Today my guest is Sajith Pai, who is a partner at Blume Ventures and he is a long-time media executive turned VC. At Blume, Sajith supports investments in media, ed tech and e-commerce, while simultaneously helping Blume building a research and knowledge platform.

We spoke about the 2024 Indus Valley Annual Report. written by Sajith and his co-authors, Anurag Pagaria, Nachammai Savithiri both at Blume Ventures; the many countries that make up the country of India; bifurcated between India1, 2, and 3; gross fixed capital formation, fintechs, the consumption led boom that India is experiencing, the space industry, and much more.

Recorded June 25th, 2024.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:09:16) - Private Consumption and Fixed Capital Formation

(00:14:15) - Gross Fixed Capital Formation

(00:22:39) - Regime Uncertainty

(00:26:51) - The Indian Consumer

(00:35:10) - Bottlenecks and Reforms

(00:42:18) - Mutual Funds Savings Model

(00:47:33) - Path from Seed to IPO

(00:55:40) - India's Foreign Investors

(01:00:57) - India's Fintechs

(01:11:09) - Space Tech in India

(01:17:36) - What's on Pai's Bookshelf?

(01:23:39) - Outro

Today my guest is Anne O Krueger. She is a Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the Herald L. and Caroline Ritch Emeritus Professor of Sciences and Humanities in the Economics Department at Stanford University. She served World Bank’s Chief Economist from 1982 to 1986, and the first deputy managing director at the IMF from 2001 to 2006. We talked about her famous 1974 paper “The Political Economy of a Rent Seeking Society” on its 50th anniversary, her experience understanding the license permit raj system in India, the 1991 trade liberalization, the Washington consensus, decline of the WTO, the new protectionism in the US, reforming Argentina and much more.

Recorded May 17th, 2024.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:01:24) - Rent-Seeking in Turkey and India

(00:10:49) - Professional Influences

(00:15:35) - South Korean Miracle

(00:18:53) - Korea vs. India

(00:26:19) - Import Substitution and Rent

(00:29:15) - Turning Around the World Bank

(00:38:59) - The Krueger Consensus

(00:42:18) - Africa

(00:45:39) - India's 1991 Reforms

(00:50:52) - World Trade Organization

(00:53:53) - United States and Free Trade

(01:02:14) - License Permit Raj in the US

(01:04:36) - International Monetary Fund

(01:06:47) - Hope for Milei and Argentina

(01:11:30) - Looking Back on Success

(01:13:31) - Outro

Today my guest is Karthik Muralidharan. He is the Tata Chancellor's Professor of Economics at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of the recent book Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap for Effective Governance.” We talked about the lacking state capacity in India, about improving the quality of public expenditure, fiscal federalism, methods to improve the hiring process for government, better ways of staffing and using the Indian bureaucracy, randomized control trials and development and much more.

Recorded May 15th, 2024.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links.

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Timestamps

(00:00:00) - Intro

(00:07:46) - Quality of Public Education

(00:17:59) - Decentralization vs. Federalism

(00:31:58) - Welfare Expenditure

(00:41:30) - Personnel for the Indian State

(01:09:08) - Better Approach for Skilling

(01:17:26) - Empanelment

(01:34:32) - The Backdrop of the Field of Economics

(01:56:52) - Outro