Estelle Metayer writes:  Businesses can have blind spots and they can be costly, causing companies to overinvest in risky ventures or to fail to take advantage of emerging opportunities. Successful leaders are careful to identify their company’s blind spots and introduce mechanisms to ensure that no harm will come from them.

When Amy Norman and Stella Ma started “Little Passports,” a website that invites parents to teach their children geography in an interesting way, they were turned down over and over again as they made presentations to venture capitaists

Today “Little Passports” makes $5 million a year and is a success by any standard.  They were funded by Golden Seeds, a venture capital group that has about 77% female members.

The basic argument about women’s money being available is that they make only 72 cents to every dollar a man makes.  But clearly women are stepping up with money, and focusing on women entrepreneurs is a worthy cause. Word is out among men that women are unwilling to take risks.  Simply not so.

Africa is desperately short of investment. Infrastructure alone needs $90 billion a year.  Many of the normal routes by which capital gets into economies are blocked in Africa.

Only private equity has a direct route.  Private equity raised $4 billion for Africa last year, building toothpaste factories and providing modbile phone service.  Handing cash to pioneers in Africa is often seen as less risky than putting money in underdeveloped pubic markets.

Private equity has been warmly welcomed in Africa.  But Africa needs more than these funds can provide. Often they want to sell the firms they buy in five years. Long term investment is needed.  Uganda’s privatized electric grid gets a state-guaranteed return of 20% a yaer on all dollars invested in the grid.  African economies have grown 5% or more over the past decade.  The continent’s mddle class is projected to triple (one billion people)  by 2060.

Capital restrictions are in place in the rich world which prohibit long-term illiquid investments, such as ports, railways and roads.  African governments are also to blame.  Investors have not forgotten the natioanalizations across the continent in the 1960s and 1970s.

Rich counties need to change their regulations to get capital flowing freely.  African governments need to set up large regional stock exchanges to provide liquidity, security and ease of access.  The conitnent is ripe for investment if the right climate prevails.

Daniel Yergin writes:  American shale oil has become the decisive new factor in the world oil market in a way that could not have been imagined five years ago. It has proved to be a truly disruptive technology. But will that impact continue in a world of low prices?

Oil is now below $50 a barrel, a price too low for a good deal of the new shale oil development to make economic sense. Yet output is likely to continue to rise by another 500,000 barrels per day in the first half of 2015 because of sheer momentum and commitments already made.

Come the middle of the year, however, growth will flatten out. Producers will work hard to improve efficiency and lower costs, but in 2016, at these prices, American output could decline. Production elsewhere in the world will also be flattening.

But by then, the world economy might be doing better, stimulating oil demand. Prices could start rising again. If the gulf producers have their way, prices will not go back to $100 a barrel. Even at prices well below $100, American shale oil producers will find ways to drive down costs and output will start rising again. And the world’s new swing producer will find itself back in the swing of things.

This is the first time a US president will be visiting India twice. Why is Obama placing such importance on India, and what does he expect from a country that was formerly in the Soviet camp and has disappointed so many, despite decades of “liberalization”?

Major bilateral issues are part of the trip’s agenda. Defense, energy and counterterrorism are the main course for the talks, but President Obama’s top concern is deepening economic ties with India. The visit comes at a particularly fortuitous time. Both the US and India are on promising growth curves. It is entirely possible that Obama’s visit could mark the beginning of the most vigorous US-India economic cooperation since the beginning of the liberalization process nearly a quarter century ago.

Obama’s visit can potentially help right US-India economic relations and send a clear signal to American businesses that India can be a serious, stable place to grow.

1) Tax

There is wide agreement that the Indian government’s decision to contemptuously disregard a Supreme Court decision and overturn 50 years of settled Indian law to implement retrospective taxation on certain types of major business transactions has derailed Indian economic growth and given the country a notorious reputation in investment circles. Although it was the Congress-led government that decided to overturn a court’s decision and tax past offshore M&A (mergers and acquisitions) transactions, the Modi government has done little substantively to reverse that decision, despite carefully worded promises that it would not undertake any new cases based on retroactive tax laws.

While there are signs that India and the United States will sign a significant agreement to resolve certain other types of tax cases, the Indians must understand there are no half measures for repealing a tax that marked the Indian tax regime as untrustworthy and out-of-step with modern practice.

Obama’s second priority will be to persuade India to change its inflexible and archaic labor laws.

Obama’s third priority will be to seek a reduction to India’s infamous red tape. While some “single-window” clearance systems have been implemented with fanfare, anyone who has to deal with Indian bureaucracy still has to run from pillar to post. Many promising areas of growth have ground to a halt on mistaken bureaucratic action or complete inaction.

More importantly, even a “yes” in India infamously means “maybe” rather than an unequivocal “yes,” and this ruffles American feathers.

Modi has made very public efforts to make the bureaucracy work better or, simply, to show up for work.

One testy issue that doesn’t matter a whole lot is intellectual property (IP). This is a hot-button issue in both countries, but it is almost exclusively focused on pharmaceutical patents.

India has valid concerns about providing up-to-date medicines to its impoverished population at affordable prices, but it also needs to encourage domestic innovators who are being lured abroad by countries such as Singapore. The United States has valid concerns about enforcement of IP rights, but its bargaining position must not be held hostage by the large pharmaceutical companies. The US must recognize that compared to China, India is a virgin when it comes to IP violations. The courts will enforce foreign IP holders’ rights on a timely basis, and there is little “home cooking” when it comes to such decisions. IP holders in China would love to face the comparably minor challenges one meets in India.

