Thursday, June 30, 2011

M&A

Did you say Merger & Acquistion?
So let's see what we have here then...an yuppy iBanker-MBA are we or are we yuppy-dreaming-yet-to-be-iBanker-MBA-frustrated-in-the-ubiquitous-Indian-industry? You may be either, no point mentioning here that I will be more reverent if you are the former, but then an advice at the outset for both the segments, be advised that your career progress has already been determined, some 22-24 years ago (the age bracket where you can still hopefully expect to become an iBanker and beyond which be advised you can only become an Equity researcher-about-to-be-frustrated-in-3-years). For the people who got the import of these meandering lines, welcome to the club and for the people who read thru twice, read once more if you must. Now that you thought Merger & Acquisition, let me test if you are worth your salt..can you tell me if it will be profitable to M&A Greece with EU so that the Greeks as a nation can be a matter of history much like its famous people like Aristotle and the gay Alexander? Before you answer that, I am not interested any more. Before I tell you that this was not the expansion I had in mind, I must admit I belonged to the second segment,went to a VERY ETHICALLY ORIENTED bscul where I was told I had no chance in the same, so let's continue...

Today I was discussing something quite serious with a good friend, when he suddenly said something about the Arranged-Marriage marketplace in India. That and my tendency to connect dots, gave birth to this post. Couple of days back, the eminent newspaper ET carried a very heart-rendering account of how Indian EVES are the most stressed of their race in the MILKY Way if you must. The venerable ET said that these were the beacons India was looking askance for deliverance and how the India (mind you not Bharat) should focus on saving these Eves, now that the 1411 Tigers of India have been saved (psst...heard on the street Ratan will soon have an illegit successor, a striped Royal Bengal T of all, thanks to the bad M..so make dat 1412 at least ;-)). Well back to the topic at hand, theEVES (sounds suspiciously like ;) ) are stressed with work and to digress a little, if you know what NSSO is and who TCA Anant is then you will also know that there has been a serious slide in EVE's participation in the Indian labor (pun intended) force by about 600 basis points,this again may be Greek (pun intended yet again...for the more aware of the set not reading this that is almost the spread on Bunds and Greek bonds hence the pun) to some of us. In short, let's say it is worrisome. Of course for UPA not for me. Some chic CHICK economist thot that this provided a ripe opportunity to champion Women's Lib yet again ( thank God she thought better than burning her upper innerwear unlike her ancestors) and wrote some mind-numbing shit on ET with a rider thrown in the views were her own only to which I wanted to ask, why did she bother to pick the pen up then...spare us economic analysis..economics is not CHICK Lit after all. Now back to the topic of distressed EVEs.

So what bothers them or shall we say Distresses them (jingles with Mistresses..i m wicked i know :D). The list lists the usual suspects - being-made-to-study-more-than-would-have-been-good-for-them followed by a thing called Career (the respondents were as ET said first-time-women-workers-from-their-families mostly) followed by another thing called Marriage(M) which helped by some fine-but-horny highly-educated-young-Indian-males leads to another thing called Baby which eventually leads to some kind of Arrangement(A). Now if you are my target readership, you know what I meant by M&A.

To this concoction, if you add what my friend had to say : He, a fine-young-man-with-an-even-finer-takehome met one of these distressed EVE's father digitally. The parent expressed his willingness to marry off his daughter but threw in some food for thought - why doesn't the fine-young-man-with-an-even-finer-takehome trade his city of work for the EVE's native(u see the family is there). He left a parting comment that the Groom is now expected to be Einstein+Buffet+Clooney (if u follow the pattern none of them are fine-young any more ;-)) To this when I add CNN-IBN’s Sagarika Ghose's tweet which went like “A boys club meeting with editors is hardly the way to reach out to the nation. Shame!” presumably coz she was not invited to the PM's meet, one can only be amazed at the apathy the Indian society heaps upon the EVEs and I say they have all reasons to be DISTRESSED ;-). So maybe ET missed out on 1 more plausible reason for theEVE's distress - Marriage & an Arrangement.

