Less than a year back, a former chief executive of Mastercard, Ajay Banga, was in a surprise move picked to head the World Bank. Putting a Wall Street player addicted to profits in charge of a development institution claiming to…
John Stuart Mill was among the foremost liberal thinkers of modern times who wrote extensively on economics and philosophy. Though under the influence of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, he came closer towards socialism late in his life, it was…
The other day the Chief Executive Officer of Niti Ayog made a fantastic claim, that the poverty ratio in India had fallen below 5 percent according to the 2022-23 consumption expenditure survey data. His claim was based on the fact…
Recent discussions on economic policy in the US and other high-income nations make it appear that there is only one domain and one instrument that really matter: monetary policy and interest rates. Whether on the eve of meetings of the…
One persistent macroeconomic concern in the Indian economy over the past decade has been the continuing decline or stagnation in investment rates. The decline began after 2010, that is before the tenure of the Modi government, but it continued thereafter.…
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…
