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%. […]
He advocates a false morality to disguise his government’s failures
Dr Manmohan Singh the prime minister has routinely relied on platitudes (instead of on incentives) to motivate the UPA government’s policies. But he is getting even the platitudes wrong. In a country where the average annual per capita income hovers around an unacceptably low US$1000, he […]
The Reserve Bank of India is considering launching a Sovereign Wealth Fund which will effectively allow it to invest its excess reserves in higher yielding assets that are off-limits to it right now. This is on the back of the $5 bn set aside in the 2007 budget for the India Infrastructure Finance Corporation. Critics […]
Who gets hurt when grain exports are banned?
Swaminathan Iyer took the words out of this bloggers mouth. The UPA government, he writes “has suddenly shifted from protecting Indian farmers against cheap imports to protecting the consumer by cheapening imports”. He is referring to the ban on rice exports (which follow the export of wheat late […]
The total strength of the defence employees has risen from nearly 362,000 in 1960 to 1.3 million today. The defence pensions bill, which is over 50 percent of the central government’s pensions bill, has also risen exponentially since the 1960s. It has grown nearly tenfold from Rs. 1670 Crore in 1990-91 to Rs. 15,244 Crore […]
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 […]
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 […]
As another year draws to an end, extracts from two speeches delivered this year — one by an ex-finance minister (who happens to be the current Prime Minister) and another by the current Finance Minister. Both the speeches were delivered to a foreign audience and the extracts reproduced here cover only the hard facts, […]
…likely for the Maharashtra government.
The BBC reports that the World Bank is considering the first ever proposal for a loan of $3.5 billion to be disbursed and repaid in rupees and not the US dollar. This is being done to ostensibly counter the fluctuating rupee- dollar rate. However, it needs no saying that a continually […]
…to counter the rising rupee.
Professor Kaushik Basu of the Cornell University believes that the rise of the rupee against the dollar is inevitable in the mid-term. He also believes that the sudden collapse of the dollar is unlikely but there is not much that India can do to alter the current dynamics of exchange rates.
[…]
Uttar Pradesh has fallen in line with the rest of India and implemented VAT. Subhomoy Bhattacharjee writes in the Indian Express on “the biggest success story of Indian public finance“.
Before the issue of the historicity of the characters in the Ramayana came along to cloud the issue, much of the public debate hovered around political and environmental issues.
Neither the commercial viability, nor the putative military strategic benefits, were adequately scrutinised.
The commercial case for the project rests on the time and cost saved due […]
Budgeting- ‘Guns versus Butter’
The Indian budgeted defence expenditure (DE) for the current year (2007-08) is Rs. 96,000 crore and the Indian Army’s share of this pie is approximately 47%. The DE is 2.07% of the GDP; the corresponding figures for Pakistan and China are 3.4% and 2.8 % respectively. But there is a […]
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 […]
Prashant wrote to me earlier this week to bring a recent blog post (and Business Standard article) from Ajay Shah to my attention. Essentially Ajay is arguing the following:
“a lot of what is going on is owing to procyclical (i.e. destabilising) macro policy. I emphasise the distinction between the long-term trend and the business cycle. […]
Ajay Shah alerts us to a draft volume published by the World Bank (free download) titled Dancing with Giants: China, India and the global economy.
Drawing upon the latest research, this volume analyzes the influences on the rapid future development of these two countries and examines how their growth is likely to impinge upon other countries. […]
Here’s a fantastic piece about Walmart efficiencies. Titled, Wal-Mart’s Shelf-Correcting System Is Model for Government, argues that the government (of USA) does two things well.
…Anyone who’s ever filed a tax return or visited the Department of Motor Vehicles understands that government does two things well: spends our money and wastes our time…
The piece goes on […]
More of the same where the same has failed
Here’s a conundrum: it is amply clear that given the abysmal state of India’s roads, railways, ports, irrigation and electricity grids, and given the rapid growth of the Indian economy over the past several years, good infrastructure is in great demand in India. Yet the central government’s […]
As per the India Stock Blog
The Rupee is fundamentally weak, but has been propped up by overly positive sentiments of Foreign Institutional Investors (FIIs), which are now moderating…
Factors weighing on the Rupee:
Trade and Current Account Deficit
On the surface it would appear that oil would be the cause of the widening trade deficit. But non-oil imports […]
In response to the previous post by Reuben bearing us glad tidings about the economy (that it grew at 8.1% last quarter) reader Patel points to a piece on Bloomberg claiming that the growth figures might be incorrect because of statistical fluctuations. But isn’t it possible that something elsee is happening? Much of India’s […]