A Market gone awry
It defies all logic. As expected, once the implications of the Covid-19 contagion began to be absorbed, the BSE Sensex lost 37 per cent in value, falling from a level just above 41,000 on February 19, 2020, to just below…
Wrecking Fiscal Federalism
India’s Constitution puts the bulk of responsibility for the basic goods and services to be provided to citizens on to state governments. That is also why it mandated that independent Finance Commissions be appointed every five years to determine the…
Prepare for a Surge in Global Inequality
The United States prepares for moving out of the Trump era with the incoming President promising more rounds of stimulus spending to revive an economy ravaged by Covid-19. Other members of the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development, a predominantly…
India’s External Sector during the Pandemic
The complete absence of any meaningful fiscal response from the Indian government in the face of one of the biggest economic crises ever faced, cries out for explanation. One argument has been that the central government is concerned about its…
Bilateral Swaps in China’s Global Presence
Discussions of China’s growing global presence normally refer to its large investments overseas and lending by the state-owned China Development Bank and China sponsored multilateral institutions like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and New Development Bank. But there has been…
Unaffordable Education in the New India
One of the few aspects of the Indian development project that is supposed to have seen some recent success is education. Enrolment has increased significantly in school and higher education, and the gender gap in enrolment has reduced up to…
Discrimination and Bias in Economics, and Emerging Responses
Note: Opening the Miami Institute’s economics forum, Jayati Ghosh presents severe and persistent forms of discrimination and power imbalances in economic analyses, and underscores older and newer networks of scholars pushing back against these tendencies. Recently, mainstream economics has been…
The Remittance Shock
The fall in remittance flows following the loss of migrant jobs in leading host countries has been among the many adverse effects of the Covid crisis on developing countries. While there have been job losses across the board in regions…
Developing Asia: The growing divergence between China and the rest
The past year has brought into sharp relief the significant differences between China and the rest of the world. The experience of the pandemic is probably the most extreme and definitive expression of that: the ability of China to contain…
Covid Debt and the Tax Paradigm
The Covid-19 pandemic has forced governments across the world to increase reliance on debt. The IMF projects the fiscal deficit as a proportion of GDP in emerging markets and middle-income economies (EMMIEs) as a group to rise from 4.9 per…