Category: Economy

I am always looking at new things to do on this blog, and when the folks at CreditLoan offered to do an infographic that showed how gold did over the years, I jumped at the offer.

Check out how gold prices moved through the past few decades, which countries mine gold, some history on gold, and a few interesting facts in this awesome graphic below.

Here is an interesting little chart that compares some of the world’s major indices since the beginning of 2000 till date.

I looked at the green worm go, and thought that it looked like India, and so it was too.  It’d be interesting to see how EPS for these countries grew over this time period; I’ll see if  I can put something together.

Courtesy dshort via Big Picture

I was looking at data about India’s import partners – the countries from which India imports from, and thought it would be interesting to see how this compares with America’s import partners.

I came up with this visualization comparing India and America’s import data in 2009.

The similarity of course is how big China’s share is, but everyone knows that. The next thing that struck me was the size of the Canadian and Mexican circles, and it clearly shows how much they benefit from being America’s neighbors. After looking at this for some time – I noticed how the Middle East was littered with huge bubbles in India’s map, but they were missing in America’s maps. Looking at this in a little more detail shows that America imports quite a lot of oil from its neighbors while India relies on the Middle East quite heavily. Part of this is politics, and part of it is geographical proximity. It is quite interesting to see this next viz which shows the countries from where India and America import their oil.
Continue reading “A look at where USA and India get their oil from?”

The big news today has been the strong first quarter GDP growth logged by the Indian economy. At 8.8% over last year, this has been quite a good quarter, and the major contributors were manufacturing and trade, hotels, transport and communications.

This is how the data breaks out (green is this year’s).

Agriculture is a bit slow, but given the good monsoons this sector should do well in the rest of the year.

As far as the contribution of private or government sector is concerned there wasn’t much change, though the change of capital formation which indicates capital investments in the economy slowed down a bit. Here is how that looks:

While the low base has helped the GDP growth number rise a bit, this has been a good performance, and hopefully India can clock a healthy GDP growth number this year with inflation in check.

Stories about the Common Wealth Games are almost always about corruption, inefficiency, and poor planning, and while we all know that paying 4000 bucks for toilet paper and 6000 bucks for umbrellas is over the top – how does the total spend compare with what other countries spend on sporting events?

I looked up CWG games spend for the last host – Australia, and found that they were able to do it in about 1 billion dollars, and were really really close to their budget. That’s quite below the 6 billion or so India will be spending, but then Australia didn’t have to spend on Infrastructure like India does.

So, let’s look at another emerging country then – China hosted the last Olympics in the most magnificent way ever, and spent about $42 billion on it!

I looked at a few other countries, and realized that these comparisons are not straight because of the definition of  what is part of Olympics, CWG or Winter Olympics spend. Emerging nations take this opportunity to upgrade their infrastructure, which will be used long after the games themselves, but a lot of it is counted as part of the games spend, and then there is the difference in size,  year of these events, and even the exchange rates.

All that said, here is a little map of sporting spend of a select few countries (mouse over to see values). Most of them are past events with the exception of India’s CWG, Brazil’s FIFA World Cup, and London’s Olympics which are estimates.

I’d say this is more fun than instructional due to the limitations I noted above, but you can still get a glimpse of how much various countries spent on these events.

Here is a list of these events along with the source of the data if you are interested. Let me know what you think.

S.No.	Country	Total Spend	Event	Year	Source
1	China	42.00	Olympics	2008	Link
2	Greece	16.00	Olympics	2004	Link
3	United Kingdom	22.60	Olympics	2012	Link
4	Germany	1.40	FIFA World Cup	2006	Link
5	South Africa	5.48	FIFA World Cup	2010	Link
6	Brazil	41.70	FIFA World Cup	2014	Link
7	India	6.23	Common Wealth Games	2010	Link
8	Australia	1.00	Common Wealth Games	2006	Link
9	Canada	2.50	Winter Olympics 2010	2010	Link

The Economist published a cheekily titled article – “Hello America” a few days ago. It showed a graph of the history of world GDP, and showed the share of different countries over a very long timeline.

I was a little surprised to see that China and India had so much of the global share for such a long time, but didn’t give it much thought because these are absolute numbers, and I felt what would have really been interesting would be a comparison of per capita GDP.

