Weekend reading links

1. Debashis Basu writes on the shocking level of regulatory failure associated with the NSE scandal. 

2. Some facts about Indian students studying abroad

Currently over 770,000 Indian students are in various countries, and they are spending an estimated $28 billion on tuition and living expenses. Consulting firm RedSeer estimates that by 2024, the number of Indian students abroad would be close to 1.8 million, while their estimated spending abroad would go up to $80 billion.

And this about medical education,

Over 1.6 million students give the NEET examination every year in the hope of getting into a medical college. The number of MBBS seats available in all medical colleges is estimated to be around 83,000. Of these, 44,000-odd are in government colleges, which offer subsidised and generally high-quality education. The rest are in private medical colleges where standards vary widely — but charges are high. A student who opts to join a private medical college may end up shelling out well over Rs 1 crore for the course. On the other hand, in countries like Ukraine, China, Russia, the Philippines, and Kyrzystan, the costs would range from Rs 20 lakh to Rs 45 lakh for the entire course.

It appears that over a 100,000 Indian students are pursuing medical education abroad, including in Bangladesh.

In other words, the demand for medical education is far more than twice the available capacity in the country. 

3. Via Adam Tooze, this is a good post by Susan Su on the dynamics of the global petrodollar market. 

And this on the importance of the petroleum market.

4. Sajjid Chenoy makes the case for calibrated depreciation of rupee to allow for expenditure switching in light of the rising oil prices. 

5. On the rising petroleum prices, Vivek Kaul points to how low prices have allowed government to increase excise tax collections. 

With oil likely to remain elevated for the foreseeable future, it remains to be seen how the government manages the rising prices. 

6. John Mauldin has an illustrative example of the Overton window,

I have often written that I’ve been in the room with senior Fed economists and Nobel laureates privately advocating targeting 4% inflation. Nobody ever said that in public. But Bernanke says 2% and then Yellen and Powell suggest we should run hotter than that to get an average of 2%. Maybe two years ago you would have said 4–5% CPI growth was unacceptable. Now, having just seen a 7.5% year-over-year number, 4% suddenly looks a lot better. That’s what happens when the window widens.

7. Impact of Ukraine war on wheat prices

Wheat prices have risen almost 40 per cent this month. Russia and Ukraine account for just under 30 per cent of global wheat exports, sending the grain to countries in the Middle East, north Africa and Asia.

8. Finally from a FT interview with Claudia Goldin, the Harvard economist who has deeply explored the gender pay gap through longitudinal data,

This data shows that straight after college or graduate school, pay for men and women is very similar. In the first few years of employment, the gaps remain small and are largely explained by different fields of study or occupations. But about 10 years after graduation, things begin to change. Those changes typically set in a year or two after people start their families...

But when we unpack it, it seems pretty clear at this point that there isn’t one wage gap. There are changes over time, and these changes over time indicate that individuals are opting for different paths to accommodate their other desires. These very large divides occur at particular junctures, and these junctures are often the ones concerning partnership or marriage, geographic moves, leaving a school. The point quite clearly is that study after study shows that the biggest differences between men and women, particularly those who have college degrees and beyond, is that women tend to do more on the home front, be the individual who’s on call at home, and men tend not to be the individual on call at home. In terms of the gender pay gap, there’s no question that there’s discrimination, that there are biased managers. There are bad people around. We can talk forever about them. They’re all over the place, and we should get rid of them. But even if we did, even if we were capable of doing that, which is pretty hard, and we spend a lot of resources trying to do that, even if we did that, we would still have this other issue, which is systemic.

She makes the point about "greedy jobs", where salaries are implicitly set assuming long time commitments, where women, with their familial responsibilities tend to fall behind. Unfortunately, most of the higher earning jobs are these greedy jobs, which end up favouring men more than women. This, she says, is the critical contributor to the gender pay gap.