Airport. These megaprojects, in different ways, helped remake London into the great global city-state of Europe, a 21st-century melting pot and Sybaris of culture and free-market prosperity — at the same time that they clearly exacerbated underlying urban inefficiencies and stirred resentment elsewhere in England toward the city... London... is historically poor in the east, rich in the west and along the periphery, although that east-west distinction has eroded as gentrification has seeped outward. Underserved and long-disconnected East London neighborhoods like Shoreditch and Whitechapel in recent years have become chic and largely unaffordable to many Londoners. The city has added light-rail lines to help some of those areas, but only Crossrail is capable of “tying together many of the developments that have transformed London". 

The economic benefits of such projects are high, as the example of King's Cross area renewal has shown,

The area around King’s Cross, once notorious for drugs and prostitution, has metamorphosed after the renovation of the decrepit King’s Cross station and its neighbor St. Pancras, now serving the Eurostar express train to Paris and other cities in Europe. King’s Cross today is home to an art school, The Guardian, a cluster of high-tech medical research centers and Google’s future European headquarters. The point: Major, long-term infrastructure projects support game-changing investments. 

Or the development of the Canary Wharf area,

From Heathrow, riders will need just over a half-hour via Crossrail to travel east to Canary Wharf, the defunct docklands turned world financial hub, which today employs more than 112,000 people. When the site opened in the late 1980s, the aptly named Narrow Street was its only real access road. Canary Wharf went belly up. Then London broke ground for the Jubilee subway line, linking Canary Wharf by mass transit to the heart of the city, and international banks started moving in... Foster & Partners, the celebrated London-based architecture firm, has designed Canary Wharf’s Crossrail Station, a spectacular glass and timber tubular structure, docked like a giant cruise ship beside the firm’s HSBC tower. Nearby, Canary Wharf plans to build thousands of new luxury (and some affordable) homes and other developments by high-end architects like Herzog & de Meuron to turn Canary Wharf into more of a neighborhood.

Even before its completion by end-2019, change is well afoot along Crossrail's alignment,

The final stop on that southeast spur of Crossrail is Abbey Wood, where Sainsbury’s, the chain store and a bellwether of gentrification and commercial investment, has lately opened a shop in anticipation of the train. Streets here are lined with terrace houses now occupied by plasterers and truck drivers. Record numbers of landlords in the area have been filing applications for renovations, believing that Crossrail will attract bankers and lawyers. Property values are expected to rise on average 10 percent around all future stations along the Crossrail route. Change is even more acute one stop before Abbey Wood, in Woolwich. The Berkeley Group, a big British real estate company, is building 5,000 sleek, mostly high-end apartments around the future Crossrail station, which the developer paid millions to help construct. Hugging the Thames River, Woolwich is the former site of the Royal Arsenal and Henry VIII’s dockyard, where Charles Darwin’s Beagle was built. Historically working-class, it, too, used to be all white but has come to attract Caribbean and Asian immigrants, with nearly 40 percent of residents today living in social housing. 

The article does maybe make a simplified and picture-perfect representation of transportation investments in London. But it makes a very strong point about the power of urban renewal built around transportation investments and transit oriented development planning.  

This is something which the largest Indian cities have to embrace. They need urban development authorities and municipal corporations to focus on the critical challenge of guiding densification, expansion, and renewal using the instrument of transportation investments. Unfortunately, not an area which are among the current priorities of these authorities.

Weekend reading links

1. Metro rail projects on the rise in India, with 8 metro projects 370 km already operational, and over two dozen lined up or approved and under construction. Bar a handful, all of the rest are being executed by government owned entities. PPPs have proved a false dawn,

Interestingly, PPP for metro projects has been limited to five in India. Out of these five, one project (Mumbai Metro Phase 2) was terminated before it started, while another (Delhi Airport Line) was terminated after becoming operational. Currently, there are three operational PPP-based metro projects (one in Mumbai, and two in Gurugram) while one project is under implementation (Hyderabad Metro).

Mumbai and Gurugram are very small ones, and the former has already suffered several rounds of acrimony between the government and the operator. Much the same applies to the tortuous process of construction of the Hyderabad metro, despite the very generous land leverage subsidy for the project. This is unlikely to change given the inevitable need for public subsidy for metro rail systems.

2. Property prices in the most liveable cities have been rocketing in recent years on the back of cross-border purchasers, a significant share of whom are Chinese. London has been at the forefront of the froth. The Economist has this nice graphic of iconic London properties which are currently owned by foreigners.

3. Economist has this about India's push to improve transportation,

Local governments are paving and widening rural roads at a rate of 117km a day.

4. Even as expectations are of petrol prices staying low for a long time, oil and gas producers are turning on on their investment spigots on the face of falling development costs.

More new oil and gasfields were given the go-ahead in the first half of this year than in the whole of 2016 as companies such as ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and BP re-engineer projects to lower costs and accelerate speed of development. Average development costs have fallen 40 per cent since 2014, according to Wood Mackenzie, the energy consultancy, encouraging companies to revive investment despite continued weakness in the oil market. But they are doing so on a highly selective basis, with only the most attractive projects going ahead... the most risky or economically marginal projects are being cancelled, leaving billions of barrels of untapped resources “stranded” as long as weak prices persist. Producers are instead trying to mimic the “short cycle” model of US shale companies by focusing on resources that can be developed at the lowest cost in the shortest time. Almost three-quarters of conventional projects approved this year have been “brownfield” expansions of existing fields, or satellite developments connected to existing platforms and pipelines through so-called tie-backs... Conventional producers are trying to narrow shale’s cost advantage further by adopting a “no frills” approach to development. The “big is better” mentality of the $100-oil era has given way to smaller, simplified projects, often involving fewer wells than originally planned and advanced in phases rather than all at once.

This investment rush in turn only amplifies the prospects of lower prices for the foreseeable future.

5. The Economist points to the work of Michael Sances and Hye Young You who find racism at work in police jurisdictions in the US. They examined 9000 US cities and found, 

Those with more black residents consistently collected unusually high amounts of fines and fees—even after controlling for differences in income, education and crime levels. Cities with the largest shares (98%) of black residents collected an average of $12-$19 more per person than those with the smallest (0%) did. However, there was one subgroup of cities that bucked the trend: the relationship between race and fines was only half as strong in places whose city councils included at least one black member. This may be because black politicians are likelier than white ones are to respond to complaints from black constituents. Black councillors might also intervene to stop certain policies, like increasing court fees, from going into effect to begin with.

