Cultures of Corruption

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We exploit a unique natural experiment – the stationing in New York City of thousands of government
officials from 146 countries around the world – in a setting of zero legal enforcement of parking
violations to construct a revealed preference measure of official corruption. We find that this measure is
strongly correlated with existing measures of home country corruption. This finding suggests that cultural
or social norms related to corruption are quite persistent: even when stationed thousands of miles away,
diplomats behave in a manner highly reminiscent of officials in the home country. Norms related to
corruption are apparently deeply engrained, and factors other than legal enforcement are important
determinants of corruption behavior.

The related second empirical finding is the strong negative relationship between affinity for the
United States in the diplomat’s home country and parking violations in New York. This provides realworld
empirical evidence that sentiments matter in economic decision-making in general and for
corruption decisions in particular. One implication of this finding is that government officials’ “feelings”
towards their own nation – for instance, their extent of patriotism, national pride, or strength of national
identity – could also be factors in their corruption decision within the home country.

Compare with Transparency International's 2005
Corruption Perception Index
India is ranked #88 in the TI survey as opposed to #67 in the paper above - which assigns no group ranking.

Ranking difference possibly explained by favorable view of US in Indian public consciousness and/or presence of better instiutional checks and balances (e.g. better law enforcement) in US vs. India.

The Innovation Sandbox

The Innovation Sandbox

more than 490 million people (about 70 percent of the Indian population) live in rural and semi-urban areas. They are difficult to reach, especially in a country where doctors are scarce (the ratio of physicians to total population is less than one per 100,000 people, compared with about one per 160 in the United States). World-class facilities are even scarcer. Rural patients must often travel to cities for treatment, a journey of excessive cost since their family members travel with them. These constraints affect the nature of health care in unexpected ways. For example, in the United States, a customized lower-limb prosthetic may require several fittings spread over weeks. In India, it must be finished in one eight-hour sitting, so the patient and his or her family can return home before their money runs out.

And yet amid all these constraints, a few health-care providers in India are establishing new global standards for cost, quality, and delivery. They do it by bypassing the conventional approaches to medical practice. For example, the Narayana Hrudayalaya cardiac care center, located in Bangalore, is one of the world’s largest providers of heart surgery and other forms of cardiac care, including care for children. A private corporation, it was founded in 2001. Only three years later, in 2004, the company performed 7,500 cardiac surgeries and treated 60,000 outpatients, including almost 2,000 telemedicine patients who received consultation and treatment at remote sites, accessing specialists through satellite- and Internet-based telecommunications links. NH makes no distinction among the quality of service delivered to different patients. Everyone is charged a fixed rate per surgery of $1,500 — one-thirtieth the $45,000 that a typical U.S. hospital might charge, and one-third of the $4,500 that a top-line hospital in India would charge.

It’s important to note that the facility and its parent company, Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH), are profitable. And NH’s cardiac care is far from the only profitable health-care innovation emerging from India. The most famous example (documented at length in my book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid) is the “Jaipur Foot,” a prosthetic foot made from rubber, intended for below-the-knee amputees, such as people injured by accidents and land mines. The JF (as it is universally called) costs about $30, a fraction of the $8,000 to $10,000 cost of a similar Western prosthesis; if a patient damages, loses, or outgrows it, he or she can simply get a new one. Since 1975, the JF has been distributed by a nonprofit, nondenominational organization called the Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti (BMVSS), which fits about 16,000 patients per year, with trained paramedics as the primary patient contact. BMVSS also ships artificial feet, calipers, and other aids to thousands of patients worldwide — more than 50,000 in 2004. BMVSS does not charge for its prosthetics and service; it survives on donations from satisfied patients and from philanthropists.

Another example is the Aravind Eye Care system, the world’s largest provider of cataract surgery. This company, founded in 1976, performed 240,000 surgeries in 2004 and treated 1.6 million outpatients. The founder, Dr. G. Venkataswamy, has said that his goal is to “wipe out needless blindness.” Thus, Aravind treats more than 60 percent of its patients free — and continues to operate profitably.

All three health-care innovators, NH, BMVSS, and Aravind, have been around long enough to give us confidence that these innovative health-care efforts represent sustainable businesses. The basic performance of these three systems is captured in Exhibit 1.

Surgical skills, in particular, are improved by frequency of encounters. No surgeon can keep pace with all the subspecialties in the field. Therefore, by disaggregating the medical process, a medical institution can make far better use of its higher-credentialed physicians.

Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, chairman of NH (and a well-respected surgeon), explains the logic this way: “The task of heart operations has been broken into many tasks. Each is managed by a group of professionals. One of my colleagues conducts most Dor procedures — a complex left ventricular remodeling procedure that is done by only a few experts all over the world. Since he has completed more than 250 of these, we all refer patients for this procedure to him. Similarly, everyone refers patients who need the Ross procedure to me, since I have conducted more than 150 of them with zero mortality. Because we deal so frequently with so-called rare procedures, it is not difficult to standardize them and consistently get good results.”

Surgeries delivered like fast-food orders - brilliant! Such innovations are desperately to drive down astronomical US healthcare costs. Going to a doctor should be like going to Jiffy Lube - for most standardized ailments with an openly displayed price list.

The future is Indian: so wake up, Whitehall - Comment - Times Online

The future is Indian: so wake up, Whitehall - Comment - Times Online

But I believe the opportunities in India may be even greater. We share a common language and a shared history — what one Indian pharmaceutical company described to me as “cultural comfort”. Two per cent of our own population is of Indian descent, and 20,000 Indian students study in Britain each year. We are two service-orientated economies whose skills fit neatly together.

Above all, we need to get rid of the patronising assumption that the only thing India has to offer is a giant back office. I have met here Indian companies who have bought pharmaceutical factories in Huddersfield, opened call centres in Northern Ireland and, in the case of Tata Consultancy Services, have UK operations that employ more than 7,000 people. Yet many tell me that the British Government, unlike our competitors, still does not see this as a partnership of equals. If Britain is to compete in the new global economy, it is time to think again.

The Academic Exchange - Gandhi/MLK links

The Academic Exchange

In 1947, black America joined in the celebrations of India's hard-earned Independence with a delegation led by Mordecai Johnson (of Howard) and Benjamin Mays (of Morehouse).

A generation of civil rights movement leaders--Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, Whitney Young, Vincent Harding, and James Farmer--came under the spell of the powerful educator-cum-preacher in Thurman (whose personal library on Gandhiana was far ahead of any college library collection in the United States). Other recognizable names around metro-Atlanta who came under Gandhian influence were Ralph McGill (who had a photo of Kasturbai on his office wall), Richard Gregg, Devere Allen, Kirby Page, A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Bayard Rustin. African Americans were the first observers outside of India also to appreciate Kasturbai Gandhi's exemplary role as a woman in the struggle for justice. King had a virtual conversion to the Gandhian way after hearing the sermons of Johnson, who too had visited Gandhi's ashram-headquarters. King observed a fledgling group of student protesters (SNCC) versed in Gandhian tactics. Thus drawn to nonviolence, in 1959 he and Coretta Scott King traveled extensively in India, re-living Gandhi's memory.

King's absolute conviction in the efficacy of the Indian philosophy of nonviolence to achieve racial justice was set out in his 1958 book, Stride Towards Freedom. With young, nonviolent activists in tow, King eventually mobilized a mass movement, systematically enacting satyagraha-style sit-ins, nonviolent human barricades, civil disobedience, marches, rallies, noncooperation strikes, and pickets, spiced with passionate speeches, while risking arrests or police beating.

Exit strategy Crisis, The - Find Articles

Exit strategy Crisis, The - Find Articles

as I noted in W.E.B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963, "the appearance of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery bus boycott had been something of a puzzle for Du Bois." He observed somewhere that he had expected to live to see anything but a militant Baptist preacher. In the Indian journal Gandhi Marg, Du Bois drew obvious parallels between Gandhi's liberation of India and King's success in Alabama, and went on to speculate that the gifted, committed preacher might be the American Gandhi. King wrote a grateful note in response to the Du Boises' letter supporting the Montgomery boycott. But nonviolent passive resistance devoid of an economic agenda increasingly disappointed Du Bois, and he finally decided in late 1959 that King was not Gandhi: "Gandhi submitted," Du Bois asserted, "but he also followed a positive [economic] program to offset his negative refusal to use violence."