Monday, January 3, 2011

Enough of Cursing Now Presenting the Economics of Reservation

Nothing about contemporary India is as tragic as the fact that millions here are excluded by birth and early environment from educational and economic opportunities that could reveal their full potential and here I mean the GENERAL CATEGORY ;)

In independent India, the debate on inequality has been largely hijacked by the protagonists of reservation on the basis of caste. Certainly, the age-old inequities of the caste system have much to do with the mass poverty and abject social status of millions of Indians. Does this justify the adoption of caste quotas in higher education and employment as the major instrument of an egalitarian redistribution? This is a question that has evoked intense and prolonged controversy.

The debate has focused essentially on two issues: whether the presumed gains of the intended beneficiaries of reservations offset and justify the presumed losses of the others, and whether the presumed improvement in the distribution of income and power justifies the possible losses in average efficiency and aggregate output. No one has doubted that the intended beneficiaries do benefit and that in consequence distribution does actually improve. If a college is forced to admit a target-group student who would not otherwise have qualified, or a firm to hire someone from a protected category whom it would otherwise not have considered, surely the target group must benefit. Right?

Wrong. In economics, the obvious is not always the truth. When we look at the immediate context of an action or policy, we may predict a particular outcome with perfect certainty; but when we consider its remoter consequences and their repercussions, our confidence may well disappear. Policy analysis is further complicated in India by the impact of globalization. When goods, capital and some grades of skilled labour flow freely in and out of a country, it necessarily limits the degree of freedom of the economic policy-maker. He must take into account the international flows of goods and factors that his policy would induce in assessing its likely outcome. We must, therefore, examine the likely impact of a quota regime on the distribution of employment and income in an open economy.

The economist’s traditional way of exploring such issues is to construct a simplified hypothetical picture of the economy as a whole, and to see how it changes in consequence of a particular policy. Imagine an economy set in a world where free trade in goods equalizes product prices worldwide and free capital mobility sustains profits at global rates. The economy produces goods that require capital along with either skilled or unskilled labour. Unskilled labour is an undifferentiated mass without productivity differentials, where the headcount is all that matters. Skilled labour is heterogeneous and a college education is indispensable for it.

The economy has a college system that caters to this demand. Colleges admit students on the basis of a test of their pre-college ability, accepting all those who score above a certain cut-off. They then train their students up to a final level of skill which is reflected in their eventual grades. Students differ in their initial abilities as well as their final scores; they also differ in the extent to which they benefit from college, depending on the extent to which it offers them opportunities they did not enjoy earlier and the intensity of effort they choose to exert. However, assume that exposure to the same educational process, while it may result in a convergence of the ability scores of different students, will not actually reverse their ability rankings.

A firm that requires skill will hire a college graduate on the basis of his grade, which is the only signal it has of his ability and productivity. Firms have to match the global rate of profit if they are to retain their capital. Given their technology and the price of their product, this implies that they cannot afford more than a specific unit cost of work. Competition among firms for labour ensures also that they do not pay any less. So, in a globalized economy, the unit cost of work in each viable firm is set by global parameters. Now the unit cost of work is the ratio of the wage per head and the productivity of the worker. Thus, firms can absorb low-productivity workers, provided they pay them proportionately less. There is, however, a minimum below which wage per head in skilled industry cannot fall: this is determined by the wage in the unskilled sector plus the cost of college education.

