There are well-known problems associated with the concept of gross domestic product as well as with its measurement. The inclusion of the service sector within GDP is something that Adam Smith would have objected to on the conceptual grounds that…
Early in 2024, the World Bank in its flagship report Global Economic Prospects, put out a message of gloom. This year could end marking “a wretched milestone: the weakest global growth performance of any half-decade since the 1990s”. Between 2021, when…
Argentina’s new president Javier Milei proposes to use US dollars as the currency of his country, while abolishing its central bank altogether. What is involved in this proposal is not just maintaining a fixed exchange rate between the dollar and…
The wisdom of pursuing a strategy of export-led growth has been discussed among development economists for at least half a century, ever since the so-called East Asian “miracle” started to be contrasted with the comparatively sluggish growth experience of countries…
Several major economists have put forward theories predicting a falling tendency of the rate of profit under capitalism; Marx had seen in this fact an awareness on their part of the essential transitoriness of the capitalist system. But while some…
Most people, including even trained economists, fail to appreciate the fact that an exchange rate depreciation, if it is to work in reducing the trade deficit in a capitalist economy, must necessarily hurt the working class by lowering the real…
Except in war-time, capitalism invariably seeks to control inflation by creating a recession; and this is so even when the inflation has been caused by an autonomous increase in capitalists’ profit-margins which are downward inflexible and hence would not be…
The semi-annual Financial Stability Report from India’s central bank signals that India’s banking system, especially the public banking system, has put behind it the stress from disturbingly high non-performing or bad loans on its books. The story as officially told…
With the deficit on India’s trade in goods and services widening, from $19 billion in the quarter ending September 2021 to $49 billion in the corresponding quarter of 2022, net inward transfers recorded in the current account have become crucial…
India’s current account deficit for the second quarter (July-September) of 2022-23 has reached a massive $36.4 billion which is 4.4 per cent of the gross domestic product, higher than at any time in the last nine years. It is only…