The attraction of fines as a valuable source of revenues for cash strapped local governments may amplify the problem,

Part of the problem is that fines are a very effective method for cash-strapped governments to shore up their budgets without having to raise taxes or cut spending. As a result, the temptation to tell police departments to dredge up violations, no matter how petty, can be hard to resist. City judges tend to rubber-stamp these penalties. For example, in Peoria, Arizona, two people were jailed for not trimming weeds more than six inches tall. In Ferguson, a black man resting in his car after playing basketball in the public park was stopped by police and charged with, among other things, not wearing a seat belt in his (parked) car and making a false declaration after giving the officer a shortened name (like “Bob” instead of “Robert”). Such fines may fall disproportionately on the backs of black citizens, because they tend to be poorer and lack the resources to contest the penalties.

6.  A team of analysts from UBS took apart the mass-market electric vehicle (EV), Chevrolet Bolt, which retails for $37000 and can do 238 miles on a single charge. They found compelling evidence that EVs could become mainstream far earlier than being anticipated, with the likelihood of achieving cost parity with internal combustion engine vehicles by early part of next decade. They found EV vehicles to have far less mechanical complexity - Bolt had just 24 moving parts compared to 149 for VW Golf, which means less wear and tear, and less number of workers in production line.

The report has several other interesting findings, including the fact that 56% of Bolt EV content comes from outside the traditional auto-supply chain, thereby indicating the possibility of significant disruption on the supply-chain side.

Further, with far less, almost negligible, maintenance costs, and no engine oil like consumables, the EV could hurt dealerships, who generate almost 40% of their revenues from after-sales maintenance.

As to its impact on the global market for minerals, the demand for cobalt, lithium, and graphite for batteries and rare earths for e-motor magnets would rise,

7. Two contrasting interpretations of Chinese historical perspective. Howard French talks in his new book about a Chinese neighbourhood policy motivated by its historically predominant position and the concept of tianxia, or "everything under heaven",

“Tianxia emerges as a paradigm for China’s geopolitics from a correct sense that it is vastly larger and, for most of its history, vastly richer than any neighbouring state,” French explains during our conversation. “Out of this flows an ideal, from the Chinese perspective, that order can best be established in our neighbourhood by a situation whereby the neighbours defer to us.” In the most technical sense, deference is expressed through a highly ritualised series of ceremonies: embassies dispatched to pay obeisance to the emperor; the adoption of the Chinese calendar and language. In broader policy terms, tianxia combines carefully deployed “sticks” and “carrots”. French points to historical evidence to argue that China uses inducements first and force only as a last resort: the Sino-Vietnamese war of 1979 is an example. Carrots include access to Chinese trade, to its potentially vast market, and to what French describes as “patents of authority. China essentially legitimates local leaders by endorsing them”. On this basis, “a harmonious pattern of coexistence can endure in the region. One could say only on this basis”.

Former Indian Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran, refutes this interpretation of historic predominance, 

China uses templates of the past as instruments of legitimisation, to construct a modern narrative of power. One key element of the narrative is that China’s role as Asia’s dominant power restores a ­position the nation occupied through most of history. The period from the mid-18th century until China’s liberation in 1949, when the country was reduced to semi-colonial status, subjected to invasions by imperialist powers and Japan, is characterised as an aberration. The tributary system is presented as artful statecraft evolved by China to manage interstate ­relationships in an asymmetrical world. What is rarely acknowledged is that China was a frequent tributary to keep marauding tribes at bay. The Tang emperor paid tribute to the Tibetans as well as to the fierce Xiongnu tribes to keep the peace. History shows a few periods when its periphery was occupied by relatively weaker states. China itself was occupied and ruled by non-Han invaders, ­including the Mongols, from the 12th to 15th centuries, and the Manchus, from the 15th to 20th centuries. Far from considering these empires as oppressive, modern Chinese political discourse seeks to project itself as a successor state entitled to territorial acquisitions of those empires, including vast non-Han areas such as Xinjiang and Tibet.

Thus, an imagined history is put forward to legitimise China’s claim to Asian hegemony, and remarkably, much of this is increasingly considered as self-evident in Western and even Indian discourse. Little in history supports the proposition that China was the centre of the Asian universe commanding deference among less civilised states... recasting a complex history to reflect a ­Chinese centrality that never existed is part of China’s current narrative of power.

8. Ananthanageswaran and Praveen Chakravarthy provides these very sensible suggestions in response to this SEBI discussion paper to address the disproportionate skew towards derivatives in India's equity market. They find that investors in India's derivatives markets are primarily speculators and not hedgers, and have been encouraged by the lower Securities Transaction Tax (STT) on derivatives over stocks. The scale of distortion is not to be glossed over,

Indian equity investors have an inexplicable fetish for complex derivative products. In FY2017, just 700,000 individuals bought and sold nearly $4 trillion notional worth of derivatives. This is twice as much as all foreign institutional investors in India combined. India’s stock exchanges trade eight times more equity derivatives than the Hong Kong (HK) stock exchange, even though the value of all companies listed in HK is double that of India. Indian retail investors also seem to prefer the riskier of the two categories of derivatives products between stock futures and options. The potential gain or loss in futures is unlimited, while it is limited in options. Retail investors in India bet on a notional value of $800 billion of stock futures in 2016, more than the value of stock futures traded in all of Europe, Hong Kong and Singapore combined. Retail investors account for half of all the stock futures trading in India, while sophisticated institutional investors account for just one-tenth and prefer stock options instead. Not only do Indian retail investors have a puzzling fascination for high-risk derivative products, they seem addicted to the riskiest category.

In contrast, Ajay Shah takes an ideological view on the issues raised in the SEBI discussion paper and claims that India's equity markets "largely work well". I don't have the energy to litigate, but it is amazing that views like "objective of financial markets policy is to achieve liquid and efficient financial markets" persist. 

9. The latest in the search for fancy financing instruments to address development challenges comes with the world's first issuance of Pandemic Bonds by the World Bank. The details,

The World Bank says the probability of another pandemic in the next 10 to 15 years is high. That is why it has issued $425m in pandemic bonds to support its new Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (PEF), which is intended to channel funding to countries facing a deadly disease. The bonds cover six viruses likely to spark outbreaks: new influenza viruses, coronaviruses (like SARS and MERS), filoviruses (like Ebola), Lassa fever, Rift Valley fever and Crimean Congo fever. Investors forgo their principal when a virus reaches a predetermined contagion level, based on rate of growth, number of deaths and whether it crosses international borders. The facility covers 77 of the world’s poorest countries.

