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. [...]
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