In a new turn to its advocacy of a conservative fiscal stance amidst a recession, the International Monetary Fund in the April 2022 edition of its “Global Financial Stability Report” has called for reining in bank credit to governments as…
The Modi government has been raising taxes on petro-products as its main instrument of resource mobilisation for government spending. This ironically has the dual effect of not stimulating the economy, but stimulating inflation instead. An alternative fiscal policy of raising…
It is generally recognised that the Indian economy was already in a steep slowdown well before the Covid-19 pandemic and badly planned lockdown further destroyed economic activity. But what is possibly not so well understood that that a major reason…
Wealth data are quite unreliable; and wealth distribution data even more so. Not much faith can be reposed on the absolute figures; but cross-country comparisons, and also movements in the shares of the top decile or percentile of the population…
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…
The Indian government should now be desperate to raise more tax revenues. It missed its tax targets massively in the last fiscal year, largely because of poor goods and services tax (GST) collections. Its declared budgetary target for the current…
It is only too evident that the Modi government is a strongly centralising one in many ways – and this is also clear from various fiscal moves. In 2015, it accepted the recommendation of the 14th Finance Commission to increase…
The Modi government has moved so rapidly to dismantle so many institutional and regulatory structures that have underpinned Indian democracy that it is easy to lose track. Among the many such moves that are likely to have long-term adverse consequences…
As the term of the current NDA government nears its end, with signs of popular dissatisfaction over its performance on the economic front, the urge to ramp up expenditure to woo the electorate intensifies. But a number of factors have…
The decision of the newly elected Congress-led governments in Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan to implement the manifesto promise to waive farm debt has set off a controversy. Opposition to the move comes not just from opposing parties. In fact,…
