31 August 2012: Killing the Golden Goose or Just Chasing it Around the Farmyard?: Rising Generic Entry and the Incentives for Early-Stage Pharmaceutical Innovation

Chirantan Chatterjee
Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore

Abstract:
Over the last decade, generic penetration in the US pharmaceutical
market has increased substantially, providing significant consumer
surplus gains. But is generic entry reducing the flow of early stage
pharmaceutical innovation and therefore future availability of new
medicines? We explore this question using novel data sources and an
empirical framework that models the flow of early-stage pharmaceutical
innovations as a function of generic penetration, scientific
opportunity and challenges, firm innovative capability, and additional
controls. Our estimates suggest a sizable, robust, negative
relationship between generic entry and early-stage pharmaceutical
research activity. A 10% increase in generic penetration decreases
early-stage innovations in the same market by 7.3%. This effect is
weaker in top therapeutic markets where an increase in generic
penetration by 10% decreases the flow of early-stage innovations by
2.2%. However, in those top markets, a 10% increase in the stock of
Paragraph IV challenges decreases the flow of early-stage innovation
by 3.9%. Our estimated effects appear to vary across therapeutic
classes in sensible ways, reflecting the differing degrees of
substitution between generics and branded drugs in treating different
diseases. Finally, we are able to document that with increasing
generic penetration, firms in our sample are shifting their R&D
activity to more biologic-based (largemolecule) products rather than
chemicals-based (small-molecule) products as evidenced in their
early-stage pipelines. We conclude by discussing the potential
implications of our results for long-run consumer welfare, policy, and
innovation.

Date: August 31, 2012
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room 2
Indian Statistical Institute Delhi Centre,
7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi-110016 (INDIA)

Location:

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24 August 2012: India's Total Sanitation Campaign: Two Randomized Experiments and Some Observations

Dean Spears
Princeton University

Abstract:
Open defecation in India presents a profound threat to health and human capital accumulation. Recent analyses of observational data suggest that, on average, India’s Total Sanitation Campaign has had a positive effect on infant mortality and human capital. What do randomized experimental data show? This talk will review earlier evidence and present new preliminary results from two randomized studies. The first is a trial of a TSC-like intervention in Maharashtra: the sanitation intervention caused children under five to grow taller, an outcome that is consistent with what is known about the lasting effects of early life disease. The second studies randomized reservation of village chair positions in Rajasthan: villages assigned to a Scheduled Caste sarpanch are less likely to win a prize for being open defecation free, even though they build as many latrines as other villages, on average. The talk will conclude with some observations from recent qualitative fieldwork and suggestions for policy.

Date: August 24, 2012
Time: 01:00 P.M.

Venue:
Second Floor Conference Room
The World Bank,
70 Lodi Estate,
New Delhi-110003(INDIA)

Location:

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Note:
Please confirm your attendance by email to Jyoti Sriram at
jsriram@worldbank.org by Thursday, August 23rd.

24 August 2012: Public finance of tuberculosis treatment in India: an extended cost-effectiveness analysis

Ramanan Laxminarayan
Princeton University

Abstract:
Cost-effectiveness evaluations of health interventions assess the cost
per unit of health gained from the intervention. A typical finding
would be that it costs about $1,000 to avert a death from tuberculosis
(TB) using modern drug treatments. A separate question, much less
frequently addressed, is the economic attractiveness of different
instruments for implementing an intervention in a population. Such
instruments can include mass campaigns or conditional cash transfers
to encourage treatment seeking, and partial to total public finance
for a specific intervention. Our purpose here is to develop methods
for the economic evaluation of alternative implementation instruments
through the example of universal public finance (UPF) as an
instrument. We label this approach, extended cost-effectiveness
analysis or ECEA, and illustrate our methods while taking the example
of TB treatment in India to assess three dimensions of consequences:
the level and distribution (across wealth quintiles) of the burden of
disease averted, of the net consequences of taxation and private
expenditures averted, and of the value of insurance provided. Using
plausible values for key parameters we find health gains to be
substantial and concentrated among the poor; the insurance value and
the net consequences of taxation and private expenditures averted to
vary with key assumptions.