Amazon.com: Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter With Gandhi: Books: Sudarshan Kapur

Amazon.com: Raising Up a Prophet: The African-American Encounter With Gandhi: Books: Sudarshan Kapur

Detailed yet lucid, this useful study persuasively argues that many African Americans encountered and debated Gandhian ideas of nonviolent struggle decades before Martin Luther King Jr. brought them to the forefront of the civil rights movement. Kapur, a lecturer at the Iliff School of Theology in Denver, cites extensive coverage of the Indian independence movement in the black press as the strongest proof of such interest. Black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois maintained a vision of international racial solidarity, while more popular leaders like Marcus Garvey frequently cited India and Gandhi as examples for blacks. Several of Gandhi's English followers and Indian nationalists met with blacks in the U.S., while six black leaders visited India and Gandhi from 1935 to 1937. A. Philip Randolph, the black labor leader who fought job segregation during World War II, began to cite similarities between his methods and those of Gandhi, while the Congress of Racial Equality and other groups adopted Gandhian techniques. However, Ghandhism did not gain mass appeal until King--who heard a sermon on Gandhi in 1950--fused it with the black religious tradition.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

David Cameron - We must forge a new special relationship - with India

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | We must forge a new special relationship - with India

India is the world's largest democracy, a rapidly growing economy, a huge potential trading partner, a diverse society with a strong culture of pluralism, and a key regional player - a force for stability in a troubled part of the world.

We share so many ties, not least the many people of Indian origin who live in Britain and make an enormous contribution to it. Our countries are also linked by the Commonwealth, [DR - Commonwealth of English speaking countries] in which India is not just the most populous member but has the largest economy after Britain's.

And the links between our two economies are strengthening fast. A few years ago India was the 10th largest investor in the UK; now it is the third largest. Five hundred Indian companies are based in London, and more are opening all the time.

So our relationship goes deep. But I think it can and should go deeper. For Britain, there's a precedent. Our special relationship with America has been forged through a shared past and a shared understanding of the world.

India has much to teach us; it has the world's second-largest Muslim population, and people are free to be Indian and Muslim, Indian and Sikh, or Indian and Hindu, without any contradiction.

Poor Man’s Hero: Controversial writer Johan Norberg champions globalization as the best hope for the developing world..

Reason: Poor Man’s Hero: Controversial writer Johan Norberg champions globalization as the best hope for the developing world..

This sort of

economic and political centralization is the really problematic legacy of colonialism

. It created new, very strong power centers in a lot of places where they hadn’t really existed before. You can see this in Africa. As the scholar George Ayittey has shown, in many African countries there once existed regional markets and local democracies where the chief was accountable to his people and had to follow their decisions. But when the colonizers appeared, they created power structures that weren’t accountable in the same way. They extracted resources and, with the help of small groups of locals, became autocratic occupiers of the land. When they left, the local elites just took over the power structures and became the new occupation forces. They simply took over the machinery of power left by the colonizers.

That creates a sense that the only way to improve things is to seize centralized power, to control a country’s political machinery. Many Western countries exacerbated this problem by distributing billions of dollars into these very centralized governments in extremely miserable and poor countries. The rulers would use some of this to buy off the people, but they mostly kept it for themselves and their associates. Everybody living there could see that if they wanted a good life for themselves and for their family, they had to seize political power -- as opposed to, say, going into business or trade.

Kendra: this dude eerily echoes my explanation for India's lingering poverty after its independence in 1947 - 'white' masters were replaced by 'brown' masters, operating the same economically extractive institutions.

Demographic projections till 2025 for India

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We can be more certain of the changes in the age structure of the population. Under the realistic scenario, between 2000 and 2025, the percentage of population under 15 years of age is expected to fall from 36 to 27 percent. Actually, the population under 15 years is expected to increase only marginally from 360 to 371 million in 25 years. On the other hand, the adult population in the age group 15-64 is expected rise from 604 million in 2000 to 942 million in 2025. i.e., from 60 percent to 67 percent of the total population. The elderly population is also expected to rise sharply from 45 to 89 million, and their share in the total population would rise from 4.5 to 6.4 percent. As a consequence of these age structural changes, the age-dependency ratio (ratio of non-working age population to working age population) is expected to fall from 67 percent in 2000 to 46 percent in 2025.

It is beyond the scope of this paper to discuss the population prospectus on a state-by-state basis. But because they make telling contrasts, two broad regions- north and south - will be considered for detailed treatment. The ‘north’ in our discussions comprises of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and newly formed states of Uttaranchal, Jharkhand and Chhatisgarh. The ’south’ comprises of Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. During 1991-2001, the average population growth rate was 2.22 percent per annum in the north while it was only 1.24 percent in the south.

Cultural divide between North and South India like in the US - unlike the US, South of India is the economic engine driving growth.

A Younger India Is Flexing Its Industrial Brawn - New York Times

A Younger India Is Flexing Its Industrial Brawn - New York Times

In a country where the national symbol has shifted from government bureaucrats at aging desks to call center operators in cubicles, it looks as if the next icon will be the laptop-toting engineer on a factory floor.

“The old philosophy was, ‘I should work in an office, come in at 10 and leave at 4,’ ” said Nitin Kulkarni, 35, an engineer at the Hazira steel mill. But in recent years, he added, “there has been a revolution.”

