-The Indian Express FDI in retail will bring competition to non-tradable services, and make Indian firms globally competitive India removed barriers to trade in goods in the 1990s. Removing protection brought global competition and raised productivity. But introducing global competition in services is harder. In certain services that are tradable, like legal or financial services, the removal of trade barriers can introduce competition and increase productivity. But these often involve complicated and...

-The Indian Express Too many of our economic prescriptions are based on dogma, empirical half-truths It has become fashionable to say, following the conclusions of Michael Spence’s Growth Commission, that there is no single recipe for growth, only some common ingredients. Such a claim brings a due degree of modesty to what we do or do not know about growth. And at the very least, such a claim has the virtue of...

—New York Times News Service    Documents uncovered at the Tazreen garment factory in Bangladesh where 112 workers died in a fire two weeks ago indicate that not one but two U.S. apparel makers supplying goods for Wal-Mart were using the factory around the time of the fire. Two days after the Nov. 24 fire, Wal-Mart said in a statement that it had stopped authorising production at Tazreen and that despite that move,...

-The Hindu There is a need to identify cases in which the courts might have erred in applying the Bachan Singh principle that LIMits the imposition of the death penalty The Supreme Court’s five-judge Constitution Bench judgment in Bachan Singh (1980) is the source of contemporary death penalty jurisprudence in India. Its major contribution was to LIMit the imposition of death penalty to the rarest of rare crimes, and for laying down...

-The Times of India Condom use among men in India is falling drastically — a dangerous trend for the country's already swelling population. The Union health ministry has found that out of 34 states, 22 states have recorded a major dip in condom use in 2010-11 as against the previous year. The five states with the highest overall dip in condom use has been the Andaman and Nicobar islands (50%), Madhya Pradesh (39%),...