Labour in the unskilled sector is homogeneous and earns a uniform wage, which represents the unit cost of unskilled work. This, too, is determined by global parameters: the imperative of paying the global rate of profit to attract capital dictates the wage of unskilled labour (given the technology and the product price). The global economy thus imposes the unskilled wage and sets a floor to the wage per head of skilled labour. Since it also determines the unit cost of skilled work, it fixes the minimum productivity of skilled workers. Skilled industry can only hire those graduates whose grades match this minimum productivity requirement. Since colleges are interested in the employability of their graduates, they will admit only those applicants whom they expect, on the basis of their admission test scores, to achieve such grades. Indeed, if the relationship between admission test scores and final grades, and that between final grades and employability, are common knowledge, the college need not have any admission policy at all. If it simply discloses the admission test scores, applicants who do not, on the basis of these scores, expect to achieve the grade-requirement for employability would simply select out of college education — they would prefer unskilled work to the pursuit of an expensive college education that would not culminate in a skilled job. Given full public knowledge of all the relationships involved and full disclosure of admission test scores, the pattern of admissions would be identical with what colleges seek to achieve through their admission cut-offs.

This is how the system would work in the absence of government intervention in the admission process. Assume, now, that government legislates a 50 per cent quota for specific castes in college admissions. In order to make the best possible case for reservations, add the heroic assumption that the implementation of the quota system has no impact on the quality of college teaching or the integrity of the examination system. If colleges remain interested in the employability of their graduates, they will not reduce their admission cutoffs for anybody. If they did, the ‘beneficiaries’ of this relaxation would not get the final grades required for skilled employment. Applicants themselves may anticipate this after seeing their admission test scores and refuse the admission offer, should one be made. Not a single member of the target group really benefits as a result of the quota — except perhaps for a broadening of his intellectual horizon thanks to a college education.

But if there is no increase in target group admissions, how can colleges comply with the 50 per cent quota requirement? The only possible way is by limiting admissions from other castes to the number admitted against the quota. A large number from the other castes (who would have qualified for college and skilled employment in the absence of quotas) are denied admission and driven into the unskilled sector as a result. Quotas yield no benefits for the ‘beneficiaries’ but substantially reduce educational and employment prospects for others. National income contracts drastically (since, for a large number, high skilled wages are replaced by low unskilled wages); so does the higher education system, since, with admissions stagnant among the protected castes and dwindling among the unprotected, fewer colleges remain viable.

If the quality of college teaching or evaluation is impaired by quotas (if, for example, they have been implemented in faculty recruitment as well, as indeed they have been done in India), things can only get worse. With poorer teaching, a given initial ability would translate into lower final productivity, so that admission cut-offs would actually have to be raised to ensure employability — so that quotas would no longer be neutral in their impact on the protected groups, but would actually hurt them. If grade inflation, particularly of a discriminatory kind, occurs, the credibility of the entire system is compromised. Industry can no longer trust the signals from the colleges as indices of productivity and the economic justification for the higher education system melts away. So possibly does skill-intensive industry.

In the immediate present, colleges may be persuaded or forced to lower admission cutoffs for the protected castes, thus substantially increasing their admission offers, students may be myopic or optimistic enough to accept such offers, government may even dragoon industry into offering jobs to graduates of protected groups whose college grades are lower than the minimum that it would earlier have insisted upon. Disillusionment, however, is just round the corner. Industry will soon discover that the unit cost of skilled work for its additional recruits is higher than the global level and erodes its profits below the global rate of return on capital. It will then be forced to migrate to locations outside the jurisdiction of the Indian government and its quota regime.

It is not surprising that two generations of reservations have done so little for the scheduled castes and tribes. Reservations earlier had some justification. Quotas in legislative representation are not subject to the economic constraints described above. Further, when India was a closed economy, the penalties for inefficiency were not immediate. A protected industrial sector could absorb much inefficiency. So could government. Productivity was of little or no concern in government, which was, up to the 1980s, the major employer outside agriculture. Job reservations then were a meaningful, if costly, instrument of redistribution; so were reservations in a higher education system that catered essentially to government demand. Whatever little quotas have achieved for the SCs and STs is a reflection of these two factors. In the India of today, neither of these factors is of any importance.

So much so this above part was the contribution of a JNU prof but The Person after having studied enuf economics by now can only nod his head at the implications and of course in this booming booming job market wishes the firms to make big time mistakes when they recruit from the Bsculs (what with 50% forced-ins) so that the HR managers look like fools in another 5 years when the next recession strikes...Let's drink to that den \m/