The Economic Times

This year’s budget is not simply an election budget. It is also an anti-recession budget. It seeks explicitly to stimulate the domestic economy in the face of the coming global slowdown. Yet the exercise will have at best very partial […]

For a short but incisive economic history of India since Independence, you should read the first hundred pages of Arvind Panagariya’s new book (India: The Emerging Giant, OUP). He follows this up with an excellent discussion of key contemporary problems,

TNN I was taught in college that market failure is so common that governments must intervene with regulations to protect the public. Actually, regulations are required even when there is no market failure. Competition needs to take place within a

NEW DELHI: It should be an election budget. So, expect higher exemption limits for income tax, cuts in corporate tax and customs duty, selective cuts in excise duty, and big spending on welfare and social schemes in the coming budget.

Does the crash of stock markets in India and other emerging markets mean that the “decoupling” thesis — the notion that emerging-market economies can continue soaring even if the US economy dips — has been proved wrong? Not exactly. What

For more than two decades, from 1980 to 2003, India’s GDP growth averaged around 6% per year. Reforms in 1990 produced no dramatic acceleration. Then, with no new policy impetus at all, GDP growth suddenly shot up after 2003 to

For more than two decades, from 1980 to 2003, India’s GDP growth averaged around 6% per year. Reforms in 1990 produced no dramatic acceleration. Then, with no new policy impetus at all, GDP growth suddenly shot up after 2003 to

I am somewhat surprised that the sensex as well as other stock markets the world over have taken off after the US Federal Reserve cut its short-term interest rate by 0.5%, to 5.5%. Other central banks are also expected to

Journalists do not have a good reputation for predicting recessions. Indeed, they are reputed to have predicted 10 of the last three recessions. A month ago, I wrote that the US had a 33% chance of going into recession next

The slump in global stock markets since July has wiped out an estimated $5 trillion of wealth, five times the GDP of India. So, world inequality has fallen dramatically. Are poor people across the world celebrating the great reduction of