Category Archives: Economics

Dubai Can Bite Me, Ctd

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We have often had harsh things to say about the treatment of South Asian guest workers in Dubai/UAE in many posts here (for instance), but here is one that hit home for me as an academic.

Syed Ali is an American citizen of Indian descent who teaches sociology at Long Island University. In 2007, he was in Dubai on a Fulbright with his family. One day before he was to leave the country, he got a knock on the door, and five men in white robes and a woman in police uniform asked him to come with them. What followed was a rather bizarre kind of interrogation by the UAE police:

Then the questioning began. Why are you here? Who do you know? He explained that he was a Fulbright scholar, on a grant by the very U.S. government that was the United Arab Emirates’ main strategic partner.

Ali, now 41, was in Dubai researching about second-generation expatriates from South Asia for an academic paper about how professional Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis living in the Persian Gulf were adjusting to life and work far from home, in a place where they could live in for decades but could never gain permanent residency. He was shocked that his line of inquiry would set off alarm bells.

“It ended up I was interviewing people who were quite well off,” he said. “That’s why I was so really stunned. I never had any sense that there was anything objectionable about what I was doing. No one had any serious complaints about being there.”

Yet despite the reams of information they had on him, “there was a lack of basic information that they didn’t get or have or really understand,” said Ali, who wrote about his experiences in Dubai for Britain’s Guardian newspaper. They didn’t seem to get what a Fulbright was. “‘We think you’re working for the ‘Jewish,’ ” one interrogator accused Ali, who is a secular Muslim. “‘Maybe also the CIA.'” (link)

Note that he was researching white collar workers, not the folks working in construction (whose miserable working and living conditions have been amply documented). Eventually they let him go, warning him not to return to the country to do any further research: “The research you are doing is creating divisions in our society and we will not allow it” (See Syed Ali’s original account of his experience here.) They also took his laptop and the IPod he had been using to record interviews. They later returned the computer without its hard disk, and bought him a new IPod instead of returning the old one. So much for the months of research!

Now Syed Ali’s book, Dubai: Gilded Cage is out from Yale University Press. Revenge is a dish best served with coverage in the Chicago Tribune (above), The LA Times, and the Independent.

Maybe someone should mail a copy to Dubai’s secret police: here’s that scurrilous book by the “Jewish” “CIA” agent named … umm… Syed Ali. Continue reading →

Outsourcing Issue Also Not Dead: More Nasty Politicking

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Via DailyKos, I came across this ad, in the current Arkansas Senatorial Primary race. Bill Halter is a Democratic challenger to the sitting Democratic Senator, Blanche Lincoln. The ad is technically sponsored by the Arkansas Chamber of Congress, not Blanche Lincoln’s campaign.

You thought it was dead, didn’t you? Nope, the “our jobs are going to India” bogie is also still alive and well in American politics.

According to Kos, the backstory is that Halter was once on the Board of Directors of a firm called WebMethods Inc., which had opened an office in Bangalore some years ago, though there’s no evidence that the opening of that office actually cost any American jobs. This type of ad is a bad precedent, since it basically puts anyone who has run a high-tech company or a financial services company at risk of attack.

The ad is also clearly a form of “race-baiting” — a cousin of the nasty kind of racial attack ad that would prominently feature some sort of threatening black person (sometimes a criminal) to scare white voters. But apparently it’s not Willie Horton with which these folks are trying to scare people in Arkansas, it’s smiling middle-class people in Bangalore!

Here’s Bill Halter’s website. Continue reading →

Should Indians worry about this scary infographic?

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Yes. I think so. They should be absolutely terrified by what it implies

According to this graphic, India is doing pretty well in avoiding packaged food (but also eating a lot less total food…not always by choice) relative to America and some other western cultures. Yet here is the inescapable fact about where India is headed (and China as well):

After an extensive nationwide survey, China has more than doubled the estimate of its diabetic people to 92.4 million from 43.2 million in 2009, thus replacing India as the country with the maximum number of diabetics in the world.

