In the 1920s and early 30s, John Maynard Keynes was embroiled in a controversy with the ‘austerians’ of his time, who believed that balancing the government budget, even in a time of economic volatility and decline and financial fragility, was…
Tight monetary policies in rich countries obviously affect people in the countries where they are applied, but they also cause ripple effects across the world. We were already in a very unequal world before the most recent global price increases.…
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted the urgent need for a universal social protection floor—something that has been talked about and even internationally accepted for more than a decade now, but has still received relatively little serious attention from policy makers in…
The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent war sparked rapid and dramatic increases in some global trade prices, particularly for fuel products, wheat and fertilizer for which Russia and Ukraine are major exporters. It is now clear that these…
It was headline news when Chinese customs statistics at the end of September 2022 indicated that for a second calendar year, India’s trade with China would settle at well above $100 billion. That was only partly because of the positive…
The monetary policies of the major advanced economies have been obsessively nationalist for more than two decades now, with hardly any genuine international cooperation beyond some coordination among G7 economies. These policies in turn have had all sorts of impacts—often…
It is well known that indirect taxes fall disproportionately on the poor, and therefore a tax regime that relies mostly on such taxes is both unjust and inefficient in terms of not mopping up the excess profits and incomes of…
Among the many crises hitting low and middle income countries (LMICs) today, the emergence of extreme hunger and undernutrition is getting much less attention than it should. The cost-of-living” crisis in advanced economies gets a lot of international media attention.…
Debt-strapped Sri Lanka has reached a staff-level agreement with the IMF, that promises access to $29 billion over a 4-year period under the institution’s Extended Finance Facility. Given Sri Lanka’s $51 billion external debt, that sum is extremely small. It…
On August 10, the central government, in a rare gesture of magnanimity, released Rs 1,16,665.75 crore, which was the estimated equivalent of two instalments (as opposed to one) of sharable taxes it must release to the states. It claimed that…
