A slew of numbers released recently point to rather peculiar and contrary trends in India’s balance of payments. Exports have revived but the trade and current account deficits widen, pointing to an excess of foreign exchange expenditure relative to earnings.…
It is a truism of history that rising powers tend to be the ones valorising “free” trade and more open and integrated national economies, just as waning powers tend to turn inwards. So it is no surprise that over the…
China, now one of the world’s two largest nations measured by gross domestic product (GDP), is displaying a strange malady. A sudden and large outflow of capital from the country is resulting in a sharp fall in its reserves. Going…
As the Modi government completes two years in office, one of its major economic programmes—the Make in India initiative—that promised manufacturing growth based on exports, is staring at failure. According to the most recent monthly figure available at the time…
The WTO has been a major weapon used by the advanced countries to roll back the structures that the third world dirigiste regimes which came into existence after decolonization had erected for achieving a degree of self-reliance. The TRIPS agreement…
Though overshadowed by the deep differences over agricultural subsidies and food security and on the rules governing trade in industrial goods, services were an important bone of contention at WTO’s Nairobi Ministerial Conference over 15-18 December, 2015. Developed countries had…
For many years now consecutive governments have pointed to India’s comfortable foreign exchange reserves as evidence of the positive effect that economic reform has had on India’s external sector. On June 12, 2015 foreign exchange reserves stood at a comfortable…
On Friday 12 June, the US House of Representatives stalled a bill that would have set in motion the process of confirming a major new trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPP, between the US and 15 countries in…
If one adds up the foreign exchange reserves of all the countries in the world, including under the term “reserves” what these countries hold in the form of gold, US dollars, other reserve currencies, Special Drawing Rights of the IMF,…
The Modi government completed one year in office on May 26. This year saw a continuation of the industrial stagnation which has been a feature of the Indian economy for quite some time now. The year-on-year rates of industrial growth,…