This will raise probably a few millions over the next many years. Is it really worth the effort?

10. Finally, as India refused to enforce the follow-on despite having a lead of 304 over Sri Lanka, one cannot but help think that the follow-on requirement of 200 runs has to be changed. It should be made at least 300 runs, maybe 400 runs. In the age of modern batting (fast scoring and weakness on worn-out wickets), teams realise that a lead of 200 can be made to look very small even with just one session of batting. So, enforcing the follow-on is just inconceivable. 

Mexico City scraps minimum parking requirements for buildings

This blog has written earlier about how reducing traffic congestion has to involve the use of complementary levers that make vehicle ownership and usage costly. 

Minimum parking requirement in housing complexes is effectively a subsidy to vehicle owners in so far as it makes vehicle parking space less costly. While still marginal, a rising chorus of opinion has been calling for scrapping minimum parking requirements. 

Marginal Revolution points to the very bold decision by Mexico City to dispense off with minimum parking requirements in buildings, 

Mexico City eliminated requirements that force developers to build a minimum number of parking spaces in each project. The city will instead cap the number of parking spaces allowed in new development, depending on the type and size of the building. Existing parking spaces can also be converted to other uses. Mexico City Mayor Miguel Mancera signed the new regulations into effect last week. The policy change applies to every land use and throughout the entire city of 8.8 million residents. It promises to make housing more affordable, reduce traffic, and improve air quality... The old rules mandated parking even though only about 30 percent of Mexico City residents own cars and the city has a well-developed subway system. There are now parking maximums in place instead of minimums. For example, office developments had been required to include at least one parking space per 30 square meters of floor area. Now that is the maximum parking ratio developers can build. Within the central city, the new rules also require developers to pay a fee if they build more than 50 percent of the maximum parking allowed.

To put this in perspective, Buffalo, New York, is the only US city without a minimum parking requirement in its zoning regulations.

Is Uber the world's biggest Ponzi scheme?

The Economist digs out this from the financials of Uber, which was valued at $68 bn in its last funding round in 2016,

Underlying pre-tax losses were $3bn-3.5bn last year and about $800m in the most recent quarter. Some $1bn-2bn of last year’s red ink was because of subsidies that Uber paid to drivers and passengers to draw them to its platform. At least another $1bn went on overheads and on developing driverless cars; money is also being splashed on a new food-delivery venture and a plan to build flying cars. To put its 2016 loss in perspective, that number was larger than the cumulative loss made by Silicon Valley’s least profit-conscious big company—Amazon—in 1995-2002. Measured by sales, Uber is the world’s 1,158th-biggest firm. Judged by cash losses, it ranks in the top 20. It is now eight years old, but still probably years away from being stable enough to make an initial public offering of shares. In contrast, Amazon went public at the age of three, Alphabet at six and Facebook at eight... 

A discounted cashflow model gives a sense of the leap of faith that Uber’s valuation requires. After adjusting for its net cash of $5bn and for its stake in Didi, worth $6bn, you have to believe that its sales will increase tenfold by 2026. Operating margins would have to rise to 25%, from about -80% today. That is a huge stretch. Admittedly, Amazon and Alphabet, two of history’s most successful firms, both grew their sales at least that quickly in the decade after they reached Uber’s level, and Facebook is likely to as well. But over the same periods these firms’ operating margins show an total average rise of only one percentage point. Put simply, Uber finds it desperately hard to make money. It is not clear that it breaks even reliably across the group of cities where it has been active for longest.

Put simply, with these numbers, it is no stretch to argue that Uber may well turn out to be the world's biggest Ponzi scheme - you keep acquiring customers by bleeding money till you can take it no longer and the last ones wearing the hat takes the hit! 

As I have blogged earlier, the challenge is even greater in developing countries like India where the market is so price sensitive that any significant increase in price is most likely to see largescale customer exits, thereby snuffing out the only end-game of ride-sharing firms. Further, unlike Ponzi schemes where just the remaining investors take the hit, there is also the massive social damage likely to be caused by the immiseration of poor drivers who would have taken loans to buy cars to work for Uber. 

The potential social negative externality that results from Uber's business model cries out loud for regulation. Ride-sharing and room-sharing are probably the only two large economic activities that take place in unregulated environments, where the negative externalities, and they are very significant, are completely externalised.

Limits to progress, economic growth, and capitalism?

FT has more on the challenges facing retail in the US from the e-commerce market,

Credit Suisse estimates that as many as 8,640 stores with 147m square feet of retailing space could close down just this year — surpassing the level of closures after the financial crisis and dotcom bust. The downturn is hitting the largely healthy US labour market — the retail industry has lost an average of 9,000 jobs a month this year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, compared with average monthly job gains of 17,000 last year.

The dramatic flurry of retail stores construction in the US has been a major contributor to this disruption,

PwC estimates that there is about 24 sq ft of retailing floorspace per person in the US, compared with 11 sq ft in Australia — the only other developed country that comes close to the US — and between 2 and 5 sq ft in Europe.

Amazon with less that 10% of US retail sales forms nearly 40% of US retailing valuations, 

The online giant’s shares are now worth $477bn, more than half as much as the rest of the listed US retailing world... Online-only purchases account for just over 10 per cent of all US retail sales, but the share is growing quickly.

And this is true not just of retail, but also in hotel and travel industry,

Priceline and Expedia are now valued at a combined $114bn, almost as much as all the hotels and hospitality groups in the S&P 500, or the airlines.

On labour intensity in retail, this is a stunning statistic,

Goldman Sachs estimates that ecommerce companies only require 0.9 employees per $1m of sales compared with 3.5 for a bricks-and-mortar store, and the sector is on course to lose about 100,000 jobs this year. This may be small compared with the overall retail economy — which employs almost 16m — but it is likely only the beginning of a broad, accelerating trend as even more shopping migrates online.

I have three observations.

1. One of the things that we tend to assume with development and economic growth is that it is always good and brings progress. In the long-run, or the general equilibrium, adjustments are made and losers compensated, it is assumed. However, there is little basis for this assumption. It is a faith-based argument. As Tyler Cowen has written recently, the pain and suffering associated with Industrial Revolution, was far from transient and tolerable. And unlike the 1700s, such adjustments are most likely to be even less acceptable. 