I had quite forgotten about it, but today I saw Econompic Data publish such a chart.

Look at those US, UK and Japan lines go – amazing right? Funny thing is that US is not even in the top 5 countries when it comes to per capita GDP.

Here is another chart I made from 2009 World Bank data (Wikipedia) that shows the per capita GDP of some of the top regions.

I was expecting to see Finland there somewhere, only because they made broadband a legal right some days ago!, but they are at 21 in this list.

The provisional WPI Inflation numbers for July 2010 were released today, and the number was in single digits for the first time this year.

These are provisional numbers, and the number itself is just 0.03% shy of two digits, so there is a very good chance that it touches double digits (especially because the initial numbers for the past couple of months were revised higher).

Here is the breakup of the WPI Index along with the inflation numbers for some select items for July.

As you can see – fuel, power, light and lubricants contributed most to last month’s figures, and that was because of the hike in the fuel prices.

Food inflation has eased a bit with the onset of a decent monsoon this time, and hopefully things will be better here-on.  This is especially important because food inflation has been really bad these past years, and it is best exemplified in this chart from an article by Dr. Subir Gokarn, Deputy Governor, RBI.

The red line is Primary Articles which largely consists of Food Products, and that has been really high dragging the WPI number along with it. Any reduction in that number will help ease inflation a bit.

The good monsoon will assist this time, but I wonder how many bad monsoons it will take for us to develop a solution that is not limited to tinkering policy rates, and rather tackle issues like irrigation, food storage, distribution etc.

Inflation is on everyone’s minds these days, and when someone brings up this topic, they usually talk about food inflation, and how milk has gotten expensive and tomatoes have shot through the roof.

I thought I’d see how the data around this looks,  and I went to the website of the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, and downloaded the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) for 2010.

From there I calculated the percentage inflation on various items, and found these results. These are the food articles that have gained in price in 2010.

Not everything went up this year, there were a few things that went down as well. Here is a chart that shows those.

I was a little surprised to see that onions have fallen in prices so sharply, but on further research I found that this is only due to a higher base in the beginning of 2010. The wholesale price of onion was up to Rs. 1200 – Rs. 1300 per quintal in Nashik at the beginning of the year, and was reduced to half of that by May.

I saw a story on Financial Express from May that a bumper onion harvest is expected this year, and the production is expected to grow to 8.5 lakh tons from 7.6 lakh tons last year.  The fall in potato prices also seems to be due to the high base effect, and I won’t be surprised if other fall in prices can be explained by that as well.

Monsoon seems to be progressing well, and one can only hope that inflation (at least food inflation comes under control), and doesn’t rear its ugly head again.

PS. The numbers on tomatoes were all screwed up, so I couldn’t include them in these calculations.

The big news today is that the government has freed petrol prices, and raised prices of kerosene, diesel, LPG, and cooking gas prices.

From Reuters:

A panel of ministers increased prices of state-subsidised diesel, kerosene and cooking gas prices, which could help reduce the fiscal deficit from the projected 5.5 percent of 2010/11 GDP and free up revenues for other programmes.

The panel said petrol prices would be market driven, rising 3.50 rupees per litre, while kerosene prices would rise by 3 rupees a litre. While petrol is mainly used by the middle class for cars, kerosene is used by the poor for power.

Diesel prices will rise 2 rupees per litre and will be freed up in the future. Cooking gas prices were raised by 35 rupees a cylinder.

I looked up the Report of the Expert Group on a Viable and Sustainable System of Pricing of Petroleum Products on the Ministry of Petroleum website, and it had a very useful chart on page 11.

This table shows the indicative retail price of Petrol, Diesel, Kerosene and LPG at various levels of International prices at Delhi.

This table is like a guide or approximation to what you can expect at various price levels, so at $100 a barrel – petrol is likely to cost around Rs. 60, and the current international price is about $77 a barrel.

No one likes a price rise, but at least this table will give you a sense of what to expect under different price levels. More importantly, it shows that if the oil price doubles from say $60 to $120 – the petrol price need not double to match it, which is what most people would probably think of when they hear about freeing up petrol prices.