1. India's stock market capitalisation is at a record high.
It's also 3% of the global stock market capitalisation.
2. Instead of rising rapidly in a large and growing economy, India's two-wheeler demand has been on a falling trend.
3. From the latest budget, on the stagnating tax-to-GDP ratio.
4. Truck drivers suffer arguably one of the harshest work conditions. In developing countries like India, they suffer from health problems, familial disruptions, alcohol and other abuses, and so on. The Times has a long read on the harsh conditions faced by truck drivers in the US.
While in developing countries, the absence of choices leaves the market with no dearth of potential truck drivers, in the US, trucking companies suffered a record deficit of 80,000 drivers in the aftermath of the pandemic. The article talks about how deregulation of the trucking industry
Until the 1980s, truck driving was a lucrative pursuit in which one union — the Teamsters — wielded enough power to ensure favorable working conditions, Mr. Viscelli recounts in his book “The Big Rig.” But the Carter administration deregulated the industry in the name of fostering competition, clearing the way for an influx of new trucking companies that diminished pay and increased demands on truckers. The result was an opening for big-box retailers, which harnessed increasingly cheap freight and international trade to stock enormous stores with a vast profusion of wares. Along the way, truck driving was downgraded from a middle-class profession to one best avoided.
5. Lant Pritchett has a blog on a new paper by Justin Sandefur et al on the long-term trends in school attendance and learning quality. This about India,
In India between the birth cohorts of 1958 and 1995 those with 5 or more years of schooling expanded from 36.6 to 77.3 percent. But the likelihood a woman completing just primary school could read, Read@G5 fell from 89.8 percent to 51.4 percent.
This about the very few success stories,
Peru shows a positive picture in both dimensions. In the birth cohort of 1952 71.7 percent of women completed Grade 5 or higher and that rose to 93.7 by the birth cohort of 1992. Similarly, the share of those with Grade 5 complete who could read rose from 69.4 percent to 84.9 percent. In Vietnam between the birth cohort of 1958 and 1994 the fraction with schooling of grade 5 or more increased from 76.7 to 88.7 and Read@G5 rose from 72 to 94.1 percent. Guatemala shows a massive expansion in schooling between the birth cohorts of 1967 and 1994, increasing from 39.6 to 67.3 while the Read@G5 stayed roughly constant at 95 percent.
6. TT Rammohan argues that the government is right to tread cautiously on privatisation. I think he's right.
7. Is nuclear energy industry on a revival?
After the Fukushima nuclear disaster 10 years ago, Germany announced it would shut down all of its nuclear power plants by 2022 and Belgium vowed to close all of its facilities by 2025. However, there has been a wave of renewed interest in nuclear power over the past year. The governments of France, the US, China and India have all recently come out in favour of building new nuclear plants in the years ahead, with French president Emmanuel Macron expected to outline new orders in the coming weeks. Investments in nuclear are expected to total $45bn in 2022 and $46bn in 2023, up from $44bn in 2021, according to analysis by Rystad Energy, with 52 reactors at present under construction in 19 countries worldwide.
This about the stunning costs of nuclear waste disposal,
There is little discussion of the huge costs and complexity of dismantling the plants at the end of their approximately 50-year lifespan. And nobody has yet given a satisfactory answer to the question of what to do with thousands of metric tonnes of high-level nuclear waste, some of which can remain radioactive, and thereby lethal, for up to 300,000 years. A quarter-million metric tonnes of spent fuel rods are believed to be spread across 14 countries worldwide, mostly collected in cooling pools at closed-down nuclear plants, as engineers and waste specialists puzzle over how to dispose of them permanently. Many believe these are sitting ducks for terrorist organisations and that they could potentially cause catastrophic spills or fires. The cost of maintaining these sites can be extraordinary, and last for decades. Sellafield in the UK, for example, contains the largest stock of untreated nuclear waste on earth, including 140 tonnes of plutonium. Though the plant was shut down in 2003, it remains the biggest private employer in Cumbria. More than 10,000 people continue to undertake a colossally expensive clean-up that is expected to take more than 100 years and cost above £90bn.
8. Fascinating extract about Arthur Rock, the pioneer of venture capital industry, from Sebastian Mallaby's new book on the industry. In 1957, Rock financed the "Traitorous eight" who rebelled and left William Shockley's lab at Stanford's Research Park to form a new company, Fairchild Semiconductor, to pursue their interests without the domineering and suffocating presence of Shockley. This was perhaps the first big venture capital deal.
The pivotal moment in Rock’s still-early career arrived in the summer of 1957, in a letter mailed to the New York brokerage where he worked. The sender was Eugene Kleiner, one of the Eight and later himself a venture investor. Because venture capital barely existed at this point, Kleiner and his comrades had not thought of starting a new enterprise. Rather, they asked Rock’s firm to identify an alternative employer — “a company which can supply good management.” Rock understood that the researchers wanted to escape the tyrannical Shockley, the semiconductor inventor whose scientific brilliance was matched only by his prodigious arrogance. Rock also understood that they wanted to keep their team together, believing they could be most inventive as a group. Rather than seeking out a new employer for them, Rock flew to the West Coast and proposed an unexpected alternative.“The way you do this is you start your own company,” he told them. By striking out on their own, the scientists would capture the rewards of their creative wizardry... Rock’s idea shocked the researchers. “We were blown away,” recalled Jay Last. “Arthur pointed out to us that we could start our own company. It was completely foreign to us.”... Rock promised the scientists at least $1 million, an ungodly sum of capital at the time. He also stressed that they would each own shares in their start-up. The scientists duly launched Fairchild, and the results soon proved more raucous, and more glorious, than even Rock had imagined.Rock promised the scientists at least $1 million, an ungodly sum of capital at the time. He also stressed that they would each own shares in their start-up. The scientists duly launched Fairchild, and the results soon proved more raucous, and more glorious, than even Rock had imagined.
The rest is history,
At the formation of the company, Rock had ensured that each of the Eight bought $500 worth of stock. Two years later, Fairchild sold to its main backer, and each founding scientist received $300,000, a bonanza amounting to around 30 years’ salary at the time... By the 21st century, an astonishing 70 percent of the publicly traded tech companies in the Valley could trace their lineage to Fairchild Semiconductor; and every hoodie-wearing innovator owed something to that crucible moment when it raised venture finance...Only a fraction of 1 percent of firms in the United States receive venture-capital backing, yet this tiny minority accounts for fully 47 percent of the nonfinancial companies that do well enough to go public and 76 percent of the market capitalization of these firms. Venture-backed companies have delivered more progress in applied science than any kind of rival: more than centralized corporate research and development units, more than isolated individuals tinkering in garages and more than government attempts to pick technological winners. Studies repeatedly find that start-ups backed by good VCs are more likely to succeed than others.
The problem is that contrary to the tale of smart and foresighted venture capital investors, the reality is that success is more good luck than any skill, especially at the start.
9. Informative article by Arjun Srinivas in Livemint about the struggles of Indian Railways to attract private capital.
10. MGI charts the rising inflation levels in US and Europe.
11. Finally, more reminder that green transition comes with a steep cost. This for a transition to more green shipping fuels like ammonia and methanol.
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