V Anantha Nageswaran
A table of inflation rates in many countries around the world is beginning to reveal a disturbing picture. The lowest rate is found in Germany – at 3.0%. Many emerging countries that seem to be doing a truthful job are reporting inflation rates in excess of 10% and some in excess of 20%. […]
So the UPA government is set to improve credit availability (and write off loans) for farmers. Laveesh Bhandari tells you why, if improving the livelihood of farmers is a policy goal, the Manmohan Singh and P Chidambaram are barking up the wrong tree.
Here lies the crux of the matter. If use of new seeds, fertiliser […]
About a month back, I’d written that farmers in Karnataka, when faced with a glut in the tomato crop, elect to throw sack loads of tomatoes on the highways, rather than selling them. During the great depression in America, sack loads of wheat were burnt in order to prevent wheat prices from falling. During the […]
Chandra Kochar, joint managing director and chief financial officer of India’s largest privately owned bank, $80 billion ICICI Bank, is bullish on India growth story. She contends that the growth in India is shifting from consumerism to manufacturing and infrastructure.
In the last five to seven years, India has grown on the basis of its knowledge […]
Ajay Shah has a post on the results of the Pew Institute’s latest survey:
They have three key questions that measure economic liberalism, covering attitudes towards international trade, attitudes towards foreign companies and attitudes towards free markets. The results contain many surprises. As an example, in urban India, they find 89% are supportive of international trade, […]
A friend of IEB who wishes to remain anonymous, The Graduate has sent us a great post on Islamic banking in India.
The Graduate is a recently minted MBA who is currently employed with a foreign bank’s business banking operations. He does not consider himself an expert on banking, he hopes to bring lay readers […]
In today’s DNA Mukul Asher & Amarendu Nandy argue that the Employees’ Provident Fund Organisation (EPFO) is ill-equipped to fulfil its mandate of providing retirement income security.
The EPFO is an unusual national provident fund in combining the features of a defined benefit scheme (Employees Pension Scheme or EPS, introduced in 1995) with those of a […]
So the government has done it again. After managing to procure only about 11 million tons out of the targeted 15 million tons from our farmers, the government has gone ahead and imported about half a million tons from the international market at a much higher price. A process which, in its entirety, ends up […]
Sramana Mitra, entrepreneur and consultant sent us this thoughtful piece
Enterpreneurship is a critical element of a growth economy, and India is poised to unlock a Silicon Valley like entrepreneurial boom through the next 10 years. The beginnings are already in place, steps have been taken in the right direction.
I have written extensively on the topic […]
Some interesting commentary in the papers this week:
Anantha Nageswaran’s opening salvo, in the newly launched Mint:
Central bankers in most of the developed world have taken that to heart in dealing with financial markets. Financial markets, in theory, have more participants than those engaged in the economic marketplace. Hence, the outcomes of their buying and selling […]
Back in the late 1990s, economists were trying to figure out what it was that led to the secular acceleration of economic growth in the United States: the longest and largest peace-time economic expansion in the 20th century (see footnotes). How was it that a country could grow so much and for so long without causing inflation and […]
How much of Dr Manmohan Singh’s talk on reforming agriculture will get translated into action?
Inaugurating the Second Agriculture Summit 2006 organised jointly by the Ministry of Agriculture and FICCI, the Prime Minister declared that the endeavour of his government would be to bridge each of the four deficit viz. the public investment and credit deficit, […]
Farmers are killing themselves because the government has denied them economic freedom
But if the crisis is an opportunity to reform agriculture, will Prime Minister Manmohan Singh take it up?
Back soon folks.
Till then, links to some great reading
- Larry Summers’ speech at the Reserve Bank of India on 24 March, 2006
- Edward Leamer’s review of Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat
- Our friend, Joydeep Mukherji’s paper for the Center for the Advanced Study of India at U. Penn, titled Economic Growth […]
There is an interesting article in the Financial Times today about a delay in the plans to launch the Asian Currency Unit (Acu). Not unsurprisingly the delays have been caused by “political and technical arguments over which currencies to include and how the weighting system would work” (this according, as they say, to ’sources’ […]
On Monday, the benchmark Sensex index of the Bombay Stock Exchange breached the 10,000 mark for the first time since its launch in 1986. Time to say Irrational Exuberance?
I am sure a lot of you have an opinion on this, especially those of you who work in the capital markets. Comments are open.
Reader Raj Iyer sent us this article from the Economic Times titled How govt tries to dig out black money:
The government is examining the idea of issuing special bonds to mop up black money without offering any amnesty to the subscriber. The issue has been referred to the law ministry to ensure that such a […]
Manmohan Singh has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, (subscription required) a mini-manifesto, if you will. Regular readers of IEB will find nothing new.
It’s an impressive to-do list, and includes many of our favorite things as well. So, are we going to see Mr Singh finally flexing his muscles and follow […]
Consulting firm A T Kearney’s annual survey of FDI destinations reveals that
For the first time in the history of the Index, which began tracking the FDI intentions of global executives in 1998, emerging market countries are ranked first and second as the most attractive FDI locations in the world.
… China and […]
Business Week writes about the success of two commodities exchanges in India.
Two years ago government deregulation allowed two competing Indian exchanges, the National Commodity & Derivatives Exchange (NCDEX), which deals mostly with agricultural products, and the Multi Commodity Exchange (MCX), which mostly handles energy and metals, to open for business. The fully […]