Frenchman Tirole wins Nobel economics prize

French economist Jean Tirole won the Nobel prize foreconomics today for research on market power and regulation.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited Tirole for clarifying "how to understand and regulate industries with a few powerful firms."

Tirole, 61, works at the Toulouse School of Economics in France.

"From the mid-1980s and onwards, Jean Tirole has breathed new life into research on such market failures," the academy said, adding his work has strong bearing on how governments deal with mergers or cartels and how they should regulate monopolies.

"In a series of articles and books, JeanTirole has presented a general framework for designing such policies and applied it to a number of industries, ranging from telecommunications to banking," the academy said.

The economics prize completed the 2014 Nobel Prize announcements.

Last week, different panels of Nobel judges announced the awards for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and the Nobel Peace Prize.

The awards will be presented on December 10, the anniversary of prize founder Alfred Nobel's death in 1896.

Even though the economics award is not an original Nobel Prize - it was added in 1968 by Sweden's central bank - it is presented with the others and carries the same prize money.

Last year the economics prize went to three Americans who shed light on the forces that move stock, bond and home prices.

A Nobel for incentives The importance for India of Jean Tirole

It is a common complaint about modern economics, particularly theoretical economics, that it is too far removed from the real problems of economics. In the West, this takes the form of the accusation that most economists failed to predict or warn about the possibility of the 2008 financial crisis. In India, there is concern that economic theory developed in the West fails to provide the tools required to analyse the pressing public policy problems in India. In many ways these are unjust criticisms. By awarding the 2014 NobelMemorial Prize in Economics to Jean Tirole, an economic theorist based out of the University of Toulouse in France, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has in fact demonstrated just how unjust they are.

Prof Tirole is one of the most quietly influential of economists. He may not be a public intellectual like Paul Krugman, with a wide-ranging audience for his newspaper columns; unlike Larry Summers, he may not have taken up a major public position; and he has not positioned himself, like Joseph Stiglitz, as a prominent critic of globalisation. Yet his work has been as influential as that of any of the others. As the Nobel committee points out, it spans several different sub-disciplines of economics; but in each case it focuses on rigour and the careful analysis of strategies and incentives. Modern "industrial organisation" - the theory of the firm, of pricing strategies, of regulation and of monopolies - has developed more thanks to Prof Tirole's work since the early 1980s than anything else. By organising a deeply disorderly field, and by ensuring that properly rigorous models are used, he has taken the study of the firm out of the fuzziness common to "management studies" and into the greater clarity of the economics profession. The consequences have been considerable. One the Nobel committee mentions is the demonstration, through mathematical modelling, that monopolies in one field can be extended into another through vertical integration. A question that Prof Tirole famously asked is: "What is worse than a monopoly?" And he answered it thus: "A chain of monopolies." This insight has changed the way that regulators behave - the various antitrust actions against Microsoft earlier this century were not unrelated to this development.

Rigour such as Prof Tirole brings to basic questions of incentives is clearly missing in the debate on Indian corporate bodies, as well as on public policy. One of the few theoretical papers of quality to focus on the incentives behind public-private partnerships or PPPs, for example, was authored by Prof Tirole together with a frequent collaborator, Eric Maskin. One of the things that they discover: "PPP contracts [between a bureaucrat and a company] need to be carefully reviewed by independent authorities that can expose hidden rent backloading... PPPs can be expected to entail higher transaction costs." It is worth noting that this paper has been available since June 2007. This insight is something that Indian policymakers are only now accepting after considerable pain - though a clear independent authority is still not even on the anvil. More than most Nobel prizes in economics in the recent past, Prof Tirole's work is relevant to Indian public policy. It is to be hoped it leads to a revolution in rigour and formal modelling in Indian economic circles.

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Delhi-Agra semi-high speed train to be named Gatimaan Express

The semi-high speed train that proposes to reduce travelling time between Delhi and Agra to 105 minutes will be named Gatimaan Express and will have LCD TVs installed behind each seat and emergency braking system.

To be flagged off from New Delhi station next month, the train’s name has been chosen because of its capability of running at 160 km per hour speed, the maximum till date in Indian Railways, a senior Railway Ministry official said.

Equipped with comfortable seating arrangement, there will be eight-inch LCD TV screens installed behind each seat, the official said, adding there will also be automatic fire alarm with emergency braking system and passenger information system.

However, in the initial days, the passengers of Gatimaan Express will have the opportunity of watching pre-recording programmes only as the live feed will be provided later on.

The first semi-high speed service of the Railways is considered to be a boon for tourists visiting the city of Taj Mahal.

“We have sought safety certificate from Commissioner Railway Safety to run the semi-high speed train next month as all necessary preparations are being completed now,” Railway Board Chairman Arunendra Kumar told PTI.

Asked when the train is scheduled to be flagged off, he said, “The date will be decided after getting the safety certificate but certainly before November 30.”

Railways has already conducted two trials of the train in the past and all other arrangements like fencing off certain areas along the route and upgrading of signalling system are being carried out.

Equipped with a 5,400HP electric locomotive, the train will run at maximum speed of 160 km per hour and is expected to cover the 200 km distance in about 105 minutes.

There are 14 new LHB AC coaches manufactured at Rail Coach Factory at Kapurthala for the train and expected to roll out by month end, said a senior Railway Ministry official.

While 12 coaches will be used for daily running, two will be kept as spare ones, the official added.

The train will have Executive Class and Chair Car category of seats and also catering facility.

Railway authorities are also planning to launch similar trains in eight more routes including Delhi to Kanpur and Delhi to Chandigarh.

Countdown for IRNSS 1C launch commences at Sriharikota

The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) began a 67-hour countdown at 6:32 a.m. on Monday ahead of the launch of the third regional navigation satellite, the IRNSS-1C.

The 1400-kg-plus spacecraft is slated to be flown on October 16, Thursdsy, at 1.32 a.m. on the PSLV-C26 launch vehicle from the space port located in coastal Andhra Pradesh. It is part of a seven-satellite IRNSS constellation that is being put in orbit over the next two years.

The Indian Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) is designed to provide precise location- and time-based services to a variety of users on land, sea and air across the Indian region - akin to the global services of the U.S. GPS.

The earlier planned launched on October 10 was postponed due to some technical reasons.

IRNSS 1C with a lift-off mass of 1,425.4 kg would be shot into a sub Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (sub GTO).

As part of its aspirations to build a regional navigational system equivalent to Global Positioning System of the US, ISRO plans to send seven satellites to put in place the Indian Regional Navigational Satellite System.