Arjun Ramani Profile picture
Apr 27, 2024 9 tweets 5 min read Read on X
Excited to share what I've been up to this year!

On the cover of this week's @TheEconomist is a 6-part special report on India’s economy by Tom Easton+me. It asks

- What it would take for India beat 6% growth?
- And is Modi up to the task?

🧵on the key arguments 1/
Image
Image
2/ India is growing at 6-6.5% a yr, slower than China’s heyday of 10%+

But that's still solid. Growth is harder today bc manufacturing is less of a route to riches

India has the world's #5 economy, by 2027 it will be #3. #1 is even plausible by 2070 economist.com/special-report…
Image
3/ What are India’s strengths?

Ch 1 notes the big shift over the past decade has been better infra–physical+digital. Roads+railways are growing fast. Digital payments and electronic forms work.

This reflects Modi’s forte–executing big projects Image
3/ Ch 2+3 continues on India's relative strengths--the financial and corporate sectors

Contra to narratives of crony capitalism, mkt concentration is actually falling in India. Modi favours national champions, but less than you might think economist.com/special-report…
Image
4/ Ch 4 is the tricky trio. It’s well-known that 🇮🇳 is an IT services superpower, but the govt wants it to be a manufacturing power too

There is some success–14% of iPhones are now assembled in India. But corp investment and exports have yet to budge
economist.com/special-report…
Image
5/ Why has🇮🇳struggled to⬆️investment and beat 6% growth?

Historical reforms left state-level red tape on land/labour/power mostly untouched

Mass education remains poor contributing to a weak labour mkt. Strongman govt and rising protectionism don’t help economist.com/special-report…
6/ Our final chapter lays out a reform agenda touching on everything form innovation policy to beefing up city governance

A striking stat: only 15% of Indian govt employees work at the local level vs 60% in 🇨🇳 or 🇺🇸 leading to poor state capacity economist.com/special-report…
7/ The problem is that the needed reform requires buy-in from states and social groups that might lose from change. But Modi’s weakness has been building such a consensus

Our leader argues that must change for India to sustain its rise over the long-term economist.com/leaders/2024/0…
8/ I'm indebted to colleagues, friends and sources who made this report possible.

Read the full report here:

Acknowledgements: economist.com/special-report…
economist.com/special-report…

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Arjun Ramani

Arjun Ramani Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @arjun_ramani3

Feb 4, 2023
NEW in @TheEconomist. Industry labs have driven rapid progress in large-scale AI leading to @OpenAI's ChatGPT. I ask:

1. Why did academia pass the baton to firms?
2. Does Google's LaMDA (which I got access to) or ChatGPT give better dating advice?
3. Where are things headed? 1/
First, industry is leading the way in large-scale AI (though it builds on years of work from academia). Why?

- Training big models is computationally intensive and therefore expensive
- In AI research outputs can rapidly be commercialised (a herald to the era of Bell Labs) 2/
Second, ChatGPT is not the only game in town.

Some Googlers helped me compare ChatGPT and LaMDA (Google's currently-private chatbot model). We asked math and reading questions, and also for some dating advice. Some results below, but in short, ChatGPT faces stiff competition 3/
Read 4 tweets
Jan 14, 2023
New piece in @TheEconomist! An important second-order impact of remote work: Firm “boundaries” are blurring.

Remote work changes the calculus of what to do, and crucially, what not to do. It boosts freelancing, outsourcing and offshoring, just as Coase would predict: 1/
First, skilled jobs are more distributed across geographies, in part reflecting a rise in remote work.

Second, cross-border service exports, including IT services, are booming.

Third, the market for skilled freelancers has doubled since 2018.
Fourth, perhaps most interestingly, as firm's grow in size, and adopt more technologies, their "outsourcing intensity" grows.

This can be seen by looking at what share of a firm's cost of sales is purchased from other firms.
Read 4 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(