For reasons not always well established, the middle class in modern societies is viewed with favourable eyes. Defined in terms that are often subjective, that group is seen as directly or indirectly underlying social stability and driving growth. Based on…
Over much of the last decade and more, the stock market had provided advocates of reform a convenient indicator of economic health. This was because there were long periods during that decade when real economic growth tallied with stock market…
In the ongoing Eurozone drama, the sovereign debt held by Greece is the crux of the issue. That hapless economy has seen its debt to GDP ratio increase from around 120 per cent in 2010 to nearly 180 per cent…
For many years now consecutive governments have pointed to India’s comfortable foreign exchange reserves as evidence of the positive effect that economic reform has had on India’s external sector. On June 12, 2015 foreign exchange reserves stood at a comfortable…
India’s beleaguered farmers are facing another threat to what is now a tenuous livelihood. That threat is the real prospect of a poor Southwest monsoon that would substantially reduce agricultural production over crop year (July to June) 2015-16. In its…
Having come to power by fanning high expectations of what it would deliver on the economic front, the Modi government’s first year has proved dull and dreary. Dull because there is little the government has to show, even on the…
On May 17, the Controller General of Accounts released the audited provisional accounts of the central government for 2014. Unlike the revised estimates in budgetary documents, these figures include actual figures for the month of March. A terse Statement from…
The current stand-off is more of a government effort to regain influence over macroeconomic management, as the government is accountable to the people whereas the RBI is not. Government_and_RBI (Download the full text in PDF format) (This article was originally…
The hurried exit of foreign investors from Indian equity and debt markets seems to be reversing what has been a long bull run in India’s stock markets over the last three years or more (Chart 1). On 7 May, the…
A post-Budget survey of 189 CEOs and CFOs has found that a majority of them find the Central Statistical Organisation’s new growth estimate of over 7 per cent for 2014-15 to be too optimistic and “too good to be realistic”.…
