In this week’s wrapup, we talk about India’s economic growth, the concept of living wages, Apple’s latest court battle, India’s soon-to-be-launched insurance platform, and a Nobel Prize winner’s research.

For the markets edition, we tell you why the delisting of ICICI Securities ran into some controversy. When ICICI Bank decided that it didn’t want its subsidiary listed on the stock markets anymore, it latched on to a new rule by SEBI that didn’t make the shareholders of the broking entity happy. They tried to resist but the end result shows that it was all futile. ICICI Bank got its way.

You can read all about it in our Markets edition.

Meanwhile, here’s a recap of what we wrote over the week.

Much to cheer about India’s PMI!

How do you judge if an economy is growing?

Most of us would point to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to gauge growth.

But the issue with GDP is that it takes time to tally up all these complex bits and pieces of an economy. And we get the results every quarter. It tells us what has already happened in the recent past. So it’s a lagging indicator.

Ideally, we need something else that can give us a more immediate snapshot of the economy. We need a metric that signals how the future growth is shaping up. We need a leading indicator. And that’s where the Purchasing Managers’ Index (PMI) comes in.

What do India’s latest PMI numbers tell us? You have to read Monday’s story to find out.

Can a living wage replace the minimum wage?

Most companies typically don’t care whether their employees can achieve financial security. They only care about their profits. So they’d prefer to pay employees only in line with the perceived labour contribution. For instance, if a worker contributes ₹10 in extra revenue each day, the company would only prefer to keep them on the payroll if they could pay them less than that.

And over time, when countries realised that companies could end up exploiting their workers, some of them instituted something called a ‘minimum wage’. It’s the bare minimum that the company would pay its employees per hour.

But now, a concept from at least as far back as the 1700s is emerging again. Everyone talking about a ‘living’ wage.

What’s that and why should we care about it? Find out in Tuesday’s edition.

America sues Apple

The US Department of Justice has slapped a lawsuit against Apple.

But rather than pointing out issues with its App Store policies alone like other cases have done, the DOJ is attacking the very core of Apple’s ecosystem — the integration between its various products.

It wants us to know that Apple has consistently degraded its messaging app to work with platforms like Android, that Apple banned cloud streaming games because it feared people wouldn’t want to buy its expensive hardware anymore, and that Apple is hurting the smartwatch market by preventing strong connections between third-party smartwatches and the Apple ecosystem.

And if you want to read the finer details of the matter, check out our explainer from Wednesday.

An explainer on Bima Sugam

Our country’s insurance regulator IRDAI (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India) gave the go-ahead to launch a new online marketplace for insurance. It’s called ‘Bima Sugam’.

Think of it as a one-stop platform where Indians can find all kinds of insurance policies offered by different companies. And if something catches their eye, they can swipe right and make a purchase.

And IRDAI’s goal is commendable. It wants to fix India’s insurance underpenetration problem.

But will an e-commerce-like platform for insurance solve this? Or will it hurt the insurance distributors who’ve been instrumental in getting insurance to all parts of the country?

Our story from Thursday breaks this down.

Daniel Kahneman’s Prospect Theory

Daniel Kahneman passed away on 27th March and your LinkedIn feed is probably filled with people telling you why Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is the best book ever written.

And there’s no denying it’s a great book. But it also draws heavily from the research he conducted in the preceding decades. Research that won Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist with no formal training in economics, the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. We’re talking about research highlighting how human beings are not rational — which is a central tent of most traditional economic models — and how we feel 2 times more pain from a loss than happiness from a gain.

In Friday’s story, we dived into these ideas.

That’s it from us this week. Have a great weekend!

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