Insufficient economic diversification, from low value added to higher value added activities, has been one of the important failures of the Indian development trajectory. Despite decades of relatively high growth of GDP, most of the work force remains trapped in…
Most people, including even trained economists, fail to appreciate the fact that an exchange rate depreciation, if it is to work in reducing the trade deficit in a capitalist economy, must necessarily hurt the working class by lowering the real…
Under pressure from globalised finance capital, most countries of the world have enacted legislation fixing the size of the fiscal deficit as a proportion of GDP; generally it is 3 per cent, and in India it is 3 per cent…
In a barely noticed development, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has “reformed” and extended the conditions it imposes in return for emergency balance of payments support to less developed countries with stressed external accounts. The evidence of that shift comes…
At the start of May 2023, the central government released yet another statement exuding optimism about the progress of India’s Goods and Services Tax regime, based on the previous month’s collections. The statement said that monthly goods and services tax…
A New York Times News Service report reproduced in The Telegraph of Kolkata (May 7), discusses the findings of a global public opinion survey carried out by the Bennett Institute of Public Policy of Cambridge University. These show that the…
The data on unemployment brough out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting from even before the pandemic, but the figure…
Ministers, central bankers, officials and civil society activists returning home from Washington after the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held in April 2023 were not clear as to what the outcomes of the meetings,…
It is well known that several countries of Latin America are among the most unequal in the world, in terms of both income and asset distribution. There are many political economy forces leading to such inequality, but what makes matters…
Janet Yellen, the US treasury secretary, has finally acknowledged what has been obvious to most people for quite some time, namely that the imposition of sanctions against countries that the US is hostile to, runs the risk of jeopardising the…
