There are some people who are hard to classify, in terms of achievement or contribution to society or personality, and Ashok Mitra is one of them. Economist, policymaker, writer, organic intellectual, politician, litterateur, legislator: he has been all of these…
Meeting in mid-April on the side lines of the spring sessions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund at Washington D.C., Finance Ministers of the G20 countries seemed overcome by a combined sense of despair and fear about…
One is witnessing the emergence of a strange and unprecedented phenomenon in the advanced capitalist world, namely the charging of negative interest rates. The European Central Bank reduced its deposit rate to -0.1 percent in June 2014, and since then…
At the end of March, Indian private sector steel major Tata Steel, flagship firm of the Tata group, announced that it was closing its steel operations in the UK that are reportedly bleeding losses at the rate of one million…
There was a time when India had one of the finest statistical systems in the developing world. No matter how one interpreted the statistics that came out of that system, one could take the figures themselves as reasonably correct. This…
Thousands of steelworkers’ jobs are threatened as Indian company Tata threatens to walk away from its loss-making business in the UK. The move is causing shockwaves over the health of Britain’s manufacturing industry; but it is also a strong indicator…
There’s been a lot of talk among policy makers in India about ensuring inclusion. The UPA government talked about “inclusive growth” and made it the headline for its Five Year Plan documents. The NDA government has dispensed with planning but…
In the immediate aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession that followed, two countries that were seen as crucial to propping up global economic growth and even ensuring a recovery were China and India. Prior to the…
As the air in India grows thick with accusations of being “anti-national”, it is worth taking a step back to consider what this means in political economy terms. After all, to characterise someone as “anti-national” you must first define what…
Unemployment has become so persistent a phenomenon in contemporary times that there is a common feeling that it is a “natural” state of affairs, that nothing can ever be done about it, and that the only way to have greater…
