Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan PhD

IPEF trade pillar must be converted into a trade agreement suggest experts — I write based on suggestions from top Indian domain experts ⁦@ETPolitics⁩ ⁦@Psm_cuts⁩ — economictimes.indiatimes.com…

Team Infisum was honored to engage with Consulate General of India in Seattle, Mr. Prakash Gupta, and present our book on India-US synergies. Productive discussions on strengthening collaboration and shared opportunities ahead. #IndiaUS #Infisum #Collaboration

Great reconnecting with Dr. Ram Bala at IIT2026 after nearly two decades. Insightful discussions on AI-centered enterprises, contextual AI, and innovation-driven collaboration. Looking forward to future engagements. #Infisum #AI #Innovation #IIT2026

Great to share our founder @badrinarayanang 's meeting with Prof Terrie Walmsley and Prof John Eklund @UniversityofSo5

Excited to share our meeting with Jack Hedge - looking forward to many collaborations!

My view of IMEC as an #IndoAtlantic Connectivity Partnership -- with four cardinal/adjacent regions that warrant more India-EU dialogue and cooperation. Part of the CSEP-FES report being released on Monday with multiple expert contributions and findings, including a cracking IMEC GDP growth estimate by @badrinarayanang.

Aparna Preethan & @badrinarayanang use CGE modelling to examine the economy-wide implications of reducing tariff protection for India’s steel industry. The analysis finds that a 90% tariff reduction could lead to: • US$237m increase in GDP • US$612.5m increase in aggregate exports • ~1% decline in domestic steel output • Gains for downstream sectors including machinery, automobiles and electronics The paper also models a phased 50% tariff reduction over five years, with steel output remaining resilient as the industry continues to grow. The analysis covers tariffs only; non-tariff measures are not quantified. Read the paper: csep.org/discussion-note/is-… #TradeLog #IndiaAhead @SteelMinIndia @DoC_GoI @CimGOI @NITIAayog @steel_indian @FollowCII @eepcindia @siamindia @jpc_indiansteel

This paper by @davidautor & co-authors is one of the most important papers to date in the space of what AI does to learning. It's highly credible. And very much consistent with my own experience with use of agentic AI in research and teaching. nber.org/papers/w35720

The premise of my forthcoming book "Messy Jobs" is that these guys have no idea what people do in their jobs. If you want to read or listen to someone who really understands the labour market, here is one excellent podcast by David Deming. hbs.edu/managing-the-future-…

Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow. No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it. This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in. Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again. What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive. The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn't weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.

Last week I posted a new paper with Patrick Norrick: “Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World.” We chose the title deliberately. No society in history has experienced the fertility levels now seen in South Korea, China, Thailand, Colombia, Chile, and many other countries. Our knowledge of the causes (and of the economic consequences) remains far more limited than most public discussion acknowledges. Much of what we write is, at best, educated conjecture. The paper also struggles against a space limit. We wrote 20,000 words, far from the 250,000 or so we would need to address some issues in more detail (if I had the time and resources to hide away for a year, I could do that, but not now). That means some ideas are only sketched. Nonetheless, we emphasize several important points. First, fertility has fallen very fast everywhere: rich and poor countries, east and west, north and south, conservative and liberal societies, religious and non-religious societies (with the exception of the Jewish population of Israel; fertility has also collapsed among the Muslim population within the pre-1967 borders), you name it. Even in sub-Saharan Africa we see fast and unprecedented drops in fertility (alas, from a high initial level). Second, and this is really interesting, the fertility collapse has been concentrated in poor and lower-middle-income countries much more than in rich countries. By now, income per capita and fertility are positively correlated within OECD countries. We conjecture this will hold globally in a few decades. Third, and related to the second point, the fertility collapse has been concentrated among poor and lower-middle-income women within countries. In countries such as the U.S., the rich and highly educated now have more children than the poor and less educated. Fourth, we document why we do not understand the data from the U.N. World Population Prospects. See, for example, Tables A.1 and A.2. Fifth, we explain why some proposed mechanisms struggle when confronted with the data. A more subtle point is at work here. Many commentators do not seem to understand the difference between proximate causes and ultimate causes. Yes, births might have gone down because fewer women are in long-run relationships. That is the proximate cause. But you need to explain why fewer women are in long-run relationships (the ultimate cause), and saying that they spend more years in school, to take one example, does not get us very far. Why do they spend more years in school? Once you start down the whole chain of reasoning, things become much harder than they seem. The paper can be found here: sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Demog… Comments always welcome!

Almost two decades back a young promising scholar working in an Indian think-tank in Delhi was handpicked by Prof. Thomas Hertel of Purdue University to work in his relatively new CGE lab & GTAP database. Today he is one of the most demanded trade analysts in the world. He is none other than Dr. Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan, an internationally renowned economist specializing in Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) modeling and trade policies. He was in Delhi recently and called on us. It was a pleasure meeting you @badrinarayanang. Looking forward to see you more often here.

It was a pleasure to welcome Dr. Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan (@badrinarayanang), renowned trade economist and Founder of @InfiSumModel, to @RIS_NewDelhi. We discussed #GlobalValueChains, digital trade, supply chain resilience, critical minerals, and India's evolving trade strategy, while exploring the role of CGE & GTAP modelling in strengthening evidence-based trade policy, research, capacity building and policy dialogue. @MEAIndia @aparnaray_ifs @SudhakarDalela @AIC_aseanindia @cmec_ris @DakshinNews @NITIAayog #TradePolicy #EconomicModelling #GTAP #CGE #PolicyResearch #EconomicResilience

India generated 13.98 lakh tonnes of e-waste in FY2024-25. The India-EU FTA and Nordic partnership should now support recycling plants, metal recovery and formal collection. Sweden offers a practical route. #EWaste #IndiaEUFTA policycircle.org/opinion/e-w…

India has a structural advantage in quantum computing. Its size inherently creates challenging optimisation issues, offering a practical testing ground for quantum applications. @badrinarayanang #Quantum #computing tinyurl.com/328dutrz

As the weakening rupee pushes inflationary pressures due to rising crude oil import prices, should RBI raise interest rates? An analysis by Sarika Rachuri & @badrinarayanang governancenow.com/views/colu…