This year’s Nobel Prize in economics (the Riksbank Prize to be more precise) has been awarded to three US-based economists for their research into what promotes or hinders the growth of wealth among nations; and they assign a crucial role…
Several international organisations are now engaged in the business of measuring what they call “poverty”. The World Bank has been in it for some time, but now we have a new measure of “Multidimensional Poverty” brought out by the UNDP…
Poverty is taken to be a homogeneous phenomenon irrespective of the mode of production that is under consideration. Even reputed economists believe in this homogeneous conception of poverty. In fact, however, poverty under capitalism is entirely different from poverty in…
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…
For well over a decade, policy makers and citizens had little idea of the extent of income poverty or economic inequality in India, because of the absence of official survey data on consumption expenditure, which have formed the basis of…
Neo-Liberalism propagates a set of outright falsehoods to present itself in a favourable light compared to the preceding dirigiste regime in India. The basic theme is to suggest that under neo-liberalism there has been such an acceleration of the growth…
Regulating financial activity in global commodities markets, while important, is not enough to stave off rising food insecurity. Policymakers must also take measures to help developing countries build up reserves of essential items and cope with price fluctuations, possibly through…
Unlike many low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), the Indian economy is not characterised by external debt stress or distress that could lead to default. It does record almost consistent current account deficits on the balance of payments, but these are…
Severe external debt stress in several low- and medium-income countries (LMICs) has raised two questions. The first is whether we are on a trajectory that would result in a generalised debt crisis of the kind that preceded debt write-offs under…
On April 3 this year, the minister of state for planning, Rao Inderjeet Singh, said in the Rajya Sabha that the government had no data after 2011-12 for estimating poverty, and therefore had no idea how many people had been…
