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…
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 an unerring instinct for bungling in economic matters. It has come out with a “fiscal stimulus” for tackling the current economic slowdown that will actually make matters worse. After successive interest rate cuts which were predictably…
The reduction in the corporate tax rate by the BJP government, which would entail a transfer of Rs.1.45 lakh crores from the public exchequer to the corporate sector, has been generally seen to be insufficient for overcoming the slowdown in…