India has 50.8 million people with diabetes.

The China study, published in New England Journal of Medicine on Thursday pushes up the global diabetes estimates from 285 million to 334.2 million.

Diabetes was almost 1.4 times more common among urban residents than rural ones, the study found, sampling 46,239 adults above the age of 20, from 14 provinces and municipalities.

“The ageing of the population, urbanisation, nutritional changes and decreasing levels of physical activity, with a consequent epidemic of obesity, have probably contributed to the rapid increase in the diabetes burden in the Chinese population,” wrote Yang Wenying, head of endocrinology, at the China-Japan Friendship Hospital in Beijing, who carried out the study between June 2007 and May 2008. [Link]

We Americans are likely to continue to export our food culture around the world. Or rather, countries like India and China will continue to enthusiastically import it and are probably even less equipped than us to deal with the repercussions.

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Timothy Geithner’s India trip

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I had no idea until the NYTimes reported it earlier this week that our Treasury Secretary once lived in India:

Geithner was born in New York City but spent most of his childhood in other countries, including present-day Zimbabwe, Zambia, India and Thailand where he completed high school at the International School Bangkok. [Link]

Here is a picture of Geithner when he was a kid in India. For the love of…why didn’t some local teach him some cricket??

And while in India, Geithner needed some ironing done. Why can’t we buy those big ol’ irons here? My shirts are never pressed as well as they are in India.

Actually, this man is the local ATM machine. Click on the picture for an explanation

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Some friendly Census competition

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Amardeep has already broached the topic of the U.S. Census in his recent post about question number 9. I’d like to follow up by making an important appeal to all of our readers: PLEASE encourage every South Asian American you know to get this form filled out and turned in as soon as possible. I am serious. When you are at the bar/restaurant/movie this weekend, ask your friends if they have filled it out already. If your mom and dad call and ask how your day was, ask them if they filled it out. Nag. Incessantly. They will all thank you for it later. From the U.S. Constitution:

Clause 3: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons. [Link]

The New York Times recently featured an article about the efforts of the Indian American community in the Richmond Hill neighborhood of New York City:

Kulwinder Singh, a 52-year-old Punjabi Sikh who works as a tow-truck operator, approached a young community organizer who was taping a promotional poster for the 2010 census to a wall inside his temple in Richmond Hill, Queens. Mr. Singh looked perplexed.

“Population count,” the organizer, Herminder Singh, 19, explained in Punjabi, before launching into a detailed explanation of the survey.

The older man listened intently, finally declaring, with a resolve that would warm the heart of any census official: “My family has 10 to 15 members. When the form comes, I’ll fill it out.” [Link]

How about the rest of you?

I wanted to survey the progress thus far in census form return rate from the top 10 U.S. voting districts by South Asian American population. But shockingly, nobody can say with certainty what they are. Maybe they will do that analysis for the 2010 cycle because it seems like something important to know. I have decided to pick 5 U.S. voting districts where I know there are a ton of brown folk. Let’s see what’s up using their really cool interactive map:

Edison, NJ:

Fremont, CA

Continue reading →

India’s Ailing Manufacturing Sector & Unions

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The WSJ has a sobering article on the state of the manufacturing & labor relations in India –

COIMBATORE, India — This ancient city has turned itself in recent years into a manufacturing dynamo emblematic of India’s economic rebirth. But a homicide case playing out in an auto-parts factory here is raising concerns about whether the Indian industrial miracle is hitting a wall of industrial unrest.

“We can’t be a capitalist country that has socialist labor laws“Pricol Ltd., which makes instrument panels for the likes of Toyota Motor Corp. and General Motors Co., was rocked in late September when workers burst into the office of Roy George, its 46-year-old human-resources boss. Angry over a wage freeze, they carried iron rods, witnesses say, and left Mr. George in a pool of blood. Police arrested 50 union members in connection with his death, their lawyer says. Charges haven’t been filed.

