governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
BOOK REVIEW Work 3.0 By Avik Chanda and Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay Penguin Business 2023 466 pages Rs 524 The central concern of the authors is how to retain human-centric workplaces in the face of the expected tech onslaught increasingly making machines central to the design, implementation and monitoring of most functional tasks catering to human needs. […]
Read More Cyborg WorkplacesIn India, the Union government takes on a much broader fiscal mandate than is necessary. Some of this is driven by the constitutional allocation of tax mandates, which favor tax flows to the Union government. Nearly 20 per cent, on an average, of a state government’s revenue flows in a “waterfall arrangement” from the Centre […]
Read More Indian Economy: Reading the Tea LeavesThe Union Finance Secretary dismissed l’affair Adani as a storm in a teacup. He is right of course. The personal misfortunes of the Adani family are unlikely to shake the financial stability of India. But it is a rather large teacup, even post denouement, valued at US$60 billion. If the “teacups” of all of India’s […]
Read More The Downside of Systematically Important BillionairesBook Review The Connections World: The future of Asian Capitalism Author: Simon Commander & Saul Estrin Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pages: 253 Price: £74.99 The “Asia” that this book addresses spreads northwards across the Pacific Ocean from Indonesia till the borders of China, North Korea and Japan and westwards to Pakistan on the Indian Ocean, […]
Read More Saving Asia from Stalling GrowthGrowth is slowing in India. In July to September this year there were six major economies- Malaysia, Greece, Philippines, Israel, Colombia, Argentina (The Economist December 1) with growth higher than the 6.3 percent India achieved in the April to September quarter of this fiscal. Growth by year end is unlikely to be vastly different. Is […]
Read More Indian Economy between A Rock and A Hard spaceMcKinsey, the storied global management consulting firm, will be celebrating its centenary in 2026. Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe, both journalists with the New York Times, use their considerable investigative skills, to craft an evidenced, albeit selectively curated, assault to expose the rot behind McKinsey’s public image. It makes for a riveting read but fails […]
Read More When McKinsey Comes To Town- Book ReviewIt has finally “sunk in” that Twitter is entering uncharted waters as it tries to create a world defined by free speech that offends no one, obeys the law of the land and yet manages to say something sensational in 280 characters, hour after hour, to pull in eyeballs and the advertising dollars to keep […]
Read More Musk storms the tweeters nest hoping the bird will flyCentral Bank Digital Currency (CBDC), a new asset class and system for global and domestic payments and settlements, has been under active research and development since around 2015. Oddly, the United States (US) seems relaxed about joining the race. United States makes up for lost time Reflecting this institutional languor, Jerome Powell, Chair of the US […]
Read More CBDC: Minting the FutureThe dominant view is dire on the impact of the proposed roll back of the three Farm Laws, enacted in haste in 2020, even as the pandemic raged. Opinion is divided whether it is proof of the government’s shallow commitment to deep reform or that it proclaims doom for agriculture, which has committed Hara-kiri by […]
Read More The upside of farm laws repealFifteen months down the road to economic recovery, the economy is still limping back to the normal circa 2019-20. GDP in the first quarter of the current fiscal year (April to June fiscal year 2021-22) at INR 32.4 trillion (constant terms) is 20.1 percent higher than the same quarter last year- that’s the good news. But it […]
Read More Indian economy – struggling to reach 2019-20 GDP levels
Opinion India 