The recent collapse of the protracted negotiations to restructure Zambia’s external debt, following a default in November 2020, underlines the failure of the prevailing international financial architecture to address global challenges. Not only has the structure not been adapted to…
We observe a strange phenomenon everyday, so strange that its strangeness goes generally unnoticed. Government spokespersons from the prime minister downwards go on repeating ad nauseam that India is the most rapidly growing major economy in the world today, that…
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…
Imperialist hegemony over the third world is exercised not just through arms and economic might but also through the hegemony of ideas, by making the victims see the world the way imperialism wants them to see it. A pre-requisite for…
Imagine a country that is exposed to relatively unrestricted trade. There are two obvious problems that it can face because of this trade policy: the first is a balance of payments problem because its exports are insufficient relative to its…
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…
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…
One of the striking findings of the Bihar Caste Survey, which bears out what the Left has been asserting for a long time, is that absolute poverty in the country is far more pervasive than what successive governments in India…
The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had witnessed the emergence of two different paradigms of colonialism: the first, of which India was the classic example, involved the conquest of countries which had had a history of established central administrations that were…
In an economy like ours where the work-force is not neatly divided into “the employed” and “the unemployed”, and instead there is massive and growing casualisation of work, measuring unemployment is a tricky business. It necessarily means asking a person…
