governance, political economy, institutional development and economic regulation
Politics is heating up. Elections in Bihar loom in November with Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu* and West Bengal tightly packed together in May next year, just after the FY 2021-22 budget. Bihar remains rural at heart. Luckily for the BJP, agriculture is the bright star in the Indian economy with expected growth of 3%. Doesn’t […]
Read More The price of fiscal exuberance“Waiting for Godot”- a play by Samuel Beckett in which a fictional Godot never arrives. The title has now become a code or allegory, to describe waiting forever for something which never happens. The 2014 “election jumla” of Rs 15 lakhs of recovered hawala money to be deposited into each bank account, quickly acquired this […]
Read More Fiscal stimulus – Waiting for GodotPrime Minister Modi is a “lucky General”. At a time when India seemed most vulnerable, God has chosen to level the field a bit by hitting the global economy and China with a pandemic which is sure to slow growth even further making us look relatively better. The misery of others often comes with collateral […]
Read More Red lining budget FY 2021A little history on economic growth – a major worry – can help provide perspective to today’s concerns. The incidence of annual downturns in growth (in constant terms) show a marked variance before and after 1990-91 in the Republics short economic history. Jagged growth in the first four decades Over the thirty-nine years prior to […]
Read More External assistance can rescue the economyIt’s going to be a sombre Deepawali this year. If there were any doubts, the RBI Monetary Policy report of October 4 dispels them succinctly. Missing demand Global apprehensions abound around the policy and political uncertainty unleashed by the proxy war for access to markets between the US and China. Back home, slowing private demand […]
Read More Its’ smart to stoke private demandThe Reserve Bank’s decision to transfer Rs 1.76 trillion to the government as surplus follows the “golden mean” principle, often used by committees. This bonanza comes courtesy an “Expert Committee to Review the Extant Economic Capital” of the RBI, constituted in November 2018, which has now recommended a higher level of transfer as against the […]
Read More RBI plays White Knight to revenue strapped governmentBudget FY 2020, tabled on July 5 in Parliament, unintentionally unleashed a “whodunnit” type mystery with serious downstream negative fiscal impacts. The snafu was spotted by eagle-eyed economists Ratin Roy, director of the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, and Nitin Desai, a previous Chief Economic Advisor, within hours of the tabling of the […]
Read More Budget 2019-20 “malfunction” spoils the showNirmala Sitharaman has notched up a record merely by taking over as Finance Minister in the Modi 2.0 government. She will be the first woman to hold this position as a stand-alone charge. Indira Gandhi was the first woman Finance Minister in 1970-71. But she was already Prime Minister and assumed the position from Finance […]
Read More Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman – an avatar of Durga or Laxmi?Today we found the grandfatherly chief minister of Haryana Mohan Lal Khattar smiling at us out of a half-page advertisement, paid for by taxpayers, announcing an “unprecedented decision” of his government. From October 1, 2018 onwards, electricity customers consuming less than 500 kilowatt hours per month would pay between 16 to 47 per cent less […]
Read More Electric subsidy – Haryana’s burden of richesArun Jaitley has returned to take charge as finance minister well before those who care for him would have advised. So what was the haste all about? The uncharitable view would be that power abhors a vacuum. Politicians and film stars — no wonder the two often overlap — are most vulnerable to the prolonged […]
Read More Jaitley returns as FM
Opinion India 