There is a rational way forward here, one that allows India to impose rational and just price controls on drugs while allowing a vigorous IP regime that encourages innovation in the country. India requires fresh ideas and economic thinking on this issue rather than framing this as either a leftist defense of the poor or a craven collapse to outside business interests. For its part, the United States should help India find a balance and not let the pharmaceutical lobby dominate the discussion. The best selling point for “Make in India” is that the country will not rip off American intellectual property in the manner of China.

Prime Minister Modi deserves great credit for looking at India’s greater interests and reaching out to a country that only recently had him on a blacklist and barred from entry. President Obama has a great chance to reciprocate the gesture. Both leaders have a rare opportunity to help each other unlock India’s economic potential.

Ramesh Ponnuru writes:  Democrats have a knack for stumbling into trouble with mothers who aren’t in the paid labor force.

In the late 1990s, Senator Chris Dodd said that being a full-time homemaker was a “wonderful luxury” for women who “want to go play golf or go to the club and play cards.” In 2012, Democrats said Ann Romney, who raised five sons, had “never worked a day in her life.” And a few months ago, President Obama suggested that for mothers to leave the labor force for a few years is “not a choice we want Americans to make.”

Two of Obama’s new proposals reflect ‘mother’ blindness.  Obama wants to triple the existing tax credit for child-care expenses, and create a new credit for second earners. Those proposals will help some parents and couples, but have nothing to offer families where one parent concentrates on home-based tasks. The second-earner credit is probably too small to affect couples’ decisions about work and child-care arrangements. So its main effect will be to lower the share of the tax burden paid by two-earner couples who were going to be working even without the credit.

There are two standard economic justifications for shifting the tax burden in this way, neither of them convincing.

One is that two-earner couples have higher costs than single-earner couples making the same income, so it’s harder for them to pay the same taxes.

The second is  that a progressive tax code, when applied to families rather than individuals, can penalize second earners. A second earner will often pay a higher tax rate than she would if she were single and making the same income, because she moves to a higher bracket when she marries a wage earner. The tax code thus discourages her from working. That’s true, but it’s just a special case of the way taxes discourage work, and not one that seems especially unjust or destructive. Marriage is (among other things) an economic partnership, and this feature of the tax code reflects that it involves pooling resources.

If the second-earner credit ignores that feature of marriage, Obama’s other proposal ignores how little Americans like commercial child care.

Given these preferences, it would make more sense to enlarge the child tax credit — not the child-care credit — and let parents use it as they see fit rather than requiring them to use the commercial day care most of them try to avoid.

But as most homemakers could tell you, paid work isn’t everything.

Kirsten Korosec writes:  SolarCity, the largest installer of residential solar systems in the U.S., nearly doubled its workforce last year, hiring 4,000 people to do everything from system design and site surveys to installation and engineering.

The hiring spree at SolarCity isn’t slowing; it’s picking up speed as the company attempts to install twice as many rooftop solar systems than last year and readies its 1.2 million-square foot factory in New York, which is scheduled to reach full production in 2017.

Installers, panel makers, and even traditional fossil fuel energy companies helped U.S. solar employment grow nearly 22 percent in 2014.

The company’s expansion is indicative of what’s happening within the broader solar industry. More than 31,000 new solar jobs were created in the U.S. in 2014 bringing the total to 173,807—a 21.8 percent increase in employment since November 2013, according to a report released Thursday by The Solar Foundation. This is the second consecutive year that solar jobs have increased by at least 20 percent.

The solar industry is still dwarfed by the 9.8 million workers that the American Petroleum Industry says are employed the oil and gas industry.

Solar already employs more people than coal mining, which has 93,185 workers, and has added 50 percent more jobs in 2014 than the oil and gas pipeline construction industry (10,529) and the crude petroleum and natural gas extraction industry (8,688) did combined, according to the Solar Foundation.

One out of every 78 new jobs created in the U.S. over the past 12 months were created by the solar industry, representing nearly 1.3 percent of all jobs created in the country. Solar companies surveyed for the fifth annual census plan to add another 36,000 employees this year.

Third-party financing that allows homeowners to lease solar systems, a stabilizing manufacturing sector and utility-scale solar developers scrambling to finish projects before the federal investment tax credit drops from 30 percent to 10 percent on Jan. 1, 2017 has helped drive growth, says Andrea Luecke, president and executive director of The Solar Foundation.

The solar job-growth trend has spilled beyond the confines of companies solely dedicated to the renewable energy source.

NRG Energy, one of the largest U.S. independent power producers and owner of 88 fossil fuel and nuclear plants, is expanding its solar business rapidly. NRG’s Home Solar group, the residential solar division of NRG Home, hired 500 people in the past 12 months and now has 1,200 workers.

“We’re growing explosively in several markets,” NRG Home Solar president Kelcy Pegler Jr. said in an interview with Fortune on Thursday following the company’s investor day presentation.

As a result, Pegler’s residential home solar group plans to add “hundreds of jobs” this quarter and will double its current headcount in the next two years.

NRG Energy, which employs 10,000 people, reorganized last year into three business lines: NRG Business, NRG Home and NRG Renew. The company NRG -1.02% has a number of other solar-related jobs within NRG Renew and NRG Home, including its power on the go division which was expanded after the 2014 acquisition of portable solar power company Goal Zero.

These aren’t just part-time jobs either, these are careers.