India

Last week, the Economist ran a series of articles on India’s Unique ID program that echoed themes that the Global Assets Project has been writing about for some time. Specifically, as we have argued, the Economist pointed out that delivering public benefits as cash into recipients’ bank accounts, as opposed to via in-kind methods such as grain, would make the Indian government more efficient, prevent corruption and eliminate ghost workers.

“If it could rid itself of gender discrimination, the average developing country would grow at least two percentage points faster each year.”  At least so argues Marcelo Giugale, the World Bank’s Director for Poverty Reduction and Economic Management in Africa, in a recent op-ed that likens the current state of many global economies to one in which “half of all machines [are] misplaced: tractors [are] sent to hospitals, brain scanners to barber shops, hair driers to construction sites, cranes to car factories and crash-test dummies to farms.”

Since its independence in 1947, India has fought dozens of campaigns against four distinct and independent insurgencies on its soil—in Punjab, Kashmir, the Northeast, and the Maoist insurgents of central India—as well as one foreign campaign in Sri Lanka.

In the McKinsey online piece "Mobile money: A game changer for financial inclusion,"  the authors discuss the many successes of Kenya's well-regarded M-pesa, including the remarkable 55 percent increase in access to financial services within the first 3 years of M-pesa's launch. Of course this is good news, but there are other points to consider.

This post originally appeared on the SPINNAKER Network.

Two weeks ago, President Obama announced Congress’s approval of three long-awaited trade deals with Colombia, Panama, and South Korea. They have been both hailed and rejected by the usual suspects, but the debate has centered largely on employment and labor issues. However, there’s also something to say about what these deals mean for financial inclusion, specifically with regards to mobilizing savings for the poor.

This week India's central bank, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) rejected the government’s proposal to allow microfinance institutions to accept small deposits. The plan, outlined in the Microfinance Institutions (Development and Regulation) Bill, permits MFIs to accept savings deposits, an opportunity currently afforded exclusively to formal banks and some non-banking financial companies. In its rejection, the RBI cited apprehension as to the safety of funds deposited with MFIs due to the past year’s unfolding microfinance crisis.

The New America Foundation's National Security Studies Program hosted an on-the-record, invite-only discussion on August 24^th with Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for South and Southeast Asia Robert Scher. The event focused on how the U.S. Department of Defense is building day-to-day relationships that will shape our defense partnership with India in the future, Mr Scher’s remarks focused on people-to-people ties, military exercises and defense sales. The event was moderated by Steve Coll, President of New America Foundation.

Please join the New America Foundation for an invite-only, on-the-record roundtable with the the former Foreign Secretary of India, Amb. Shyam Saran. Amb. Saran and New America President Steve Coll will discuss India’s perspective on current events in South Asia and its vision for the future.

It is widely known that China needs to rebalance its economy to rely more on consumption, but the extent of China’s imbalance between consumption and investment is not fully appreciated.  Comparisons to other emerging markets and countries like Japan, Taiwan, and Korea that pioneered the East Asian growth model show that China’s low levels of consumption are unparalleled.

(please note: technical difficulties prevented recording of the first 10 minutes of the event.)

On Friday, March 11, 2011, the New America Foundation welcomed Rajan Gupta, senior researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory, to speak about regional energy issues in Asia. Two nations now dominate energy markets in the region, China and India, and both have made massive investments in hydrocarbon over the last few years. Dr. Gupta examined the strategic implications of these investments and the competition now under way for resource security.