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India \par
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development \par
}

\centerline{\it I. Addressing Challenges of Landlocked Developing Countries}

Investing in developing nations is the next step for the global economy:
these countries, while often lacking in legal and physical
infrastructure, have large untapped labor and land reserves.
With national intervention or international investment, countries like
China, India, and Vietnam have been able to achieve very high growth in
recent years, putting them on the path to effective international
economy.
Trade deals and globalization through foreign investment are the key to
accelerating the growth of these countries beyond the value within their
own borders.
UNCTAD is a necessary facilitator of many of these deals, and India
would love to see continued development of these mutually beneficial
international relationships.
UNCTAD, however, needs to create generic policy solutions that can be
fitted to members of the international community on a reasonable basis.
These include regulatory import/export standards, frameworks for trade
deals that reduce barriers for businesses, and data-based internal
investment and development strategies.
Landlocked countries would be particularly benefited by such a programme
because they face unique roadblocks to development: cooperation with
specific neighbors is strictly necessary to even bring goods to market.
India supports solutions that are focused on allowing free enterprise
and market investment to flourish rather than pouring money into
hypothetical industries, a strategy that has failed time and time again.

India is deeply invested in the infrastructural development of its
landlocked neighbors, Afghan\-is\-tan and Nepal.
Historically, India has been a major supporter of these two nations.
For example, in the early 2000s, India developed Afghanistan as a trade
partner to help stabilize the country---by giving the country \$700
million in aid. [\cite]
India also constructed a road from Afghanistan to an Indian port to
reduce trade barriers for the landlocked nation's access to global
trade.
India's landlocked neighbors are both developing nations with high rural
populations, so their internal economic development will be a priority.

Generally, landlocked nations need to be focused on catering to the
market needs (manufacturing inputs or final products) of their neighbors
and providing both their own citizens and investors the capacity to
develop new markets and industries.
Unfortunately, landlocked developing nations rarely have sufficient tax
revenues to create large infrastructure projects, so public-private
partnerships and land-backed infrastructure loans from sovereign
neighbors will likely pave the way for road, utility, and ICT expansion.
Some of these effects have already been observed by programs like
China's Belt and Road Initiative. [\cite]
Public-private partnerships may form as a transnational corporation
funding public utilities in exchange for preferential treatment in those
specific regions (similar to the international patent system).
The primary challenge for these public-private partnerships is
Internal economic development would be accelerated by incentivizing
transnational investors to create infrastructure.
A major challenge is maintaining the legal/regulatory infrastructure in
countries where bribery is more effective than legal decrees.
A sustained presence of corporate lobbies can often bootstrap a
business-friendly environment (in terms of reductions of regulatory
barriers and increasing openness), as long as sweet-heart deals are
rejected by the top levels of government.
These deals should be as plural as possible, to reduce the probability
of corruption, and while regional stakeholders should be consulted, this
is primarily a matter of national policy for landlocked countries.

To transition from highly rural, disconnected economic patterns, like
observed in Afghanistan, Nepal, and India, to more connected ones,
infrastructure expansion is critical.
With regions far from coastal ports, India has developed its
infrastructure by creating zones where investment and entrepreneurship
are encouraged.
Recently, India has created the Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor
Project, a government development initiative that funds connective
infrastructure in six different Indian states, supporting investment in
industry along this corridor [\cite].
It expects to see significant new capital investment and job growth for
locals because of access to regional and global markets.
India wants to help landlocked countries implement similar corridors
internally and externally, to connect to their coastal neighbors'
existing road and rail infrastructure without funding it through
damaging tariffs on goods.
India proposes that such developments are funded by a lending program,
where necessary, and otherwise supported by trade deal guarantees.
Nepal could, under such a trade deal, provide production guarantees to
Indian businesses in exchange for access to trade corridors.
Such a trade deal could also establish single regulatory standards to
hasten the transport process for Nepalese businesses to seaports.
This is of particular interest to India because India and Nepal have
enjoyed a fruitful trade relationship, but in order to support Nepalese
development, private Nepali businesses should be able to, by temporary
visas for drivers or contracts with Indian driving companies, access
global markets at standard rates, when it shares in the investment costs
of infrastructure.

