Well over half of all workers in India are self-employed. The proportions of self-employed workers are significantly higher in rural areas, and among women. In rural areas, it is presumed that it is the dominance of small-scale agriculture that leads…
Interview with Jayati Ghosh by Sudipta Datta In her 2022 book, The Making of a Catastrophe (Aleph), on the disastrous economic fallout of COVID-19, Indian development economist Jayati Ghosh writes that job losses and food insecurity were significantly higher for…
The global distribution of surpluses and deficits in the balance of payments, or the excesses or shortfall in foreign exchange earnings vis-à-vis expenditures, has for multiple reasons been in constant flux. This has implications for the directions in which capital…
We are increasingly in an economy in which policy making occurs as shooting into the dark, simply because we no longer have so much of the data that are essential for any public intervention. The collapse of the most essential…
Recently, a three-judge Bench of the Supreme Court put forth the idea of setting up an expert committee that could recommend ways to protect common investors from market events. The court’s recommendation came soon after the stocks of the companies of…
Over the past two decades, Indian multi-billionaire Gautam Adani’s close ties to Prime Minister Narendra Modi have helped the Gujarati businessman become Asia’s wealthiest person. Adani’s meteoric rise, which in some ways eclipsed that of his political mentor, also made…
While Pakistan is beset by multiple crises on the political, social and economic fronts, media attention is focused on the debt crisis and analysts are preoccupied with the question whether the IMF would soon release a last tranche of $1.1…
The Government of India’s Economic Survey 2022-23 is a bizarre document. It uses cherry-picked time series data to suggest that the performance of the Indian economy has been commendable only during the current Modi government’s tenure and the previous NDA…
We all know that the Narendra Modi government has strong centralising tendencies — not just between the Centre and the state governments but even within Central ministries, with the Prime Minister’s Office and the ministry of home affairs being the…
The annual budget is generally supposed to be a statement of not only the Union government’s actual and proposed revenue raising and spending plans, but also of its general economic policy intent. If so, the indications this year are chilling.…
