India’s quasi-federal democracy, which was in danger of collapsing into a centralised authoritarianism, seems to be holding up. The results of the 2024 Lok Sabha election that reduced the brute majority of the National Democratic Alliance fronted by the BJP,…
The “demographic dividend” that was so eagerly anticipated in India more than a decade ago has already become a demographic disaster. India’s burgeoning youth population is achieving higher levels of education, and then entering a labour market that simply does…
The French economist J B Say had believed that there could never be a problem of aggregate demand in any economy, that whatever was produced was ipso facto demanded. There could of course be too many safety-pins and too few…
The popular insurrection that ousted Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and her Awami League government offers important lessons for the international community and neighboring India. While the unrest was undoubtedly fueled by the regime’s repressive and increasingly anti-democratic tactics, exemplified…
In the past three years, global food prices have been on a roller coaster, rising rapidly especially in the first half of 2022 due to a speculative bubble and then falling from July 2022 onwards (Figure 1). The phase of…
The Sri Lankan government announced that it has reached an agreement with its foreign private creditors to restructure the $12.5 billion of its external debt that they hold. The agreement incorporates a novel instrument: a macro-linked bond for which the payout…
In the search for the next country that would transit from backward to advanced nation status, India’s name sometimes features. This is partly because the idea has been mooted by Prime Minister Narender Modi, who promises to make India a…
In his opus The Wealth of Nations published in 1776 Adam Smith drew a distinction between the progressive state, the stationary state and the declining state. The progressive state was one where capital accumulation would be occurring at a rate…
The coming to power of governments led by fascists is either a reality or a threat today over large parts of the world. In Europe at present there are several countries where fascists are leading governments; France was on the…
A renewed focus on retail lending, or the provision of personal loans, by India’s banking system (and the non-bank financial companies they support), is giving the otherwise confident Reserve Bank of India some cause for concern. That the period after…