India’s labor laws, little changed since they were enacted just after independence in 1947, also continue to discourage companies from hiring workers, by making it very difficult to lay off employees even if a company’s fortunes sour or the economy slows.

Still, a new optimism prevails in India, bordering at times on euphoria.

“The Chinese are very good at copying things, but Indians believe in quality work, we believe in meeting pollution norms,” said S. S. Pathania, the assistant general manager of the Hero Honda motorcycle factory in Gurgaon, 30 miles south of New Delhi. “I think India will pass China very soon.”

Hero in Gurgaon, on the southern outskirts of New Delhi, and its archrival, the Lifan Group in Chongqing, a city in western China, produce comparable motorcycles but the similarity ends there. Hero markets heavily to its domestic market, protected from foreign competition by high import tariffs, while Lifan emphasizes exports.

With scant ventilation, Lifan’s factories are filled with diesel exhaust as workers test engines and ride finished bikes at breakneck speed out the doors, zigzagging past co-workers. Hero’s factory in Gurgaon, where Honda holds a minority stake, has far better safety standards and excellent ventilation.

The Lifan factory pays less than $100 a month. The heavily unionized Hero factory pays $150 a month plus bonuses of up to $370 a month; nearly half the workers earn the top bonus, Mr. Pathania said.

Lifan’s labor force is quiescent — would-be organizers of independent labor unions face long jail terms or worse in China. Hero’s workers staged a successful nonviolent protest in 2005 to call for more contract workers to be eligible for the bonuses as well.

BBC NEWS | Business | What might hold back India?

BBC NEWS | Business | What might hold back India?

They queue for hours to push through the necessary paperwork to open a business in India.

Many of them will have to come back repeatedly, if the countless forms they have been given by the comfortable officials in air conditioned offices have not been properly filled out. But it is a necessary evil.

You cannot open a business in Mumbai without getting the right papers stamped, marked and approved at this office.

"It's crazy," says one businessman, wary about revealing his identity in print.

"We have to stand here in the sweltering heat, back and forth with these papers, and there are only certain hours in the day when you can come here to get your work done. The office closes at 3.30 in the afternoon."

Many of the small business owners cheer us on while we film.

They want us to show the inefficiency of the administrative officials who handle their paperwork.

"Go on, show the world how long we have to wait to open up a business here," someone shouts from the snaking long queue.

"Tell them it is not India's businesses that are slow, it is India's bureacracy."

Wired News: India's Cut-Price Space Program

Wired News: India's Cut-Price Space Program

Though more than 50 countries have space programs, very few have the ability to plan and execute their own missions. Outside of Europe and the United States, the only significant players in space are China, Brazil, Japan, Turkey and India.

"We can launch a remote-sensing satellite for half the price of anyone else," said Shridhara Murhi, executive director of Antrix, the commercial arm of ISRO. It's the sort of frugality and ingenuity that has begun to attract international investors.

The demand for space imaging and communications is huge, and yet there are only a few players in the game. Last year, Antrix brought in more than $500 million, which was more than half of the operating budget for all of ISRO. It is aiming for a 10 percent market share in less than a decade.

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact

Technology Review: Emerging Technologies and their Impact

A decade after India launched an innovate-and-patent campaign, early signs of an Indian technology invasion are evident. Just two examples: a U.S. company has purchased the patent for ­Indian-­designed software that eliminates noise from complex digital data, and fruit growers in California and Turkey have bought a pomegranate deseeder invented by an Indian college dropout.

The patent portfolio of 38 publicly funded Indian laboratories has increased from fewer than 30 U.S. patents in 1995 to more than 720 in July of this year -- and those patents are beginning to translate into licenses outside India. This growth reflects a dramatic transformation in India's research culture.

Our Enemy - the State

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If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one
fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the
State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a
secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation,
political banking, "agricultural adjustment," and similar items of State policy that
fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these
can be run up under one head. They have an immediate and temporary importance,
and for this reason they monopolize public attention, but they all come to the same
thing; which is, an increase of State power and a corresponding decrease of social
power.
It is unfortunately none too well understood that, just as the State has no
money of its own, so it has no power of its own. All the power it has is what society
gives it, plus what it confiscates from time to time on one pretext or another; there
is no other source from which State power can be drawn. Therefore every
assumption of State power, whether by gift or seizure, leaves society with so much
less power; there is never, nor can there be, any strengthening of State power
without a corresponding and roughly equivalent depletion of social power.

India has had the misfortune of having a predatory State choking economic growth.