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…
Making the global food system more sustainable and equitable represents a huge and complex undertaking that necessarily involves difficult trade-offs. The tension between responding to short-term increases in fertilizer prices and implementing long-term strategies for combating climate change is a…
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…
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…
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…
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…
