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…
Monetary policy can only make credit cheaper, it cannot bring money into the hands of workers. It cannot compensate for a fiscal stimuli, especially when India is in a liquidity trap. For such an unprecedented crisis, fiscal spending has been…
At the recent G20 and IMF-WB Spring meetings held virtually in the third week of April 2020, a proposal for the IMF to issue an additional 500 billion of SDRs was blocked by the United States and – astonishingly –…
One of the many symptoms of the economic shock resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic is a sharp depreciation of the Indian rupee vis-à-vis the dollar. The value of the rupee fell from 71.3 to the dollar on February 12 to…
This lecture will try to essentially look at the impact of COVID-19 on the Indian economy — though, as we all understand, we are at a point where we don’t know anything about a lot of things, as the future…
The global devastation caused by Covid-19 is only just beginning, with the severe threat to public health worsened by the evident inability to cope of most health systems across developing and developed countries. Many states across the world appear to…
It is now well known that the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2017-18 of the NSSO (the release of which was originally suppressed by the government) revealed a dramatic fall in absolute employment of both men and women, and a…
Discussions on the state of the world economy centre around the likely negative impact of the novel coronavirus epidemic and the potential positive effect of the truce reflected in the “phase 1” trade deal between China and India. Though most…
