Economist Kaushik Basu’s journals offer a fascinating inside view of a policy advisor’s life
An excerpt from ‘Policymaker’s Journal: From New Delhi to Washington DC’, by Kaushik Basu.
8 August 2012, Wednesday
Some two weeks before 31st July, my last day as CEA, I got a call from the World Bank president’s office. A man with a slight Indian accent, one of his assistants, a Sikh gentleman I later gathered, said that the president wanted to talk to me about various things. So much so that he wondered if I could do a brief trip to Washington.
I thought that since Jim Yong Kim had taken over as World Bank president recently (in June) and was quite a greenhorn in this kind of work, he must be calling up chief economists or treasury chiefs of various countries to get a briefing on their economies. That was a noble enough mission but it was too much to expect me to fly all the way to Washington to brief him. So I said I was happy to talk but that we could just as well have a long conversation on the phone.