In general, there is nothing to suggest why automation should be accompanied by all the required labour market adjustments. In fact, what if in the future there are less human beings engaged in the work-force? There is no sound basis for the optimism of the techno-optimists. 

In the circumstances, being more cautious with the wholesale adoption of unqualified automation, even if it appears against progress, may not be that bad an idea. Public policy may need to more specifically explore the options to protect and keep meaningfully engaged those most vulnerable to labour market displacement from such trends. If we can exercise restraint on human cloning, we can as well be cautious on the adoption of driverless cars.

2. There is nothing to support the belief that economic growth of this generation and a couple earlier is the natural order of things. It is well-acknowledged that the growth spurt since the late nineteenth-century has not only been unprecedented but also outside the norm for centuries of human existence, and there is therefore nothing to suggest that it should continue. 

In fact, an empirical assessment points to a secular trend of stagnating incomes across the developed world. The Times points to an MGI analysis of 2016 that found 81% of the US, 97% of Italian, 70% of British, and 63% of French populations fall in an income bracket with flat or declining incomes over the last decade.

A world where economic growth is just enough to sustain living standards, while difficult to accept for our generation, should not signal doom. On a historic sweep, even if we are able to sustain the current living standards, with marginal and very gradual increases, it may be a big achievement. The far less desirable, but more likely eventuality (than another century of growth similar to the past century), is a decline in living standards.

3. Finally, this raises more questions about the sustainability of free-market capitalism. What if the inexorable dynamic of the market forces playing themselves out is a world without adequate work to support the billions and results in meaningless lives and pitiable suffering? On a 40-50 year horizon, I see no reason why this scenario is any less less plausible than the widely accepted argument that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" will eventually end up in an centralised and authoritarian system like in the Stalinist Soviet Union.

Update 1 (25.07.2017)

This - India won't allow driverless cars - is good public policy! 

Is Reliance Jio the biggest product launch ever?

Reliance Jio, the telecommunications service offering of Reliance Industries, has courted controversy with its aggressive launch and pricing strategy. But that controversy aside, the scale of its launch has been truly spectacular. Consider this,

Reliance Jio launched its 4G service commercially on September 5, 2016 offering free data and voice services. It crossed 50 million subscribers in just a matter of 83 days, and 100 million in 170 days, having added an average 6 lakh subscribers per day.

Even when compared to anything the Chinese have done across sectors, this is something truly staggering. And to have done it without the technical and logistical glitches associated with product launches  and project roll-outs in such scale is a massive achievement. To have managed the logistics of customer acquisition and the challenge of the explosive load growth on technology systems is very impressive. 

And, it appears that there is more to come,

JioPhone, a 4G VoLTE feature phone called ‘India ka Smartphone’... is a feature phone, but with a larger screen, access to apps and of course 4G data and 4G VoLTE calls and will effectively cost the customer Rs 0 for the device and Rs 153 per month as monthly tariff... The target is to make 5 million phones available every week. The JioPhone will always have free voice calls. From August 15, the JioPhone will come with free unlimited data. A similar quantity of data on any other operator’s network would cost up to Rs 5000 a month... The phone has been created by Indian engineers for an Indian audience, Mukesh Ambani said, “made in India for Indian users”. The phone will offer an innovative cable link to television to help users view content on a big screen at home. Users will need to buy the Jio Dhan Dhana Dhan package of Rs 309 to get the extra data needed for this. The phone also responds to voice commands, which is unprecedented for a feature phone anywhere in the world.

It begs the question whether the Jio is the most accomplished launch of any technical product or solution by public or private sector across the world?

The plumbing of third party audits

This study of third party audits of polluting industrial units in Gujarat is highly acclaimed. It claims to provide evidence that independent third-party audits are effective at reducing environmental pollution.

In brief, in response to a High Court directive, certain types of highly polluting industrial units in Gujarat had commissioned and had been filing thrice-a-year third party audit reports since 1996. Instead of being paid by the firms themselves, once the auditor payments were made from a central pool (money raised by researchers) and audits conducted randomly, there was a significant increase in reporting of pollution readings and reduction in actual pollution itself. In order to strengthen their theory of change, the J-PAL researchers also conducted explicitly announced random sample back-check super audits of each auditor and their payments were made contingent on the accuracy of the original audits (compared to the back-check super audits).

Similar third-party audits of polluting industries are being done by some states, either directly or through outsourced management of emission/effluent discharge sensors. In the circumstances, I struggle to understand the likely incremental benefits of an RCT evaluation of third party audits to monitor pollution. Of course, third party audits will reduce pollution. And perceptive environmental protection officials across states are aware of its utility. 

So, did the research provide anything that was valuable for real world life? In the real-world of weak state capacity, effective management of third-party audits itself is a massive task. The back-check super audits make the task even more onerous. Since the back-checks were conducted under the supervision of enthusiastic and committed research associates, were known to the industries, and auditor payments were made contingent on original audits tallying with the super audits, the original audits could not but not have become high stakes and thereby also high quality. The RCT established the efficacy of this particular double-audit design.

Unfortunately, such a two-level audit, which achieves both high stakes and high quality in this manner, while desirable, is too engagement intensive to stand a chance of effective scale up through weak public systems. If instead the research had proved the efficacy of one-level audits, that would have been of at least some practical value (maybe a technical rationale for an interested bureaucrat to push through the reform).

Like with this, I am puzzled by such research endeavours and the attention that it commands in the academic arena. Third party audits or certifications are today common place in monitoring everything from engineering works to the quality of goods procured and services delivered. In countries like India, over the last decade or so, third party quality audits, ostensibly of random samples and carried out unannounced, have come to be embraced for engineering works executed by all departments, big and small, urban and rural. It has undoubtedly contributed to improving the quality of these works, and where done well the benefits are very significant. 

If the authors were interested in showing that how the auditors are paid shape incentives, they need not have taken the trouble since there is a rich body of literature on the problems with ratings shopping by financial institutions. 

The researchers found at least two channels of incentive distortion with the earlier approach. One, an agency problem arising from the auditors being paid by the audited. Two, the auditors being paid significantly less than would have been required to conducted good audits. 

