Speculation is rife on what Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman’s second budget will contain and do. It does not take much to speculate on what it is most unlikely to do, which is to substantially hike central government expenditures as a…
It’s that time of year again, when people start talking about what the Union Budget may bring in the shape of fiscal policy changes and what it will show about public finances in the previous year. But increasingly, such discussion…
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…
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,…
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,…
An interview with Jayati Ghosh (by G. Sampath - The Hindu) The leading development economist speaks out on the predicted global recession this year and why the extremely adverse environment for small and medium enterprises is likely to continue Jayati…
“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…
The idea is an old one, but the Hungarian economist Janos Kornai clearly conceptualized it, by drawing a distinction between a “demand-constrained system” and a “resource-constrained system”. A demand-constrained system is one where employment and output in the system are…
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…
