Business
McKinsey on Rural Mobile Payments
The McKinsey Quarterly is carrying an article on mobile SMS payments in China and how banks can use this as an excellent opportunity to bring the rural population into the financial mainstream:
Recognizing the need for a new rural payments system, in August 2006 the People’s Bank of China directed domestic banks to devise a solution. China [...]
Economics and Ethics: What they don’t say about Adam Smith
While doing some research, I came across this interesting article (PDF) by Peter Ulrich, professor of business ethics at the University of St. Gallen (HSG) in Switzerland (the premier university for business and management studies in Switzerland). Written as a conversation with Adam Smith, the article brings out fabulously some of the problems with our current thinking [...]
India’s Capital Markets: Deutsche Bank releases paper
Another bank, another paper.
Deutsche Bank Research has released a 16 page report on India’s capital markets. It has a lot of numbers from a lot of places, and may not interest everyone. But it presents some interesting observations on India’s growth and development.
Credit growth has surged at 35% year on year in 2004-05, but financial [...]
Business Nuggets: India Flourishes
India is the flavor of the day on FT’s emerging market section:
Tata Steel has won the bidding war for Anglo-Dutch steel firm Corus (FT.com, BBC reports). The combined company will be the fifth largest in the world:
Britain’s Takeover Panel said Tata had won after offering 608p per share, valuing Corus at £5.75bn ($11.3bn).
This is surprising [...]
CSR in Developing Countries: Advocacy and Strategy
BusinessWeek has a cover story on CSR, Beyond the Green Corporation, suggesting the ethical, responsible corporation is no longer the stuff of fiction. It is very much here and while not mainstream, is certainly a visible minority.
The article may be a bit too optimistic in that prognosis. It rests on restating the same few examples, [...]
Financial Inclusion in India: Trends Beyond Microfinance
I was recently in Bombay visiting a company that provides technology solutions to extend financial services to the poor, specifically to MFI clients of private Indian banks. It does this by providing smart cards for clients and a banking infrastructure for MFIs. The visit offered a perfect opportunity for me to understand the Indian banking [...]
Vaccine Demand Forecasting: Creating Markets and Incentives
The PSD Blog and CGD’s Global Health Policy Blog mention a Scientific American article on the need for and initiatives to forecast the demand for vaccines. The problem this work addresses is what happens in the absence of well-defined markets:
Unpredictable demand creates a three-way catch-22 problem, as pointed out in a 2002 study commissioned by [...]
Entrepreneurship in the US and India: Competitive Advantage
Duke University reports that immigrants are behind 25% of the startups created in the USA between 1995 and 2005. More striking than the total number, however, was the dominance of Indian entrepreneurs. They founded 26% of tech startups - more than those created by immigrants from the four next biggest sources combined - UK, China, [...]
