The Kazan summit of the BRICS countries was a historic one for several reasons: first, it created a new category called “partner nations” as a step towards full membership, and accepted 13 such new “partner” countries, among whom were Cuba…
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize, the Nobel for “Economic Sciences”, has always been controversial. This is true of the 2024 award to Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James Robinson as well. Typically, the economics Nobel is awarded to mainstream economists for…
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…
In early October, in a show of pique, a European Commission proposal to impose additional tariffs of up to 35.3 per cent (on top of the pre-existing 10 per cent) on electrical vehicles (EVs) imported from China, was passed by…
The “inevitable striving of finance capital”, Lenin had written in Imperialism, (is) “to enlarge its spheres of influence and even its actual territory”. He was writing of course in a world marked by inter-imperialist rivalry, where this striving took the…
The fact that the world economy has slowed down since the financial crisis of 2008 is beyond dispute. In fact even conservative American economists have started using the term “secular stagnation” to describe the current situation (though they have their…
Europe is clearly battling to stall its decline in the global economy. Most recently, the Mario Draghi report on “The future of European competitiveness” commissioned by the European Union reflected that sentiment. At the centre of Europe’s economic decline is…
West Africa, which had been largely under French colonial rule, never saw decolonisation of the sort that India did. For a start, the erstwhile French colonies’ currency continued to be linked to the French franc at a fixed exchange rate,…
During the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in…
