Articles by Sunil Mani

Given the public good characteristics of new technologies and especially those contributing to improved health, there is a strong case for state support for research and development and indeed for converting those research results to commercialise products and processes. The state support to the market is even more vital in developing vaccines for the COVID-19 pandemic, which has engulfed the whole world and has shattered the economies of countries and lives of ordinary citizens. The paper, in two parts, analyses how the state and the market have responded to the development of vaccines for this pandemic in two countries, India and the United States. India is chosen as it is one of the leading manufacturers of low-cost vaccines, and the US is selected as it is the top country where systematic R&D on vaccines is carried out. In this part, the focus is on the renewed debate on the use of industrial policy and surveys the specific policy instruments used by one of the leading market-friendly economies in the world, namely the US, in successfully developing within a short period of time a number of highly effective vaccines for COVID-19.

In the absence of any major domestic mobile phone manufacturers, increased imports of mobile phones have contributed to a widening of India’s trade deficit. An analysis of the policy instruments put in place to incentivise the domestic manufacturing of mobile phones reveals a spike in domestic manufacturing, leading to significant reductions in the imports of mobile phones. However, domestically manufactured phones are dependent on imports of parts. This high import dependence itself is an outcome of the weak innovation capability in the domestic industry.

Economic Theory and Policy Amidst Global Discontent edited by Ananya Ghosh Dastidar, Rajeev Malhotra and Vivek Suneja, London: Routledge, 2018; pp xvi+463, ₹995.

A critique of the new Intellectual Property Rights Policy 2016, designed to strengthen India's IPR regime "to foster creativity and innovation," indicates that it has put the interests of intellectual property owners, or global capital above that of public. Though some measures delineated in the policy are laudable, it is clear that the policy objectives are not evidence-based and are tailor-made to suit the requirements of the Western governments.

India has one of the lowest diffusion rates for broadband among the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa grouping, or BRICS. India has also been very slow in terms of the diffusion of mobile phone services. While it took only five years for mobile phone services to reach a diffusion rate of 75%, after 10 years the diffusion rate of broadband has not even reached 10%. In this context, this study attempts to measure the rate of diffusion of broadband in the country, identifies the factors that determine its adoption at the subscriber level, and discusses the policy challenges for hastening the diffusion rate.