The Chinese central bank’s decision last week to let the yuan depreciate in three stages by almost 4 percent against the U.S. dollar, was officially explained as a move towards greater market determination of its exchange rate. Though this explanation…
There is a strong view in certain Left circles, especially in certain European Left circles, that any de-linking from global capitalism conduces to a promotion of domestic reaction. Of course, even in Europe this is not necessarily the dominant view…
I don’t know about the sciences, but in the social sciences in the old days every undergraduate student in Oxford and Cambridge was required to write two essays per week which were then discussed with the tutors. It was hard…
The debate so far on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) has been largely concerned with the question of compensation to the states for the losses they may suffer owing to the transition to a GST regime. The losses to…
The Socio-Economic and Caste Census 2011 (SECC), released by the Government of India on Friday the 3rd of July, paints a dismal picture of the economic conditions of the people in rural India. The data it has unearthed need to…
The Reserve Bank of India, as is to be expected, has been denying that its Governor Raghuram Rajan had ever suggested that the world was facing the possibility of a 1930s-type Great Depression. Members of the “global financial community” are…
The NDA government’s appointment of hack loyalists to important positions in the sphere of education has rightly raised concerns about the damage being done to the education system. But this is not the sole source of danger to the system.…
If one adds up the foreign exchange reserves of all the countries in the world, including under the term “reserves” what these countries hold in the form of gold, US dollars, other reserve currencies, Special Drawing Rights of the IMF,…
India, we are constantly reminded, is one of the more rapidly growing economies of the world at present; and even though the growth rate has come down somewhat of late, official figures show that it still remains quite high. What…
The Planning Commission, set up under Jawaharlal Nehru’s Prime Ministership, was a logical expression of an idea that underlay India’s anti-colonial struggle, namely that in independent India, an improvement in the material conditions of life of the people, subjugated and…