It is difficult to believe that the Gujarat Pollution Control Board (PCB) did not know what was going on. I can think of at least four first-order plumbing reasons why the PCB preferred to go along with the charade than adopt what were obvious (if atleast because they were being done in other sectors) reforms. One, these reports were being generated at the instance of the High Court and being reported to them. As long as the Court was happy, there was no reason nor inherent motivation for the PCB to change the system. Such pro-forma compliance with regulatory requirements is commonplace in bureaucracies. Two, if the government decided to do the audits, there was the question of who would pay for it, not to mention the “headache” of managing this additional administrative responsibility. Three, there are strong vested interests among the polluting industries that prefer the status quo. And regulatory capture, especially in such high stakes sectors (the difference between business as usual and pollution compliance for these firms is in many cases a matter of survival itself), is always imminent. Four, whether we like it or not, pollution control is a marginal concern for most state governments as they chase economic growth and job creation. To this extent, officials posted in such Departments are unlikely to be those with the greatest interest and enthusiasm to pursue painstaking reforms.

The issues of relevance for practitioners with third party audits are more in the plumbing. There at least a few that come to mind immediately. What should be the most cost-effective design of third party audits? What can be done to mitigate the risk of capture of such audits? How can the audits respond to dynamic expectations? And, how can the audits be financed?

In case of an engineering work, the most cost-effective design would focus on the least number of samples with the longest periodicity that would not compromise on deterrence. As regards addressing capture, inspections may not only have to be random but also done by personnel on rotation, and the agencies themselves may have to be shuffled periodically or multiple agencies employed. As to dynamic expectations, it may be necessary to periodically revisit the audit criteria and calibrate for the adaptations. On financing, it may be required for the PCBs to commission and finance the audits and, maybe, recover a part of the cost as a user-fee (or from the fines collected, though it could have perverse incentives) paid into a common pool. 

Ultimately what the practitioner needs is an administratively simple and workable third-party audit design. Or more specifically, he or she would want a tender document that captures these design specifications. The aforesaid research does not provide anything of relevance on this. 

Let me be clear that the purpose of this or an earlier post is not to downplay the importance of field experiments or economics research in such areas. They have undoubted value. Research, even without out a utilitarian dimension, is valuable. At the least, it provides some basis for a government official sitting on the fence to bite the bullet with independent and/or random sampled audits. 

Readers should note that there is nothing Gujarat or even India-specific to the plumbing issues. They are universal to any developing country with weak state capacity. So many of the plumbing features that could have been tested are generalisable. An opportunity has been missed, and more worryingly, we may not even be aware that these are the real challenges. 

These posts are motivated by my strong belief that field research rarely ever start with a felt-need or felt-problem for the primary stakeholder, most often government officials. While there are also practical difficulties, inadequate comprehension of the real plumbing challenges among researchers is the bigger obstacle to engaging directly with the problem. It does appear that, contrary to this, the best plumbers, outside of actual plumbers, are the practitioners themselves. Plumbing knowledge is a lived experience.

Thoughts on urban governance reforms

The issue of direct elections to the post of Mayor is a recurrent theme in Indian politics. A good status report is here. 

My preference is for directly elected and empowered executive Mayor, with a Council, and assisted by a Commissioner or Secretary, coupled with a few other reforms. 

But the case for a directly elected Mayor is complicated by the likelihood of political stalemate arising from a Mayor and Corporation being from different parties. Hence the argument for an indirectly elected Mayor. But this, in turn, has its flip side. 

The effectiveness of a Mayoral system comes from it throwing up ambitious and incentive aligned Mayors (who see the Mayoral system as a primary for bigger political offices). This is unlikely to emerge from an indirectly elected Mayoral system. As an example, just see this - Kolkata Mayor getting nominated from among the Councillors by the CM (which CM would nominate a powerful person?). In simple terms, an indirectly elected Mayor while addressing the political stalemate problem, weakens the fundamental premise of a Mayoral system - a powerful and incentive aligned Mayor! Only a directly elected Mayor can address that.

We also need to keep in mind that different combinations of Mayoral systems have been tried out in different cities, even in Mumbai. We need to learn from them and be clear as to what is different now that would increase the likelihood that this time will be different. I will suggest at least three things.  

One, a Mayoral-Council cannot by itself be effective without some complementary levers. At the least, assuming a level of delegation of functions under 74th amendment and powers from the State Government, most of the executive powers of the Commissioner should be transferred to the Mayor, and of the Standing Committee to the Council. This should complement further devolution of powers under the 74th amendment. 

Two, there is a need to address the likelihood of political stalemates. One way of partially achieving that, done elsewhere in the West, is to have smaller boroughs (executively administered or through political councils) that have all the daily administrative powers in functional areas like sanitation, management of utility services, tax assessments, building permissions etc. Those Mayors largely deal with broad functional areas like transportation, housing, and economic growth which require city-wide planning and co-ordination. 

Appropriate division of responsibilities between the Mayor/Council and Ward Committees can help mitigate some of the political stalemate risks. The Ward Committees would have all the responsibilities and power over basic municipal functions. Mayor and Council will have policy making and planning powers and control over sectors like housing, transportation, and growth. Financial sanctioning powers will have to be distributed among Corporation, Mayor-in-Council, Mayor, Commissioner/Secretary, and Ward Committee. The Ward Committee will be serviced by an Assistant Commissioner or some such level official and supported by a small Secretariat. The cutting-edge functionaries would be accountable to the Ward Committee. It may be worthwhile re-considering the sizes of current wards or consolidating 4-6 wards under a functional unit like borough (Kolkata has 16 boroughs and 144 wards). 

Three, try this out in a 4-5 second and third tier cities for a five year term and assess what changes need to be made, especially in terms of the functional responsibilities of each level (so as to increase functional efficiency and accountability) as well as capacity requirements for Ward Committees. There should be simultaneous movement towards ring-fencing and corporatisation of at least the utilities. 

To summarise

1. Directly elected Mayor and nominated Mayor-in-Council (from among elected Councillors) for a term of five years
2. Executive power with Mayor 
3. Commissioner to be Secretary to the Corporation
4. Delegation of all basic municipal functional responsibilities to Ward Committees - a Secretariat to administer basic functional activities
5. Mayor and Council's responsibilities to be confined to transportation, housing, and economic growth, and planning and policy support on other functional areas. 
6. Delegation of financial powers among different levels

Policing is hard - a bit of humility would be great!

I really cannot understand the purpose of this oped. Abhijit Banerjee points to the increased use of breathalysers (tools) and introduction of higher fines (laws) as essential in the fight against drunken driving. This, he says, has to be complemented with a strategy of vehicle checks at randomly decided locations using dedicated teams of police drawn from the reserves.  

