Enron, corporate superstar of the US, has gone from dizzy heights to bankruptcy within a year. Starting as a humble gas pipeline operator, it diversified into power plants and water supply globally, then pioneered trading in electricity and gas when […]

DOES size matter? This is an age-old question, for countries no less than companies. I remember the United Nations used to pass resolutions urging special concessions for small, island and land-locked countries in the 1970s and 1980, to help out

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,