This soft infrastructure of trade deals and regulatory partnerships
should continue to be encouraged by UNCTAD, and generic policy solutions
generated based on common ideals of free trade and mutual benefit.
One possible reform would be the elimination of double-registration of
goods (for import and export in India) automated away by UNCTAD-funded
software.

Beyond infrastructure, the development of diverse markets is necessary
for the continued growth of landlocked nations.
Developing countries tend to focus on primary commodities as their
economic backbone, which is a useful starting point.
Many of these primary commodities function as manufacturing inputs for
Indian or international manufacturing.
Because of the cheap availability of these resources in developing
nations, national subsidies on internal use of these materials creates
the environment necessary for higher-tech manufactured goods which can
help stabilize developing countries' economies.
The investment driven by government subsidies, however, can only occur
if two conditions are met: strong protections of property rights for
investors, and loosened regulations on investment into capital like
factories necessary for using these natural resources at a cheaper price
than international competitors.
Such economic development has succeeded at developing landlocked nations
economically, reducing the impact of price shocks, as has been seen in
Austria's development of a high-tech export-based economy [\cite].
But prerequisite to that development was the trade organization that is
the European Union.

India proposes that UNCTAD strictly avoid strategies like NGO-based
assistance or small lending or investment from internal reserves.
UNCTAD should instead focus on facilitating trade deals and
business-friendly economic environments, by creating policy guidelines
and tools (software or otherwise) to track development progress in these
countries.
There are four central tenets that any effective plan should constitute.
First among these is trade pacts that eliminate trade barriers wherever
possible.
Landlocked countries already seek this kind of deal with their
neighbors, but UNCTAD and orgs like the World Trade Organization can
design deals that protect the interests of coastal nations while still
allowing landlocked nations' products transit.
These frameworks would ultimately hasten negotiations between landlocked
and coastal nations because they should be designed with data-backed
policy in mind.
Second, a plan should create a legal foundation for cross-border
infrastructure.
In many ways, this relies on trade pacts from the first layer, but
landlocked countries and their neighbors need to be able to enter joint
ventures to create continuous road, rail, and ICT infrastructure.
Third, the ease of doing business is critical for developing new
high-tech manufacturing industry.
Targeted subsidies on primary commodities and reduced regulatory burden
may, for businesses, facilitate use of the infrastructure built by these
plans.
The fourth tenet is unbiased metrics.
UNCTAD already focuses on this in much of its work [\cite], but
improvement of these metrics is always possible.
Continuously available data on corruption, growth, worker conditions,
and external investment is often hard to examine, especially for
developing countries with larger informal economies.
UNCTAD should fund unbiased reporting and software tools to provide this
data for developing nations.

\iffalse
Notes
-----
- Afghanistan and Nepal are landlocked neighbors
- Focus
    - Allowing investors (corporations) to hold stake in these countries
    - PPP + deregulation
    - trade corridors
- Examples
    - Delhi-Mumbai
    - Belt and Road
    - High-tech industry in Austria
- Plan
    1. Trade pacts with guarantees
    2. Developing cross-border infrastructure
    3. Regulatory standards to simplify doing business
    4. Funding for software or an unbiased organization to provide clear
    metrics on corruption, growth, worker conditions, and investment for
    countries
\fi

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\centerline{Works Cited}
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[\cite] {\tt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan\%E2\%80\%93India\_relations\#Since\_2001}

[\cite] {\tt https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/jul/30/what-china-belt-road-initiative-silk-road-explainer}

[\cite] {\tt https://dipp.gov.in/programmes-and-schemes/infrastructure/industrial-corridors}

[\cite] {\tt http://www.unis.unvienna.org/unis/en/topics/lldc.html}

[\cite] {\tt https://unctad.org/news/few-developing-countries-overperform-frontier-technologies-most-lag-behind}

}

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\centerline{\it II. Promoting Entrepreneurship for Sustainable and
Inclusive Development}

% I so want to advocate Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's mutualism, but I'm
% roleplaying as a goddamn neoliberal state.
% Also Luke Smith has a thing on GDP that sort of rebukes this whole
% essay.

