Growth in India’s non-financial corporate sector shrank in 2015-16, after three consecutive years of “steep moderation” according to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). In its annual study of the Performance of the Corporate Business Sector, the RBI attributes this…
A visit to the USA at the height of the Presidential election season, in a nation obsessed with polls that are just a few weeks away, creates simultaneous sensations of fascination, dismay and even horror. Even from a distance, the…
The term “infrastructure” covers all sorts of things, from ports to roads to canals to bridges to building railway lines. Because it covers such a range of things, many of which appear to be useful, most people look upon “infrastructure”…
All across the world, from the United States to Britain to Europe to China, a huge resistance is building up against globalization. True, this resistance is not self-consciously aimed against globalization per se; in different countries it focuses on different…
Three parallel developments that caught media attention over the last month point to the restoration of the hegemony of Finance Capital in the years since the 2008 crisis. They also reveal the likely consequences of the neoconservative backlash, led by…
The World Bank and the IMF have started a new trend of late, of taking “progressive” positions in their publications even while insisting on the same old “conditionalities” in policy negotiations with particular countries. In accordance with this new trend…
The ongoing review of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act 2003, by a Committee set up by the central government, has once again brought to the fore the vexed question of whether limits should be set by law to…
In an acceleration of a trend towards mega-mergers in the agribusiness area, German pharma and agrochemicals major Bayer has announced an all-cash $66 billion deal to take over American seed major Monsanto. To clinch the deal, Bayer raised its initial…