Date: August 24, 2012
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room 2
Indian Statistical Institute Delhi Centre,
7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi-110016 (INDIA)

Location:

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17 August 2012: Should the Right to Property Return?

Namita Wahi
Harvard Law School and Center for Policy Research

Abstract:
The Indian Constitution adopted in 1950 guaranteed to all
citizens the fundamental right to “acquire, hold and dispose of
property” subject to reasonable restrictions in the public interest.
Moreover, Article 31 of the Constitution provided that any state
acquisition of property must only be upon enactment of a valid law,
for a public purpose and upon payment of compensation with exceptions
for certain zamindari abolition laws. The following decades saw
conflict between the legislature and the courts in cases of
acquisition of property (movable and immovable) with the Supreme Court
striking down acquisition laws (including but not limited to land
acquisition laws) on constitutional grounds and Parliament responding
with amendments to the Constitution which redefined property rights.
This culminated in the 44th amendment in 1978 which abolished the
fundamental right to property. However, a legal right to property was
retained in Article 300A of the Constitution.

Prior to 1978, the Supreme Court was vilified in political rhetoric
and scholarly discourse as being reactionary and anti poor. The
Court’s enforcement of property rights was criticised for defending
the rights of rich property owners and impeding the Parliament’s land
reform agenda. Recently however, widespread state acquisition of land
has received public attention due to dispossession of poor peasants
and traditional communities like forest dwellers, cattle grazers,
fishermen and indigenous tribal groups. Consequently, scholars have
renewed focus on property rights. It is now argued that the “weakening
of property rights” by Parliament in response to the Court’s
pro-property rights decisions in the first phase has “dispossessed the
poor” rather than the rich. In accordance with this view, in February
2009, a public interest petition was filed in the Supreme Court
seeking invalidation of the 44th amendment and restoration of the
fundamental right to property.

In my presentation, I will examine the chequered history of the
constitutional property rights provision in order to provide a revised
narrative of how state institutions in India, the Parliament and the
Supreme Court have, over the last sixty years, managed tensions
between the right to property and the state’s power to acquire
property for the purposes of redistribution and economic development.
I hope my presentation will contain useful insights for evaluating the
current discourses surrounding the new Land Acquisition,
Rehabilitation and Resettlement bill and the reinstatement of the
fundamental right to property in the Constitution.

Date: August 17, 2012
Time: 12:30 P.M.

Venue:
Second Floor Conference Room
The World Bank,
70 Lodi Estate,
New Delhi-110003(INDIA)

Location:

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Note:
Please confirm your attendance by email to Jyoti Sriram at
jsriram@worldbank.org by Thursday, August 16th.

17 August 2012: Macroeconomic Effects of International Remittances: The Case of Developing Economies

Puja Guha
ISI Bangalore

Abstract:
Over the past few decades International workers' Remittances have
significantly contributed to the foreign exchange reserves of the
developing countries. While these household level remittance flows
have often been associated with poverty alleviation, positive welfare
gains and even as an alternate source of development finance, a
detailed study of the effects of these flows on a remittance dependent
, small developing economy, however shows counterintuitive results.
The paper applies the Dutch Disease theory to explain the effects of
remittances on the economy and introduces a micro-macro framework to
establish channels of transmission of remittances through the economy.
The paper shows that international remittances, by altering the
household budget constraint, have a direct impact on the micro level
household decision making, primarily with respect to the consumption
and labor supply decisions. These when aggregated give rise to
significant adjustments in the macro level production functions and
consumption behaviors, leading to a decline in the output,
particularly of the trading sector and an adverse impact on the
external sector of the economy.

Date: August 17, 2012
Time: 11:30 A.M.

