EQ Saturday Sapience #63

Equity Intelligence 20th April 2024

Policy lessons from PM Modi’s approach on development with focus on microeconomics and implementation, Indians continue to prefer to eat restaurant foods despite rising availability of ready-to-cook options, Reshape the Indian economy by ‘servicification’ of manufacturing, Reasons to be cheerful about Generation Z; they are not doomed to be poor and anxious. 

• When one closely looks at the different government schemes launched or implemented by the NDA under PM Modi, greater emphasis has been placed on their impact on individual growth and development. Subsequently, the design and implementation of government schemes are as important as, if not more than, mere budgetary outlays. This sharply contrasted with the UPA, where a greater emphasis was on aggregate expenditure, with limited attention on the micro details of design and the implementation of the government programme… Read more
• Ready-to-cook and ready-to-eat meals have existed as a category for decades, many players have come and gone. While Indians are perhaps moving towards cooking lesser, they continue to prefer ordering in rather than these packaged options. And in all honestly, pricing wise it comes out to be the same, so why wouldn’t they?... Read more
• The objective of capital expenditure and its linked subsidies should be to increase the domestic value addition and improve technological depth in manufacturing. In order to do that, it is important to recognise that with increase in automation, the proportion of value being added in goods from embedded ‘services’ (R&D, product design, business services, logistics, sales, marketing etc.) is increasing. This phenomenon also known as ‘servicification’ of manufacturing makes services and manufacturing interdependent on each other…  Read more
• It is only natural for the old to worry about the young. If that leads to better mental-health treatment, or fewer restrictions on building more homes, well and good. But celebrate Gen Z’s resourcefulness, and its successes, too… Already Gen Z-ers are transforming the world of work. They have bargaining power—and they know it… Gen Z will shape society in other ways, too. Young people’s concern about climate change will, as they reach voting age, make states more likely to act… Read more
• “The crowd and the stock market have other features in common. They both thrive on uncertainty and rumour…. Like the forces behind a bull market, the crowd is inherently unstable; it has no stasis, no point of equilibrium, and is driven by a dynamic either to grow or to shrink. At the moment of its dispersal, a crowd frequently succumbs to panic: ‘It is of the very essence of a panic,’ wrote Freud, ‘that it bears no relation to the danger that threatens it, and often breaks out on trivial occasions.’” —Edward Chancellor