But there is nothing new about this "strategy" that Banerjee claims to have figured out with an RCT. In fact, it is exactly this "strategy" that police superintendents and commissioners resort to for short periods when something (usually a high-profile accident or a court directive) precipitates greater vigilance on drunken driving. And some of the more enterprising police leaders with interest in traffic issues too adopt randomised checking locations strategy. The problem is that these things cannot go beyond short periods. Coincidentally, they are also exactly the same "strategies" than new entrants and popularity seeking police leaders embrace. 

Take the issue of random locations. While, from the outside, allocating random locations may appear an algorithmic exercise, it is far from that when operationalised in scale. A combination of closing ranks by powerful and entrenched interests and systems with very weak institutional capacity at field (read police station) levels mean that such strategies are easily sabotaged, unless there is a strong enough leader micro-managing the process. As an example, random third party quality checks of engineering works under construction, now passe, has become completely captured in many jurisdictions. As to reserves, their deputation beyond a few days, is by definition, impossible. In a heavily under-staffed police force overburdened with crowd and VIP events management responsibilities (bandobasth), reserves, are that only in name. 

In fact, the optimism with even with the first two may be misplaced. The challenge, as Esther Duflo pointed out in other contexts, is with the plumbing. We need to understand the evidentiary standard for a legal offence of drunken driving. For example, in order to limit discretionary excesses, the law (regulations issued on the central Act in different states) mandate that breathalyser tests have to be carried out in the presence of a police personnel above a certain rank. And over-burdened policy administrations have too few personnel of such rank to spare for any traffic responsibilities, much less for night-time drunken driving patrols. But delegating this responsibility raises its set of problems.

Actually, I can unpack several plumbing layers which can make the challenge even more daunting. But this is sufficient for our purpose. 

The article itself is drawn from this research paper which conducted RCTs covering 162 police stations in Rajasthan covering five management interventions - limitations of arbitrary transfers, rotation of duty assignments and days off, increased community involvement, on-duty training, and "decoy" visits by field officers posing as citizens. It found the first three "which would have reduced middle managers' autonomy, were poorly implemented and ineffective", while the last two had "robust impacts". Based on these findings, the researchers found "very large outcomes" from an intervention that linked "good performance" on sobriety tests without relying on middle managers to  the "promise of a transfer from the reserve barracks to a desirable police station posting".

The paper's headline finding is plain misleading, maybe even dangerously populist,

The experimental results in this paper show that it is possible to affect the behavior of the police in a relatively short period of time, using a simple and affordable set of interventions.

If only it were possible to easily replicate a sanitised pilot! So what do the authors conclude,

It is striking that two of the three most clearly successful interventions had never been advocated by the many police Reform Commissions or in the discussions we had with the police top brass despite the motivation for reform and support of the top administration. In contrast, the interventions that failed to work were all carefully selected by the police leadership, partly based on the recommendations of various Police Reform Commissions, who among them combine a huge amount of experience and expertise. These senior police officers also did not lack human capital, being selected through an extraordinarily competitive set of exams. Yet they had clearly substantially underappreciated the difficulty of implementing these interventions even with their full backing, suggesting that they did not fully realize the nature of the informal authority enjoyed by the station chiefs.

And this,

We see the relatively poor performance of police force interventions as evidence against the view that the managers know how to translate the general principles of management into solutions that are relevant for their organization. The managers in this case were the elite of the Indian police, with decades of experience and who were motivated enough, among other things, to engage with us to launch this reform program. They had a clear and articulated understanding of the principles that motivated the interventions and they were recognized as outstanding leaders. However, none of that could guarantee that they would automatically hone in on all the right interventions. And while they clearly shared the view that incentives, as a general principle, are important, they could not see a way to introduce them within the political and administrative constraints, until we intervened as pseudo-consultants. What do outsiders, with less institutional knowledge and experience, provide in these situations...

Really! This is staggering hubris, even if borne out of ignorance.

Let us examine the six (five plus one) "strategies" that the researchers have explored. "On-duty trainings" are a staple of any administrative system. The problem is just that the trainings do not get translated into meaningful enough learning or internalisation, even when done on the right set of issues and by outsider consultants. "Decoy" visits by field officers is more a figment of juvenile imaginations from stories of kings visiting their kingdom in disguise to obtain citizens' feedback than an institutional solution. In fact, if at all police leaders want better feedback, instead of hiring decoys, they should hire the services of third party agencies (and manage it well) or randomly solicit telephone feedback through call centres from people who have just interfaced with the police system.

Good police superintendents and commissioners (is actually true of managers at any level) do not require fancy "decoys" to quickly figure out more or less what is going wrong and who among their officers can be trusted. The practical difficulty of identifying and managing the activities of decoys is immense. Instead of trying to improve the effectiveness of their institutionalised intelligence wings, sending out "decoys" is exactly what populists and band-aiders would suggest. Finally, the researchers would not even be able to imagine the ways in which such "decoys" can end up creating an even bigger problem for the police force.

Take the case of the last intervention, linking transfers to good performance. Again plumbing is the challenge, which the researchers have unsurprisingly glossed over. 

For a start, drunken driving enforcement would hardly figure among the top-ten priorities of the mainstream police force, leave aside of the reserve force. And their (reservists) main bandobasth activities are not amenable to quantitative assessments of individual policemen. Second, how sustainable is a policy that explicitly seek to reward some policemen with transfers to "desirable" places (for whatever "good performance") and penalise some others (the natural corollary) by drafting them to reserves? 

Third the moment we start linking incentives to quantitative performance indicators in detecting drunken driving, it is only time before we get into targets and slip down an undesirable slope. Four what is the sustainability of an administrative process where there is no involvement of middle-managers? Ultimately managers at some level have to be managing this institutionally. Even assuming that level exists outside the "middle-managers", are we any less likely to have concerns with them? And is it even practical to think about such administrative stuff without the involvement of middle managers? Finally, it is far from true that "evaluation generated evidence and information is not typically available to the police leadership". "Evidence", of a far more sweeping breadth and with more than the requisite credibility and rigour, in large measure, is available, to police leaders who keep their eyes and ears open. No amount of careful evidence generation can get you beyond a few baby steps in your endeavour to effectively manage large systems. 