Entrepreneurship is critical to the creation of new markets for rural
and urban populations.
Pro-entrepreneurial culture, access to finance, and the regulatory
environment are the most important barriers for developing nations to
create a flourishing business environment.
Historically, before the invention and pervasion of information and
communication technologies, countries have industrialized through
urbanization policies, but rural entrepreneurship has become a growing
and much more necessary force in developing nations like India [\cite].
However, with significant tribal and village living, ICT penetration is
not needed for most initial entrepreurialism in agricultural, light
manufacturing, or mineral and forest products.
Inside of this rural/urban split is another divide: group
entrepreneurship and individual entrepreneurship.
Small groups and individuals tend to function better as entrepreneurial
units for social development, as observed in industrialized nations.
Therefore, empowering individuals and creating a culture of empowerment
is central to such development practices.

However, modern developing nations have an extra tool in their belt than
early industrial countries: global financial markets, angel investors,
and existing businesses that can bootstrap developing nations.
In addition to internal reforms, creating valuable investment
opportunities for local companies is necessary for capital to flow
towards entrepreneurs who can utilize opportunities opened up by
development plans.
For investment to be viable for creating prosperity, property rights,
intellectual and material, need to be strictly enforced, and bankruptcy
destigmatized and legally bolstered, to allow entrepreneurs to take
risks for their communities.
Lending and investing mean little, especially in high-tech industries
(one of the best sectors for new entrepreneurship), if intellectual
property rights are poorly enforced, the effects of which we've seen on
China with the sinking global opinion of Chinese copycat goods.
The creation of such investment opportunities may include R\&D spending,
infrastructure spending, and the development of new asset classes from
existing government holdings, all of which India is attempting to do to
achieve growth and development, [\cite] [\cite] [\cite] and it's
working.
PM Modi, with these policies, has been able to attract major investment
in the country and notably improved the economic state of the nation, by
allowing businesses to do business instead of the government trying to
play that role.

These pro-business divestment and protection policies are necessary
components for creating urban and semi-urban development, but further
investment is strictly necessary to reach rural and disenfranchised
groups.
By using compulsory education policy, India has been able to achieve a
95\% attendance rate for primary schools, which means cultural change is
able to be meaningfully achieved by simply modifying existing teaching
patterns [\cite].
Many other developing nations have comparable policy levers, so with
policies designed for the 10 competencies UNCTAD outlines in EMPRETEC
briefings, [\cite] India recommends creating primary school standards
that teach entrepreneurial values, which can be allocated special
instructional days by school boards.
Ideally, entrepreneurs from local communities should be brought into
schools to speak, which should not be a difficult feat because
entrepreneurs tend to be community leaders.
India also hopes to provide additional resources for youth to get
involved with their communities through schools, temples, or local
businesses.
Programs that help connect young people to the economy can be
kickstarted by non-governmental organizations that help local areas
create and implement no- or low-cost plans for experiential learning or
networking, two critical entrepreneurial skills.

Gender inequality in entrepreneurship is, for India, a product of
traditional rural society, and in the long term, education will be
sufficient to create cultural change, but in the short term, India and
many other developing nations need to provide resources directly to
women entrepreneurs to counterbalance the cultural bias.
Entrepreneurs are go-getters and believe in mastering their own fate, so
conferences designed for female community leaders and offering free
consulting on regulatory issues can

