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…
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…
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…
Figures on India’s balance of payments in financial year 2023-24, recently released by the Reserve Bank of India, have added to the hype on India’s growth story. India’s current account deficit, or the surplus of current foreign exchange expenditures and…
The election results, which gave both the BJP and the NDA far lower seats than they had in the previous parliament and led to a coalition government, surprised many. But now, attention has shifted to assessing what that would do…
The recently released report from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Evaluation, the ‘Statistical report on value of output from agriculture and allied sectors (2011-12 to 2022-23)’ provides some estimates of how the value of agricultural output has changed since…
For some time now, there has been much discussion of and concern expressed about a decline in the net financial savings of the household sector in India. Overall household savings as a percentage of gross national disposable income (GNDI) rose…
It is generally perceived that India’s growth trajectory has been consumption-led. Many of the enthusiastic international assessments of future economic growth prospects in India are based on the anticipation of the massive domestic market likely to be created by India’s…
