This was never going to be an easy Union Budget to present for any finance minister, even before last week. Despite all the hype about a resurgent Indian economy, almost all the indicators that matter suggested that economic conditions were…
Economic theory makes much of “rent goods”. A “rent good” is one whose supply cannot be augmented at will, simply through investing more on its production; its supply is subject to constraints imposed by nature, because of which there is…
The semi-annual Financial Stability Report from India’s central bank signals that India’s banking system, especially the public banking system, has put behind it the stress from disturbingly high non-performing or bad loans on its books. The story as officially told…
With the deficit on India’s trade in goods and services widening, from $19 billion in the quarter ending September 2021 to $49 billion in the corresponding quarter of 2022, net inward transfers recorded in the current account have become crucial…
All regimes based on class antagonism require a discourse to legitimise class oppression and this discourse in turn requires a vocabulary of its own. The neoliberal regime too has developed its own discourse and vocabulary and a key concept in…
To mitigate the worst effects of climate change and prevent societal breakdown, we must shift to renewable energies and reduce extreme inequality. But doing so would require massive increases in public spending, which is why governments must overhaul their outdated…
In the 1920s and early 30s, John Maynard Keynes was embroiled in a controversy with the ‘austerians’ of his time, who believed that balancing the government budget, even in a time of economic volatility and decline and financial fragility, was…
The IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva has now openly admitted that the year 2023 will witness the slowing down of the world economy to a point where as much as one-third of it will see an actual contraction in gross…
Tight monetary policies in rich countries obviously affect people in the countries where they are applied, but they also cause ripple effects across the world. We were already in a very unequal world before the most recent global price increases.…
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the urgent need for a universal social protection floor—something that has been talked about and even internationally accepted for more than a decade now, but has still received relatively little serious attention from policy makers in…