Pro-entepreneurial messaging in schools can make massive impacts on the
lives of pupils and on equitability for women and ethnic minorities.
And while urbanization has historically been necessary for major social
developments, rural entrepreneurialism is a primary concern for India
given the large rural populations in most developing nations.
Finance for rural entrepreneurs often requires alternative mechanisms to
achieve results because angel investors rarely have the scope for small
agricultural, services, or natural resource-dependent industries.
Some of these enterprises require little capital, so much of their
funding can be handled by the ``Friends, Family, Fools'' mechanism, but
this entirely precludes small and medium sized businesses that require
startup capital in the ``missing middle'' between USD\$50,000 and
USD\$1M.
Many villages where these rural developments occur don't have the
capital backing to create a new small or medium business, as classified
by [1], so India recommends developing nations create legal frameworks
that legitimize inter-village crowdfunding/share-based investment so
rural entrepreneurs have a legal foundation beyond the social
foundations that entrepreneurs build with their own skills.
UNCTAD would be helpful in writing policy suggestions and communicating
with rural entrepreneurs to understand what they need.
This may include greater access to supply chains by deregulating
transport for material inputs, or rural entrepreneurship could be best
developed by loosening labor laws for ventures that are often maintained
by the general community.

In order to achieve growth and connectivity in developing nations,
UNCTAD needs to prioritize rural entrepreneurship and cultural change
for those regions.
There are three key actions that developing countries can take to
facilitate investments in their economy and build up entrepreneurs as
community leaders.
The first is to create investment opportunities by developing new
infrastructure in existing supply chains and to incentivize expanding
into other markets by providing tax advantages to companies.
This can attract foreign investment and allows new homegrown
entrepreneurs to take advantage of the downstream push for businesses.
The second is to bring entrepreneur education into schools, especially
rural ones, for girls and boys, using experiential learning and projects
centered around building up the 10 Personal Competencies during the
school day.
The third is to legally legitimate social finance mechanisms: several
villages can band together and form a community bank that goes into a
new venture which isn't large enough for angel investment.
This would close the missing middle for rural environments, allowing
farms, services, and miners to produce more with machinery.
But even beyond funding, formalizing enterprises is crucial for the
Indian economy to function on the global scene.
That is why India recommends offering free consulting and workshops for
business registration and handling the regulations.
This policy pays dividends in equitability and in business creation
because it connects people knowledgeable about the system to people
knowledgeable about the business.
This often works better than simply decreasing the size of regulations
but still requiring entrepreneurs to go through the process entirely
independently.
This gets wrapped into conferences for women and marginalized groups
because such agencies would be flexible and desirable for entrepreneur
conferences.
Such a program would help informal entrepreneurs incorporate and
legitimize their businesses, and reduce gender or opportunity gaps
greatly.
UNCTAD, national governments, and local communities should work together
to create these programmes and provide developing economies with access
to the wonderful tool that is global markets.

\iffalse
Notes
-----
- Modi's policy
    - R\&D from gov't (privatize the gains)
    - Create new assets from gov't stores
    - Protect "intellectual property"
- Make bankruptcy easy and destigmatized (is that a Modi thing? Haven't
  looked)
    - Serial entrepreneurs lol
- Hyperindividualist rhetoric where possible
    - Will be worse for rural areas where crowd-funding or mutual
      finance may be needed
    - Entrepreneurs = "the wheat over the chaff"
- Treat conservative social views as products exclusively of school
  socialization
    - World Bank 95\% attendance rates
    - Indoctrinate them kids early
- Gender inequity
- Rural entrepreneurship
    - Missing middle
    - Crowdfunding legal frameworks
\fi

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\centerline{Works Cited}

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[\cite] {\tt
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/304112617\_Rural\_Development\_in\_India\_\discretionary{}{}{}through\_Entrepreneurship\_An\_Overview\_of\_the\_Problems\_and\_Challenges}

[\cite] {\tt https://unctad.org/news/few-developing-countries-overperform-frontier-technologies-most-lag-behind}

[\cite] {\tt https://yourstory.com/2021/02/privatisation-unleash-exciting-opportunities-boost-investment-india-inc}

[\cite] {\tt https://www.telegraphindia.com/business/modi-seeks-investments-worth-1-5-trillion-offers-lower-tax-rates/cid/1796707}

[\cite] {\tt https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2011/09/20/education-in-india}

[\cite] {\tt https://empretec.unctad.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/EG\_eng.compressed.pdf}
}

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