India is an outlier in terms of low government spending during the pandemic, as we noted last month in an earlier article. Unlike advanced economies and even most developing and emerging market economies, the Indian government did not ramp up…
In recent years, when the economy as a whole performed poorly, reports on how old and new businesspersons accumulated huge volumes of wealth in short timespans have been commonplace. There is also evidence that conspicuous consumption is on the rise.…
Through out the continuing pandemic, the Indian government’s fiscal reticence has made it a significant outlier in the world. Advanced economies have gone all out in terms of expanded public spending. Their governments quickly abandoned the (flawed) arguments about the…
In early December, the State Bank of India (SBI), which dominates the country’s banking sector announced that it had entered into a partnership with Adani Capital, a private sector non-bank finance company (NBFC). The aim was to engage in “co-lending”…
State governments in India are experiencing a fiscal crisis that would adversely impact their development and welfare expenditures in the coming years. As per the revised estimates for 2020-21 collated by the Reserve Bank of India, after averaging 2.7 per…
Historically, today’s developed countries are responsible for nearly 80 per cent of global cumulative carbon emissions over 1850 to 2011. The climate change impacts that the world is facing today are fundamentally a result of that over-exploitation by a small…
The near relentless bull run on India’s stock markets seems to be faltering, with signs of a descent from recent peaks. These signs of investor reticence are visible across emerging markets, with India being one of the better performers. While…
According to the US Department of Labour, consumer prices spiked at 6.2 percent higher in October than a year earlier. The resulting inflation fears are beginning to influence the thinking of central bankers in the developed countries. As that happens,…
In recent weeks the media have featured stories bordering on the alarmist about a coal shortage in India. Coal inventories with thermal power plants had fallen to levels at which major country-wide power outages seemed inevitable. Fortunately, that has not…
The Covid-19 pandemic operated to expose various global inequalities in their stark form, but it has also further accentuated them at unprecedented scale and speed. The latest World Economic Outlook from the IMF, released in late October 2021, provides further…
