India’s stock markets have revived and touched inexplicable peaks even while the real economy braces for what may be the largest contraction in post-Independence economic history. Having collapsed from a level in excess of 40000 in late February, when the…
Now that India has already overtaken Brazil among countries with the most number of Covid-19 positive cases and is on the verge of even beating the USA, it’s worth trying to understand what has led to this inability to control…
July 2020 marks the completion of three years since the launch of the Good and Services Tax regime. That is long enough to allow us to take stock of how well the new tax regime is performing. If the regime…
Reactions have come in from different quarters after the Indian Government introduced new screening rules for foreign direct investment (FDI) in April 2020. The latest Press Note on FDI (Press Note 3, 2020) has made government approval mandatory for all…
There has been much discussion about how external debt concerns are likely to weigh heavily on developing countries in their attempts at economic recovery in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Most of this discussion has centred on emerging markets…
The outbreak of the Novel Corona Virus pandemic has brought to the fore the fact that the Indian economy is run to a large extent, if not to the largest extent, by the inter-state migrant workers. One report has in…
It is generally recognised that the Indian economy was already in a steep slowdown well before the Covid-19 pandemic and badly planned lockdown further destroyed economic activity. But what is possibly not so well understood that that a major reason…
In a trend which sees equity markets in the “emerging economies” imitate stock markets in the US, the MSCI Emerging Market Index that collapsed over the month ending 23 March, from more than 1,100 to just above 750 (Chart 1),…
While everyone was busy looking at the Covid-19 numbers across the world, other “stuff was happening” in international trade: the US-China trade war, which started as far back July 2018, just got significantly worse. This on-again-off-again war has been a…
Early evidence of the crisis in the developed world induced by the Covid-19 pandemic is trickling in. One set of numbers provide the first estimates of GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020, which includes the period when lockdowns…
