The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) is delighted to invite you to a Seminar titled Business Groups and Market Power in India on Thursday, December 12, 2024 from 11:30 AM to 1:00 PM (IST).

The Seminar will feature a presentation by Simon Commander, Managing Partner, Altura Partners and Naveen Joseph Thomas, Associate Professor and Associate Dean, JSGP Online Programmes and International Collaborations. The presentation will be followed by a discussion with Payal Malik, Professor (Visiting), ICRIER, moderated by Shishir Gupta, Senior Fellow, CSEP. Laveesh Bhandari, President, CSEP will deliver the opening remarks.

The seminar will be held at the CSEP Auditorium, 6, Dr Jose P Rizal Marg, Chanakyapuri, New Delhi – 110021. Please note that this is an in-person event only. If you are in Delhi on the day, please join us for the seminar. The event will be available on the CSEP website and YouTube channel upon completion

Register here to attend

About the event

Abstract: Using a rich dataset, we analyse changes in market structure in India between 2000 and 2020, focussing on the place of business groups – notably family-owned groups – in the Indian economy. We examine concentration in markets and market shares by industry as well as their dynamics, including diversification. We show that although market concentration has been falling, a bloc of high-concentration sectors remains. Further, business groups have continued to pursue diversification across sectors. We find that the ratio of revenues to variable costs – a measure of the markup – has shifted upwards, particularly after 2013. We also document the striking persistence of these large business groups, as measured by the ratio of their revenues to GDP. We then discuss possible policy options.

Opening Remarks

Laveesh Bhandari

Laveesh Bhandari is President and a Senior Fellow at CSEP.  Dr Bhandari has published widely on subjects related to sustainable livelihoods, industrial, economic, and social reforms in India, economic geography, and financial inclusion. He received his PhD in economics from Boston University for which he was awarded the Best Thesis in International Economics. He has taught economics at Boston University and IIT Delhi. Apart from applied economics research, Dr Bhandari has built, seeded, and exited from three companies in the research, analytics, and digital domains, including Indicus Analytics, a leading economic research firm. Currently, he is conducting research on issues of inclusion, India’s energy transition, and how it will impact the government as well as the economy.

Presenters

Simon Commander

Simon Commander is Managing Partner of Altura Partners which provides strategic and economic policy advice to decision makers in governments and companies in emerging economies (www.alturapartners.org). He is also at IE Business School in Madrid and Independent Economics in London. He was Senior Adviser at both the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London between 1998 and 2011 and before that at the World Bank in Washington DC from 1988 to 1998. He holds an MA from Oxford University and a PhD from Cambridge University. His latest book – ‘The Connections World: The Future of Asian Capitalism’ (with Saul Estrin) was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.

Naveen Joseph Thomas

Naveen Joseph Thomas has a PhD in Economics from the Department of Economics, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi. He received his MSc in Economics from the TERI School of Advanced Studies and his BSc(H) in Physics from St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. His research interests are in Industrial Policy, Labour Economics and issues of the MSME sector. With over a decade of teaching experience, Dr Thomas is the Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Programme Strategy and Academic Affairs at the Jindal School of Government and Public Policy, O P Jindal Global University. His current research focuses on the big business groups and market structures in India, the multi-plant phenomenon in the Indian Manufacturing sector, evaluating the impact of the deregulation of labour laws in India, the manmade fibre segment of the Indian textile and apparel industry, and the electronics industry in India.

Discussant

Payal Malik

Payal Malik is a public policy economist. Her areas of expertise are competition law and policy, digital markets, antitrust litigation, technology policy, and economic regulation of network industries. She has been an Economic Adviser and Head of the Economics Division at the Competition Commission of India for ten years between 2012-2023, where she played a key role in advising the Commission on the economics of competition law across an expansive range of markets and led interfaces between the CCI, sector regulators, government, industry and the international competition community.

Notably, she was the Convener of the Working Group on New Age Economy and Bigdata constituted by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, Government of India (GoI), for the Competition Law Review Committee (CLRC). She was also nominated as a member of the task force of the GoI formulating the e-commerce policy of India and member of a sub-group of the Committee on Digital Competition Law (CDCL), devising an ex-ante regulatory mechanism for digital markets through a separate legislation.

Moderator

Shishir Gupta

Shishir Gupta is a Senior Fellow at CSEP in New Delhi. His work focuses on many aspects of the Indian economy, including economic growth, governance and institutions, urbanisation, and sub-national reforms, among others. Before joining CSEP in August 2020, Shishir was a Fellow with the McKinsey Global Institute for 14 years, where he led multi-ethnic teams in India and the US on policy research and client studies across multiple domains. He has written widely on these topics in MGI reports and research papers as well as in popular media. He is an economist by education, with an MA and MPhil from the Delhi School of Economics.

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for general queries and Ayesha Manocha at AManocha@csep.org for media queries.