With China having successfully convened the second Belt and Road Forum in Beijing late April, discussions on the significance, impact and sustainability of this ill-defined, even if tangible, effort at economic diplomacy have revived. That effort is the Belt and…
On May 2, the Trump administration brought to an end the waiver the US had granted eight countries, including India, of sanctions on imports of oil from Iran. Having pulled out of the 2015 multi-country agreement with Iran to limit…
This year’s just-concluded spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank were marked by a mood of gloom among the world’s leading policy makers. As recently as January 2018 the IMF had claimed that “the cyclical upswing…
Just before the Global Financial Crisis more than a decade ago, China had emerged as the most significant trading partner for a majority of the world’s economies. Since then, it has had even more significant impacts on global exports and…
India’s stock markets seem to be riding one more bubble. Between 19th February and 29th March, the Sensex rose by 9.3 per cent. The trend has not been restricted to a few stocks. The S&P BSE 100, which tracks 100…
When the third estimate of US growth in the last quarter of 2018 was released the euphoria exuded by forecasters of global growth even a few months earlier waned. The annualised quarter on quarter growth rate that had risen to…
At the end of its five-year term, the NDA government’s claim that the Indian economy has experienced rapid growth during its tenure sounds shallow. The GDP numbers many observers argue are wrong and possibly fabricated. The GDP figures have since…
The SDGs were obviously incredibly ambitious – far more so than the Millennium Development Goals that they succeeded – and so it was indeed a remarkable achievement that governments of almost all countries signed up to them. There were no…
Late in February 2019, the GST Council, prodded by the Centre, decided to modify Goods and Services Tax rates applicable to the housing sector. The declared intention was to reduce prices that home buyers would have to pay for their…
The gender distribution of migrant workers has a macroeconomic impact – it affects both the level and the volatility of remittance inflows, as the Asian experience shows. The gender distribution of cross-border migration obviously matters because women migrating for work…