Venue:
Seminar Room 2
Indian Statistical Institute Delhi Centre,
7, S. J. S. Sansanwal Marg,
New Delhi-110016 (INDIA)

Location:

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14 August 2012: The Ability and Willingness-to-Pay for a Comprehensive Social Security Scheme – Results from a recent study

Shahid Vaziralli
Institute of Financial Management & Research, Chennai

Abstract:
The focus of the 11th Social Security Seminar will be on the topic “The Ability and Willingness-to-Pay for a Comprehensive Social Security Scheme – Results from a recent study”. In view of the growing concern in India on the need to provide comprehensive social security cover to its unorganized sector workers, the Ministry of Finance, Government of India had commissioned a study entitled, “Ability and Willingness-to-Pay for a Comprehensive Social Security Scheme”. The study was conducted by the Indo-German Social Security Programme, GIZ in collaboration with IFMR. This study which has been concluded recently will provide some interesting insights on the poor households’ ability and willingness to pay for a contributory Comprehensive Social Insurance Scheme (CSIS).

Date: August 14, 2012
Time: 04:30 P.M.

Venue:
GIZ Conference Room,
21, Jor Bagh,
New Delhi 110 003(INDIA)

Note:
Please confirm your participation until the 13th of August 2012 at Sanjib.Pradhan@giz.de

21 August 2012: Understanding India's Equity Trading Behaviour

Tarun Ramadorai
University of Oxford

Date: August 21, 2012
Time: 04:00 P.M.

Venue:
Conference Hall, Ground Floor, New Building
National Institute of Public Finance and Policy,
18/2 Satsang Vihar Marg, Special Institutional Area,
New Delhi-110067(INDIA)

Location:

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7 August 2012: Policy Lessons from Implementing India’s Total Sanitation Campaign

Dean Spears
Princeton University and NCAER

Abstract:
Open defecation (OD) is a large global problem, but it is substantially and importantly an Indian problem: about 60 percent of the approximately 1 billion people who defecate in the open live in India. Widespread OD has major consequences for health and human capital in India. Ending OD and pursuing feasible methods of safe excreta disposal are therefore important policy priorities. This paper draws policy lessons from the first ten years of latrine construction under a flagship program of the Indian government, the Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC). So far, the TSC has been able to improve average health and human capital among Indian children where it has been implemented, even though sanitation coverage remains substantially incomplete. The first ten years of the TSC will have, on average, prevented an infant death for a few thousand dollars, a comparatively very inexpensive average cost. This initial success is in part due to the Nirmal Gram Puraskar (NGP), an incentive for village governments. Heterogeneity in the intensity and effectiveness of TSC implementation suggests that the additional benefits of extending effective TSC implementation to the many remaining Indian children would probably substantially exceed the additional costs. Therefore, as the TSC becomes the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan, India should not miss the opportunity to invest in successful principles of total sanitation: quality data, effective monitoring, and motivational ex post incentives.

Date: August 7, 2012
Time: 04:00 P.M.

Venue:
NCAER Conference Room
National Council of Applied Economic Research
Parisila Bhawan, 11, Indraprastha Estate
New Delhi-110002(INDIA)

Location:

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Note:
Please join us for tea and snacks at 3:45pm before the seminar. For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org or on 011-2345-2669.

8 August 2012: An Introduction to the Proposed Law on Land Acquisition

Muhammad A. Khan
Officer on Special Duty to the Minister of Rural Development, Government of India

Abstract:
The Government of India, through the Ministry of Rural
Development, has undertaken a legislative revisit of the century old
law on land acquisition. This new law, the draft Land Acquisition,
Resettlement and Rehabilitation Bill 2011, seeks to provide a better,
more comprehensive and humane vehicle for the exercise of eminent
domain while simultaneously seeking to address the inevitable
displacement that accompanies such acquisition. This talk analyses the
various contributing factors that led to the emergence of a consensus
for a new law. It then outlines the authorities established and also
discusses the broad objectives sought to be achieved by the Bill.

The talk is meant to serve as an introduction to the provisions of
the Bill and how it seeks to avoid and remedy the shortfalls of its
predecessor the Land Acquisition Act 1894.

Date: August 8, 2012
Time: 12:30 P.M.

Venue:
Second Floor Conference Room
The World Bank,
70 Lodi Estate,
New Delhi-110003(INDIA)

Location:

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Note:
Please confirm your attendance by mail to Jyoti Sriram at
jsriram@worldbank.org by tuesday, August 7th.