The underlying question raised by this story is the size, shape & importance of the manufacturing sector for India’s long term economic development…

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When History Fell In India

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While on the topic of why India didn’t liberalize sooner, an article posted to the SM’s News column points at one important factor. In his “Letter from India” column in the NYT, Akash Kapur reflects on the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall the impact it had on India –

Most of the media coverage has, quite understandably, focused on Europe. But the tremors from Communism’s collapse were felt far beyond the immediate battlegrounds of the Cold War. The breakup of the Soviet Union had a profound impact on India. In many ways, it paved the way for a reinvention of the country

Akash Kapur

While an important socio-political milestone, Kapur notes the equally important intellectual milestone – an event Francis Fukuyama memorably christened The End of History. History in this sense didn’t mean an “end to events” but rather, the (potential) end of a type of dialectical debate about political systems. Continue reading →

What if India had Liberalized Sooner?

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Historical “what-if’s” are notoriously difficult to prove but also notoriously delicious to discuss. Would WWII have happened if Hitler had been killed in the trenches of WWI? [W]ith earlier reform, 14.5 million more children would have survived, 261 million more Indians would have become literate, and 109 million more people would have risen above the poverty line.Would there have been a WWI if Franz Ferdinand survived the assassination attempt? What if Al Gore got his Florida recount? What would have become of Sonam Kapoor’s career if she skipped the flop that was Saawariya?

Arguably, while many of the most famous what-if’s focus on chance events in history, prominent Indian econ journalist Swaminathan Aiyar, writing for the Cato Institute, decided to take on a far more considered, deliberate economic policy “what-if”. He asks “what if India liberalized its economy 10 yrs earlier?” Put differently, what if 1970s India followed the economic path pursued by Korea, Japan, and Taiwan?

Until the 80s/90s rounds of liberalization, India followed a Soviet-inspired economic model resulting in stuff like this –

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Incenting Desi Teachers…

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The good folks over at Marginal Revolution have yet another interesting post about Desi schools. Here at SM, we first touched on this topic when we discussed the incredible outcome differences between government and private schools – even with low income students and often at a much lower total cost per student. A post last week noted one reason for poor performance at government schools – classic public choice economics as absentee teachers discovered how to game the system to maximize their salaries while minimizing risks to their slice of the public trough.

Muralidharan

This week Alex Tabarrok points out a great study that cuts into the economics of teaching from a different angle – teacher incentives. The various teacher incentive options out there broadly work by directly compensating teachers based on tested educational outcomes achieved by their students. If poorly designed, the incentive programs run the risk of over-incenting teachers to mind-numbingly “teach to the test” (alas, even seemingly well intentioned govt policies like No Child Left Behind are often also criticized for the same thing). Still, what well designed systems do is dispel the notion that teachers are just in it for the greater good and – like all other professions – are actually motivated by pocketbook issues as well.

In this study, UCSD researchers Karthik Muralidharan and Venkatesh Sundararaman (with names like that, I suspect they’ll know a thing or 2 about the Desh), describe the results of a carefully crafted, multiyear program conducted in Andhra Pradesh (AP). The results are impressive –

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The Economics of Piracy

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The econ blogosphere is heavily linking a new article in Wired about the economics of Somali piracy. In addition to being a slickly produced piece (including an online game where you can dabble in some “Cutthroat Capitalism” yourself), Wired editor Scott Carney managed to get ahold of a Somali pirate and got unusually candid answers about the $$ and cents of their operation & the details often turn out to be incredibly, well, mundane & rationale.

“Ships with African or Indian crews are never profitable.”Far from fashionable excuses that the pirates are avenging illegal offshore fishing or represent some sort of anti-neo-colonial insurgency, the truth of the matter is a pretty basic risk vs. reward calculation –

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