The authors of the Reform Commission reports, in contrast to academic researchers, are life-long plumbers, who, with varying degrees of success (or failures), have grappled with the plumbing challenges of policing in the real world. They were spot on with the three recommendations, which, however you look at police reforms, cannot but not be a part of any end-stage that Rajasthan Police would hope to achieve with police reforms. In fact, they are essential plumbing necessities in any administrative system, all of which can be very logically established (not being done here because of lack of space). In contrast, the three researchers' solutions, as discussed above, suffer from serious practical deficiencies. The Reform Commissions refrained from such band-aid recommendations because they were responsible and honest (apart from not being ignorant) to not do so.

Instead of suggesting solutions that help improve institutions and systems that are at the cutting-edge of policing activities, the researchers end up recommending piece-meal and unsustainable solutions. The objective, for example, should have been to improve policing outcomes by enhancing accountability of middle managers and enhancing the quality of intelligence from institutional channels, instead of hiring decoys and dispensing with middle managers.

This example is teachable in many respects. Abhijit Banerjee acknowledges the importance of  the so called inputs and regulations - breathalysers and prohibitive enough punishment as critical deterrents. But he also points to the role of complementary factors (strategy) to the success. 

It is in the same vein that we should see other input and regulation prescriptions in cases of education, health care, nutrition, state capacity and so on. Everywhere inputs and regulations are critical requirements to even get to the starting point. While they are necessary, they are not sufficient. Complementary levers of implementation as essential.

I have written about this many times earlier and let me repeat it. Performance incentives that involve large enough financial rewards or transfers are unlikely to work in scale in weak public systems like in India. After all where does it work in even developed systems? For a start, several plumbing challenges, mostly related to weak state capacity and the socio-political environment, increases the likelihood of an even more inefficient general equilibrium. Second, quantifying outcomes in a credible manner is deeply problematic, and collecting and managing it even more so, in most contexts. Third, financial incentives most likely end up becoming entitlements, thereby worsening the problem of already high lower level government salaries. Finally, transfers are among the highest stake administrative actions, and when done in environments where rank ordered "good performance" cannot be credibly and indisputably established is a recipe for controversies.

Let me state this and I would be happy to be refuted by practitioners from the police bureaucracy. There are no innovations, either great ideas or process re-engineering or even management theories, that can dramatically improve policing outcomes in conditions of acute systemic and leadership weaknesses. Wherever police systems work well, it is more likely a combination of functional administrative capacity and good leadership. The intensity of the latter can even temporarily mask deficiencies in the former. It is for this reason that we keep hearing stories of poorly run administrations suddenly becoming efficient with the arrival of a good Police Commissioner.

In economists' speak, the production function for good policing outcomes is largely these two. Innovations most often can work at the margins to improve administrative capacity and free up leadership energies for productive use elsewhere. But in really weak systems, as we have here, leadership is necessary to both generate short-term good outcomes and build long-term institutional capacity.

That this paper got through a peer-review is a reflection of how badly disconnected the real world of experimental economics is despite at least some economists' claims to being superior plumbers. These are thoughtful economists who swear by the general equilibrium. But that, in turn, requires deep plumbing knowledge. Not exactly their forte, despite claims to the contrary. 

India labour market graphic of the day

In the absence of reliable data, India's labour market assessments are mostly speculative exercises. In that context, a new MGI report tries to tease out some inferences. This assessment of the changes in the labour market for the 2011-15 period drawn from the annual survey of the Labour Bureau is instructive.

The report points to three broad areas of job creation - public investments in infrastructure; advances in automation and its impact on IT and BPO sectors; and independent work and micro-entrepreneurship driven by the new digital ecosystems. 

Mobile phones manufacturing and industrial policy

FT has this graphic that shows the composition of mobile phones manufacturers in India, the world's second biggest smart phone market.

Four of the top five smart phone sellers today are Chinese, an inversion of the market position till recently. The good thing with the "Make in India" push has been this,

The proportion of locally assembled phones jumped from 30 per cent in 2014 to 80 per cent by early 2016, estimates Bipin Sapra, a partner at Ernst & Young.

Smart industrial policy has helped,

Over the past 18 months, the government has rolled out supplementary import duties to incentivise the domestic manufacturing of components — focusing initially on simple parts with low investment requirements. February’s budget extended this policy to printed circuit boards, a key component that lies at the heart of every smartphone... The new measures are also convincing foreign groups to deepen their manufacturing work in India, says Manu Kumar Jain, country head for Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi... Today, more than 95 per cent of Xiaomi phones sold in India are made at local facilities run for it by the Taiwanese contract manufacturer Foxconn, helping it to achieve Indian smartphone sales second only to Samsung during the final quarter of 2016.

But the concern,

For many phones in India, Nitin Kunkolienker, vice-president of the industry lobby group MAIT says, “local value addition is not more than 2 or 3 per cent”, with some producers putting together Chinese kits imported in near-complete form. “It’s just screwdriver technology,” he says.

The only surprising thing is that it is the FT, which is implicitly endorsing more industrial policy,

But this growth was driven... largely by a “differential duty” structure that pushed up the cost of imports relative to domestically assembled phones. This has now been superseded by India’s landmark, all-encompassing goods and services tax that came into force at midnight last Friday. From now on, according to policy announced so far, an effective tax of 12 per cent will apply to imported and locally assembled phones alike. The government calmed fears in the small hours of Saturday morning, announcing a 10 per cent duty on imported phones that will maintain the fiscal incentive to produce onshore... But by maintaining — and strengthening — a differential duty regime on imported products, the government can push foreign groups to do more of their manufacturing in India, while eroding the advantages that they enjoy over local brands from their huge international operations, argues Shubhajit Sen, marketing head for Micromax.

Examining agriculture in India

Very good analysis of India's agriculture system by Ram Kaundinya. I have always struggled with a outlining a satisfactory enough pathway to agricultural sector reforms. Here is only the latest attempt. 

As a context, about 130-140 m farmers cultivate around 175 m hectares of land, of which over 60% is unirrigated and rely on erratic monsoons. Mechanization is limited and with perhaps not much (though not non-trivial) potential given the small and fragmented holdings. Farming is therefore not very productive and largely subsistence. A vast and entrenched intermediary network coupled with lack of storage infrastructure means that most of farm production is sold immediately at farm gate at lower prices in a post-harvest buyers market. Cropping patterns have been shifting, with riskier and more infrastructure dependent horticulture crop production recently exceeding food grains. 

Given the aforementioned context, I see two major market failures. 

