It is now widely recognised that the Finance Minister misinformed Parliament when presenting the Revised Estimates for central government revenues and expenditures in the Union Budget presented in July 2019. That fact has, however, been largely forgotten, perhaps because to…
The experience of depositors in the Punjab and Maharashtra Cooperative Bank (PMCB) suggests that the government and the central bank are unwilling to protect the financial savings of ordinary households. Besides allowing depositors in the bank to access only a…
In a previous edition of MacroScan, we considered trends in central government employment, and showed how the number of people employed by the central government stagnated between 2006 and 2014, while the number employed by central public sector enterprises declined.…
The State in India, barring the Left-led governments, has never been committed to implementing redistributive land reforms and securing rights of tenants. After 1991, when India adopted the policies of liberalisation and globalisation, the government stopped paying even the lip…
The stated objective of the regional comprehensive economic partnership (RCEP) agreement under negotiation is to integrate ASEAN countries and its bilateral free trade partners — Australia, China, India, Japan, New Zealand and South Korea— into a mega regional free trade…
It is only too evident that the Modi government is a strongly centralising one in many ways – and this is also clear from various fiscal moves. In 2015, it accepted the recommendation of the 14th Finance Commission to increase…
One of the unusual features of the Indian economy relates to the banking sector, with bad loans of commercial banks becoming a serious problem, even at relatively low aggregate credit to GDP ratios by international standards. Figure 1 indicates that…
Two years after its implementation, the extent to which the Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime is an improvement upon the earlier system of multiple excise and sales taxes remains unclear. As of now, there are several worrying trends. The…
The global crisis and subsequent slowdown in imports of advanced economies put a brake on the export-oriented growth of developing Asia, forcing many countries in the region to look for other sources of dynamism. The instabilities and vulnerabilities in the…
While the neoliberal focus has been on attempts to “shrink the state” on the grounds of corruption and inefficiency, sensible people have long recognised that high levels of public employment tend to be associated with better quality of life for…
