Business
India: Challenge and Opportunity of a Lifetime
Last week I had the opportunity to attend three events in Delhi – the 3rd Sat Pal Mittal Memorial Lecture by Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chair of the Planning Commission, on the 11th plan; the India-Japan Energy Forum organized by TERI and NEDO; and the London School of Economics (LSE) Asia Forum. The timing of [...]
Formal Business through Informal Means: Targeting the BoP
The McKinsey Quarterly is carrying an interesting article on doing business in emerging markets, particularly the BoP. Titled, A grassroots approach to emerging-market consumers, the article sees the challenge primarily as a principal-agent problem: A company (the principal) is in a weaker position than the community (the agent) when it comes to gaining local information, [...]
Kidney Transplants Legal in Iran
Iran, apparently is one of the few countries that allows people to legally sell their kidneys. And The Economist approves: With proper regulation, a kidney market would be a big improvement on the current, sorry state of affairs. Sellers could be checked for disease and drug use, and cared for after operations. They could, for [...]
Doing Business in India, Indian Style
Wharton Business School’s special online portal on India has an article on India’s business environment for SMEs, titled How Some Firms in India Succeed by Bypassing Entrenched Financial and Legal Systems. India has often been praised for its strong financial and legal systems and its well-regulated stock market. It is argued that these strong formalized [...]
Wind Energy in India
During a recent visit to India, over dinner with a friend, I got confirmation that India was now among the top five countries in terms of wind power generating capacity. Renewable energy and climate change have been interesting theoretical topics for me, but they are also a huge business opportunity. The fifth largest manufacturer of [...]
India on the Global Competitiveness Report
The World Economic Forum has released its 2006-07 rankings for global competitiveness. The rankings are based on weighted scores in 9 areas: Institutions, Infrastructure, Macroeconomy, Health & Primary Education, Higher Education, Market Efficiency, Technological Readiness, Business Sophistication, and Innovation. The big surprise seems to be that the United States has moved from number 1 to [...]
The Power of the NGO
Back in university, I had heated debates with my colleages from the US and Europe, on labor and environmental standards. As I’ve said before, I am vehemently against them. For me, they constitute at best protectionism by other means. At worst, for some it is neo-colonialism by means of the NGO. I do not, necessarily [...]
Corporate Responsibility and Profits
I have been doing some research recently on Socially Responsible Investing (SRI). These days, in the banking world, SRI is en vogue. Banks are constantly introducing special investment funds with positive or negative screening criteria. Other forms of SRI are also gaining popularity – as an advocacy mechanism as well as social venture capital. SRI [...]
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- Financial Inclusion in India: Trends Beyond Microfinance - 34 emails
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