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…
Government officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world. What they never mention is the fact that India had witnessed perhaps the sharpest absolute drop in GDP among the major economies…
The world economic outlook released in time for the recently concluded spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF presents a gloomy picture. Global GDP growth is expected to fall from 3.4 percent in 2022 to 2.8 percent in…
Except in war-time, capitalism invariably seeks to control inflation by creating a recession; and this is so even when the inflation has been caused by an autonomous increase in capitalists’ profit-margins which are downward inflexible and hence would not be…
Rubber prices, which had recovered a little after the fall during the pandemic, have collapsed again, with the farmers in Kerala, which grows 80 per cent of the country’s rubber crop, being badly hit. The central government has flatly refused…
Well over half of all workers in India are self-employed. The proportions of self-employed workers are significantly higher in rural areas, and among women. In rural areas, it is presumed that it is the dominance of small-scale agriculture that leads…
There is a commonly-held view that while capitalism in its early stages brings about unemployment and hence an accentuation of poverty, this initial damage is subsequently reversed as it keeps growing. The unemployed get largely absorbed into the ranks of…
The month of March 2023 has come out to be yet another nightmarish experience for the world of global finance, after the collapse of Washington Mutual and Lehman Brothers in September 2008. This started when on March 10, the world…
