Amaani Bashir’s Post

Pleased to share that the research work done by Sabyasachi Kar, Mayank Jain and myself on Machine Learning techniques for measuring inflation and growth has been published in EPW! It is pertinent to try and find new analytical solutions to fix old problems when traditional tools fail to deliver. However, it is equally important to understand the limitations of statistical techniques, which must be complimented with a deeper understanding of the data and the context it arose in. Do check it out!

Shreyans Bhaskar and myself recently co-authored a piece looking at the demographic effects on fiscal balances in India, building on similar work done by the ADB in East-Asian countries. We find that while currently the effect of an increasing old age population is limited, this is due to change as India's demographic transition moves it towards an 'aging' society. Fiscal balances will come under threat of a higher old-age dependency through increasing pension and healthcare spending. Additionally, lower potential tax revenues due to smaller proportions of working population may add to the fiscal burden. This will be further exacerbated by increasing life expectancy which will also have household consumption and investment effects in addition to increasing the fiscal burden. An important focus area of future policy research!

Sabyasachi Kar, Mayank Jain and I co-authored a Working Paper on the efficacy of Machine Learning methods for Inflation and Growth forecasting. We have also provided a primer on #machinelearning and #bigdata within economics and forecasting, do give it a read! #forecasting #workingpaper #inflation #growth

My good friend (and infinitely better economist than me) Mayank Jain engaged in a super interesting and approachable conversation about a wide range of topics including #climatechange, #localleadership, #inequality and #democracy and how it relates to #economics and economic thinking! He also touches about the state of academic circles, accountability, ego and communication gaps within economists today!

Anmol Rathore and I have written a piece modelling the supply and demand dynamics of the Covid-19 vaccination drive in India as well as analysed the viability of the government's ambitious 2 billion dose vaccination target by December 2021. We find that the effective (or constrained) demand will match the effective supply (based on public domain resources) of vaccinations before the third wave. While this is good in terms of clearing the vaccination market, it spells epidemiological disaster as it falls 400 million doses short of the government’s target vaccination rate. We conclude that the effective vaccine demand in the country is constrained by the suboptimal vaccine roll out. Moreover, working in policy for the past few years has opened our eyes to the heterogeneity of policy implementation and design across the country and the need for targeted vaccination and Covid-19 health policies based on state-level sero-prevalence surveys. Do take a look at share your thoughts!

My interest in Behavioural Economics has really piqued during this pandemic. Trying to figure out why some people's values differ from other and how this affects their epidemiological and economic decisions has led me to write this article on The Quint on how Behavioural Sciences explain the dissonance in behaviour during Covid-19 and how we can harness it to produce better societal outcomes! #behavioraleconomics #indiafightscovid19 #economicpolicy #development