The global economy, the soothsayers would have it, is riding the back of a recovery. Growth is seen as having consolidated in the US, picked up remarkably in Europe, and returned, after a minor blip, in China and India. Encouraged…
In discussions of global inequality, there is general agreement that, whatever else may have happened, within-country inequality has increased in most cases, even as between-country inequality has come down. But overall, because of the recent emergence of countries with large…
Globally, equity and bond markets are turning bearish. Analysts seem to be unanimous in their explanation: the era of cheap and abundant money, that was leveraged for investments in capital markets, is over. Governments and central banks are tiring of…
In India, we tend to obsess a lot about the growth rate of national income, worrying if it drops even a tenth of a percentage point below market expectations, and checking fiscal and monetary indicators with respect to the value…
For India’s post-liberalisation poster-child, the software and IT-enabled services industry, recent developments in the global economy are bound to be disconcerting. Even as early signs of a synchronized global recovery emerge, fears of inflation and high interest rates have resulted…
This Debate contribution describes the promotion of digital rather than cash payments as a form of the financialization of finance, in its role as a payments system, with reference to recent Indian experience. The obsession with digital transactions as a…
The use of exchange rates based on Purchasing Power Parities to compare income across countries and over time has become standard practise. But there are reasons to believe this could lead to excessively inflated incomes for poor countries and in…
A feature of banking in India that has not received the attention it deserves is the business reflected in the off balance sheet or contingent liabilities of banks. Typical of such liabilities are swaps, options and forward rate contracts involving…
In most market economies, the disbursal of bank credit is usually a relatively reliable indicator of the extent of dynamism, of both expectations and actual economic expansion. So much so that it is often viewed by analysts as a better…
