Articles

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

The future of the Middle East depends on the direction of US foreign policy. Many Indians have misgivings about your grasp of what is needed to create free, tolerant societies in the Middle East. These can only deepen after your

Amidst the excitement of the hijacking that wasn’t, the Bangladesh election, and the US build up against the Taliban, not many readers would have noticed a news item about an out-of-court settlement for $ 875 million reached by two top