Preliminary evidence that India’s economy contracted by 7.5 per cent in the second quarter of financial year 2020-21 was, as news, both good and bad. Good because that figure is far lower than the 23.9 per cent contraction registered in…
A report of an internal working group (IWG) set up by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has revived discussion on the wisdom of allowing entry of corporate players, including large business groups, into India’s banking space. Though the process…
One of the few aspects of the Indian development project that is supposed to have seen some recent success is education. Enrolment has increased significantly in school and higher education, and the gender gap in enrolment has reduced up to…
The fall in remittance flows following the loss of migrant jobs in leading host countries has been among the many adverse effects of the Covid crisis on developing countries. While there have been job losses across the board in regions…
South Korea, long lauded as a “model” for developing countries looking to transit to developed status, had lost some of its sheen after the 1997 Southeast Asian financial crisis. Yet, the return of stability after the crisis and the global…
In a move that was expected, the US Justice Department has filed an anti-trust lawsuit against internet search giant Google, alleging that it resorts to anti-competitive practices to ensure its dominance in the search engine space and, through that, over…
The past year has brought into sharp relief the significant differences between China and the rest of the world. The experience of the pandemic is probably the most extreme and definitive expression of that: the ability of China to contain…
A chapter in the October 2020 edition of the IMF’s biannual publication, Fiscal Monitor, argues that as a response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and to support the recovery as Covid-19 induced lockdowns are relaxed and the world moves to a…
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced governments across the world to increase reliance on debt. The IMF projects the fiscal deficit as a proportion of GDP in emerging markets and middle-income economies (EMMIEs) as a group to rise from 4.9 per…
The results of the long-awaited time use survey conducted over January to December 2019 by the NSSO have just been published. This finally allows policy makers and the general public to have some idea of the extent to which unpaid…
