It is not the most conducive time for Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to present her second budget. Growth is decelerating sharply, revenues are lagging behind targets, the government’s off-budget transactions that make a mockery of budget estimates are being revealed,…
The universe of Indian startups is teeming with ‘unicorns’, industry slang for firms with valuations in excess of $1 billion. But most have yet to show the profits that legitimise that valuation, and many are bleeding. That was ignored till…
Even while the effort to resolve the crisis resulting from non-performing assets in the banking sector was underway, India’s financial sector was overwhelmed by failures of large non-bank financial companies. In the discussion that followed the collapse of these NBFCs,…
“Mainstream” economics does not appear to understand the functioning of the bourgeois economic order; and nowhere is this more evident than in matters relating to fiscal policy. It holds to this day that a fiscal deficit “crowds” out private investment…
In the revised estimates for 2018-19 reported in Budget 2019, the NDA government had hugely inflated figures on central revenues and expenditures in 2018-19. This was one of many signals that it was faced with a fiscal crisis it did…
Even as the growth rate of the Indian economy is slowing down, and the index of industrial production actually showing negative growth for three consecutive months, August to October (over the corresponding months a year ago), the inflation rate in…
In the latest of many critical interventions since he demitted office as Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, Arvind Subramanian (in collaboration with Josh Felman, together hereafter referred to AS-JF) has argued that the recent sharp deceleration in…
When income growth slows down in an economy, so does the growth of tax revenue within the given tax regime. Since the government has certain expenditure obligations, to meet these obligations it has to either impose additional taxes or expand…
It is now widely recognised that the Finance Minister misinformed Parliament when presenting the Revised Estimates for central government revenues and expenditures in the Union Budget presented in July 2019. That fact has, however, been largely forgotten, perhaps because to…
The Moody’s decision, citing a growth slowdown and policy inadequacy, to downgrade India by changing its credit rating outlook to ‘negative’ from ‘stable’, and doing the same for a bunch of financial institutions and firms in the power and infrastructure…
