1. Very informative article in The Economist on infrastructure financing. Two graphics are important. One, private investments in greenfield projects is only a small share of the total.
Two, the global volume of PPPs has been continuously declining.
Renewables makes up 57% of all infrastructure deals globally.
2. Edward Glaeser and James Poterba have a useful paper that summarises a compilation of essays on infrastructure investments in the American context.
3. The dues owed to power generators by discoms rose over 35% to Rs 1.41 trillion in Nov 2020.
4. VC-PE inflows into India grew by 6.6% in 2020 to reach a record $39.2 bn from 814 deals. The increase was largely due to RIL, which alone contributed $27.5 bn! VC inflows fell 13% in value and 16% by volume, to $10.7 bn across 694 deals. Telecoms accounted for $11.2 bn of the total inflows, followed by IT & ITeS at $7.5 bn. In terms of size, there were record flows in the large and early stage deals.
5. From an IBM report authored by Yuen Yuen And on the importance of combining thin and thick datas,
Using big data on parking availability, algorithms automatically adjusted parking prices according to supply and demand—prices rose with high demand and fell with low demand. But drivers did not take full advantage of dynamic pricing. To explore why not, a team of ethnographers spent several weeks in each city observing parking behavior and trying out the parking process themselves. Their research revealed a problem that smart technology had missed: confusing parking signs meant that drivers did not want to park at certain spots, even with lower prices . The easy solution to this unexpected problem was designing clearer parking signs... Although big data enables computational analyses and predictive analytics that exponentially exceed human cognition, they do not diminish or negate the role of human observation and immersion in social settings . In order to leverage big data to improve government services, policymakers can combine it with thick data . Drawing on anthropology and ethnography,— thick data refers to rich qualitative information about users, such as their values, goals, and consumption behavior, obtained by observing or interacting with them in their daily lives. Whereas big data are broad and thin, thick data are narrow and rich—blending them therefore yields a more holistic picture of the problem at hand.
6. In the context of the debate about global manufacturing shifting away from China, Gordon Hanson examines the evidence. He points to three possible pathways - a reallocation of labor-intensive export production to other emerging economies, labor-saving technological change in historically labor-heavy industries, and a relocation of manufacturing production within China. He finds that the first and the third appear to be working slowly and the third not at all.
This graphic points to a decline in India's share in exports of labour intensive products.
7. Indian Express has two good primers on the nature of producer and consumer subsidies involved in agriculture. Udit Misra uses OECD data on agriculture support to show that Indian farmers get the rough end of the stick on terms of agriculture support policies which favour the consumers. This graphic of total producer protection says it all.
The farmers got a negative net support of minus 5% of gross farm receipts, the producer support estimate (PSE), in 2017-19, among the lowest in the world. In contrast, consumers benefited from reduced expenditures through subsidies by 21.4% (Consumer Support Estimate, CSE) on average across all commodities in the same period, among the highest in the world.
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