1. Price signals are distorted by information and access barriers as well as intermediation layers. This means that the fundamental requirement for price transmission and resultant supply-demand balance is vitiated. The result is price gouging when crop fails and price collapses after good harvest. Given the role of global factors, price shocks, both positive and negative, are increasingly common.

2. Markets do not offer affordable instruments to hedge against the two biggest risks - weather-related events and price-shocks - which are both much higher than for most other major livelihoods. Such hedges are costly, inaccessible, and under-supplied. 

This is compounded by the farmer's incapacity and cultural and psychological reluctance to respond swiftly to emergent information signals. And exacerbated by backward looking and reactive policy responses (the bigger increase in the Minimum Support Price for pulses and lower for cotton). 

So what can public policy do? Some very general thoughts. The minimum would be to increase public investments in research and infrastructure - higher yielding varieties, irrigation facilities on an outcomes (irrigation potential actually realised) focused approach, storage facilities etc - and ease regulatory barriers - effective implementation of the APMC Act etc. Others would involve catalysis of markets in affordable access to upstream and downstream linkages, mechanisation (custom hiring centers etc), information flows, provision of credit, and so on. All these would require persistent and long-drawn work, not exactly the sort of activities a weak state is good at. 

The more difficult ones involve de-risking agricultural activity and addressing the issue of property rights. There are no satisfactory answers in either case and the risk of moral hazard, with the former, is significant. We should strive to develop crop insurance as the primary risk-mitigation tool (away from an MSP) over a 10-15 year period. But in the short-run, some form of price support, including for some horticulture crops, may be unavoidable. On the latter, an even more difficult challenge, we should seek to clean/update land records and develop a practical regime for ownership and tenancy rights.

Premature de-industrialisation - Ethiopian edition

Consider this. Ethiopia may perhaps be the only economy which has grown at 11% a year since 2005. It has often been held up as a poster child of the new face of Africa, attracting big-brand FDI into its manufacturing sector, especially textiles and shoes. And its several advantages make it best placed for sustaining this growth.

It is one of the poorest countries, even in Africa, and therefore naturally with a very high catch-up potential. Its relative political stability, stronger bureaucracy, and very low wages make it a very attractive investment destination in Africa as well as provide an opportunity to increase its industrial base. And  manufacturing's share of GDP is lowest among all sub-Saharan African countries, with the average being 10.6%. 

But surprisingly, despite the very low base and wages, relatively favourable conditions, and the sustained very high economic growth rates, manufacturing value add has continued to decline steeply. 

In fact, during the decade when the economy grew at 10% annually, the manufacturing's share of GDP fell from over 6% in 2005 to 4.1% in 2015, well below the peak of 7.8% in 1997!

Some thoughts on promotion of entrepreneurship

Here is the challenge with entrepreneurship. India has too many of the wrong type of subsistence entrepreneurs, micro-entrepreneurs in the informal sector, and too little of the right kind of job creating entrepreneurs, small entrepreneurs in the formal sector.

Ejaz Ghani et al define entrepreneurship as presence of formal establishments which are less than 3 years old, measured in terms of number of such establishments per 1000 workers in formal sector. Evidence shows that jobs get created when firms which start small and formal, grow into medium sized ones. Accordingly, areas (both at state and sub-state region levels) with high levels of new enterprises have been found to generate higher employment growth. Further, as Andrei Shleifer and Rafael La Porta have argued “informal firms stay permanently informal, they hire informal workers for cash, buy their inputs for cash, and sell their products for cash, they are extremely unproductive, and they are unlikely to benefit much from becoming formal”.

This means that the primary objective should be to promote the establishment of formal small enterprises, instead of trying to move informal firms to formality. 

In India, the two most consistent factors that predict overall formal entrepreneurship, in both manufacturing and services, are local education levels and the quality of local physical infrastructure. These relationships have been found much stronger in India than in the US. Liberalized labour regulations and household banking quality in the districts concerned are also important predictors. Further, in manufacturing, agglomeration economies (Chinitz effect) in the district arising from supportive incumbent industrial structures for input and output markets (common labour needs or have customer-supplier relationships with the city's incumbent businesses) too contribute to new entrepreneurship. 

Despite these correlations, even in case of developed economies, identification of policy levers that drive entrepreneurship and incubation of new enterprises has proven elusive. The mainstream discussion on entrepreneurship focus on three types of policies – trainings, clusters, and deregulations. However, there is little evidence that entrepreneurship trainings work or economic clusters materially increase the level of overall entrepreneurship within a city. In fact, there is no example of validated successes with entrepreneurship training anywhere in the world, developed or developing. Though deregulation has not been found to increase entrepreneurship, it is likely that excessive regulation may prevent the growth of firms.

So, what are the policy responses available? A first order takeaway may be to eschew policies that seek to create entrepreneurs or directly promote entrepreneurship. Also avoid too much focus on trying to roll back informal sector. 

Instead focus on creation of conditions for enterprise entry and growth. These conditions can be divided into two broad categories – physical and enabling. 

The former involves improvements in infrastructure, access to credit and skilled labour at competitive terms etc. Unfortunately, there is limited progress possible in the short-run and only so much that can be done even in the medium-term. 

This leaves us with the latter as the focus of all policy action. They involve broadly business development and enabling regulatory environment. Numerous studies have shown that productivity can be improved by 25-35% by merely introducing simple management practices like monitoring, setting targets, personnel incentives, inventory management etc. Such business development services should become quasi-public goods, to be subsidized by governments. This should be complemented with regulatory enablers. Deregulation, limiting interface with government, extensive use of IT work-flow automation, and so on are some possible steps in this direction.

The life-cycle benefits of early childhood education programs

The latest evidence in favour of the benefits of early childhood education programs come from Jorge Luis Garcia, James Heckman, Duncan Ermini Leaf, and Maria Jose Prados. In a new paper that combines experimental and non-experimental data from the US in a very large cohort of ages from zero to mid-thirties, they estimate the life-cycle benefits of early childhood education programs using an approach that goes beyond current narrowly focused analyses, 

Our estimates of the internal rate of return (benefit/cost ratio) range from 8.0% to 18.3% (1.52 to 17.40)... Our baseline estimate of the internal rate of return (benefit/cost ratio) is 13.7% (7.3).

The graphic below shows the net present value of the life-cycle cost-benefit gains over control, in terms of increases in own labour income (from 21 to retirement), incomes of parents, gains from reduced crimes, improvements in QALYs, and so on.