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…
With the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) registering negative month-on-month annual rates of growth over the three months ending October 2019, the perception, based on trends in individual industries, that Indian industry is experiencing or is on the road to…
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 NDA government has recently declared that it had made an unannounced decision to trash the ‘draft’ report of the official consumer expenditure survey relating to 2018-19. These benchmark surveys, normally conducted every five years in the past, are the…
The experience of depositors in the Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative Bank (PMCB) suggests that the government and the central bank are unwilling to protect the financial savings of ordinary households. Besides allowing depositors in the bank to access only a…
With the government being forced to withdraw from the RCEP agreement, an argument has arisen: if India is not competitive with other countries in producing a whole range of goods, which is why the producers of such goods within the…
In a previous edition of MacroScan, we considered trends in central government employment, and showed how the number of people employed by the central government stagnated between 2006 and 2014, while the number employed by central public sector enterprises declined.…
The stated objective of the regional comprehensive economic partnership (RCEP) agreement under negotiation is to integrate ASEAN countries and its bilateral free trade partners — Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea— into a mega regional free trade…
In an unusual and ill-advised move, the Reserve Bank of India issued a brief ‘clarification’ on October 1st which said: “There are rumours in some locations about certain banks including cooperative banks, resulting in anxiety among the depositors. RBI would…
