Articles

Pundits have been wringing their hands for years about the stagnation of jobs in the organised sector, about the growing casualisation of labour. I think this is an elitist, ill-informed view of employment. It is based on an obsolete 19th […]

THE BIGGEST potential gain to India from the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation is something India actually opposed – bringing competition policy into the new agenda. This gives India an opening to try and dismantle the cartel that

India Inc looks right now like the Taliban — demoralised, in retreat, and thoroughly uncertain of its future. The NCAER index of business confidence is at a two-year low, having slumped from 107.4 in January 2000 to 82.8 last month.

As Yogi Berra would have put it, it’s deja vu all over again. Eleven years ago, when George Bush Sr launched the Gulf War against Iraq, Indian intellectuals let loose a cannonade of articles on how stupid and dumb Bush

SEVERAL blue chips are in danger of disappearing from our stock markets. Several foreign companies want to buy back all outstanding shares and delist themselves. These include Cadbury, Carrier, Wartsila, Hoganas, Cabot India, and ITW Signode. The government needs to

A global recession is slashing jobs. But even if industry was booming, pubic sector undertakings and old industries are so overmanned that job cuts would be needed for efficiency. And new technology is mechanising every line of manufacturing, reducing jobs

Ministers talk of new measures to increase foreign direct investment, which has stagnated at around $ 4 billion a year, and approach China’s level of $ 45 billion. Few seem aware that foreign investors are leaving India in such numbers

ALMOST everybody in business and politics says the government really must do something to revive the flagging economy. Industrial and export growth are floundering. Bank credit to industry is not taking off despite interest cuts. Few businessmen want to invest,

Many Indians think Pakistan has squeezed far more financial advantage out of the US campaign against the Taliban than India has. The USA and Japan have lifted the 1998 economic sanctions imposed on both India and Pakistan, but Pakistan has

Even when markets fail, market-based solutions can often be better than government ones. This needs emphasis in the wake of the Nobel Prize for economics going to George Akerloff, Joseph Stiglitz and Michael Spence, for showing that lack of formation