The Economic Times

A visit to Afghanistan is a sobering one. Like most Indians, I celebrated the Taliban’s overthrow. Eighteen months later, the celebration looks premature. In theory, democracy has been restored and reconstruction has begun after two decades of civil war. In […]

Computer software is India’s fastest-growing and most competitive industry. The global recession of 2001 sent most technology companies the world over into a tailspin. Yet the Indian software industry kept growing by 25 % annually. This was slower than the

Journalists tend to remind readers about their most brilliant, penetrating forecasts which came true. They rarely write about times when their predictions were dismally wrong. Well, here is an entire column about how badly wrong journalists went in Iraq. Let

For years, the World Bank, IMF and Indian observers (including me) have warned that India’s fiscal deficit is too high and will soon lead to disaster. So too did Martin Wolf and Ed Luce in a recent article in The

WASHINGTON: India has been joined by China and Brazil in prepaying loans totalling $7bn from the World Bank, putting it in the embarrassing position of having a huge net inflow of funds from developing countries. To counter this, the World

After booming on hopes of a quick Iraq war, the stock markets have now slumped in the expectation of a long and messy war. The US wants to send and deploy an additional 100,000 soldiers in Iraq, and the logistics

Just one fortnight after presentation, the budget looks distant, almost forgotten. All eyes are now on Iraq. Without question, what Bush and Saddam Hussein do is infinitely more important for the economy than what Jaswant Singh does. What are the

Why is the US hell-bent on toppling Saddam Hussein? To install a democracy? Don\’t make me laugh, many will say. Yet all other explanations look equally laughable. Some say Bush Jr wants to finish the job his father started in

Ratan Tata has retired as executive chairman of the Tata group on reaching the age of 65. How good has he been for India’s largest industrial group? I have sometimes criticised him over the years, but my overall verdict has

Indian industrialists are terrified of competing with China. But fears are also evident in the once-miracle economies of south-east Asia. East Asian countries like Korea and Taiwan have long graduated out of labour-intensive goods into high-tech ones, and do not