On July 1, Sri Lanka’s parliament approved through a majority 122-versus-62 vote, a plan to restructure the government’s domestic debt totalling 15.4 trillion Sri Lankan rupees (SLR) at the end of March 2023. That is not all of Sri Lanka’s…
Around a month ago, The Reserve Bank of India, in a controversial circular, reversed its long-standing policy of not allowing banks to arrive at compromise settlements with willful defaulters or holders of fraudulent accounts. A willful defaulter is defined as…
High global prices of food items, especially essential food grains, have terrible consequences around the world, with those living in lower-income food-importing countries typically the worst affected. It is often assumed that when such prices rise, it is the result…
By far the most significant ‘innovation’ in industrial policy under the current NDA government is the production linked incentive (PLI) scheme. It provides an incentive pay out or subsidy of 4-6 per cent of incremental sales based on domestic production.…
Insufficient economic diversification, from low value added to higher value added activities, has been one of the important failures of the Indian development trajectory. Despite decades of relatively high growth of GDP, most of the work force remains trapped in…
In a barely noticed development, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has “reformed” and extended the conditions it imposes in return for emergency balance of payments support to less developed countries with stressed external accounts. The evidence of that shift comes…
At the start of May 2023, the central government released yet another statement exuding optimism about the progress of India’s Goods and Services Tax regime, based on the previous month’s collections. The statement said that monthly goods and services tax…
Ministers, central bankers, officials and civil society activists returning home from Washington after the Spring Meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund held in April 2023 were not clear as to what the outcomes of the meetings,…
It is well known that several countries of Latin America are among the most unequal in the world, in terms of both income and asset distribution. There are many political economy forces leading to such inequality, but what makes matters…
The world economic outlook released in time for the recently concluded spring meetings of the World Bank and the IMF presents a gloomy picture. Global GDP growth is expected to fall from 3.4 percent in 2022 to 2.8 percent in…
