Building regulations, AI and society, Electricity sector reform, Railways privatisation, and Arbitration policy | The TrustBridge Newsletter | Issue 14
Talk: 'Build, Baby, Build!' | Workshop on AI and Society | Law and Rhetoric | Electricity sector reform | Railways privatisation | Arbitration policy
This is TrustBridge’s monthly newsletter. TrustBridge seeks to improve India’s business environment by improving the rule of law. In this monthly newsletter, we bring you the work done by the TrustBridge Team in the public space and offer insights into future work.
Events
Prof. Bryan Caplan gave a talk titled ‘Build, Baby, Build’ at the TrustBridge offices in New Delhi on September 27, 2024.
An abstract of the papers Prof. Caplan presented is below:
Housing regulation has pushed the price of housing in the United States to roughly double its cost of production. The effect in many other countries is probably even greater. This has not just sharply reduced living standards; it has also raised inequality, reduced economic mobility, harmed the environment, increased crime, and reduced fertility. Most of the standard negative externalities of housing could easily be addressed with Pigovian taxation, and in any case the positive externalities of housing likely exceed the negative. Regulation thrives because it is popular, and it is popular primarily due to economic illiteracy, innumeracy, and pessimistic bias.
Links to the papers:
https://www.cato.org/books/build-baby-build
Talks and panel discussions
Renuka Sane was a Panelist at the 1st Annual Workshop of the Centre for Digitalisation, AI and Society organised by Ashoka University on September 27-28, 2024.
Prashant Narang presented a paper “Between Law and Rhetoric: Unveiling Ideological Underpinnings in Economic Freedom Judgments” for the Markets and Society Conference organized by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, Virginia on October 14, 2024.
Op-eds
Renuka Sane wrote two articles for The Print:
‘India’s electricity sector needs structural reform. Increase price for domestic sector first’, on September 25, 2024.
Can the threat of further exit of C&I finally provide the impetus for reforming the electricity sector? If the electricity provided by distribution companies has to be competitive, then both the price and the quality have to be attractive. Scaling back cross-subsidies and increasing the pricing for the domestic sector and agriculture will be a start.
‘Two railways privatisation models for India to learn from—UK & Japan’, on October 9, 2024.
The experience of privatisation of railways across the world has been mixed. There have been some failures where the incentives did not play out and outcomes didn't match expectations. However, the efficiency, quality of service, and fiscal sustainability have been better than what would have ensued under fully nationalised railway systems. Most countries that went down this route are not walking back to a fully nationalised system. There are various models in which the three functions of ownership, operation, and maintenance are shared between the public and private sectors, each with their trade-offs. Even incremental reform to allow for private participation will bring in more investment and efficiency into the current operations of the railways.
Prashant Narang wrote an article for MoneyControl: ‘The Arbitration Retreat: A short-sighted policy move?’, on October 2, 2024.
The real issue is not arbitration itself—it’s the bureaucratic impulse to contest every decision, even when courts are likely to uphold the original award. The guidelines acknowledge this problem, attributing it to a misplaced sense of propriety, and a lack of expertise due to the transferrable nature of bureaucratic jobs.
To address these concerns, the guidelines propose promoting institutional arbitration and adopting an empirically grounded framework for contesting arbitral awards—a promising step. However, one has to wonder why the government didn’t push for these solutions earlier, rather than severely restricting arbitration.