Column : India’s inflation puzzle
A couple of weeks ago, Deepak Mohanty, and executive director of RBI, gave a speech in which he tackled India’s inflation puzzle. I will outline what he said, and then assess the arguments. Mr Mohanty first pointed out that India’s recent inflation surge and its persistence did not line up well with either its own history or what has been happening contemporaneously in the rest of the world. World inflation rose somewhat with the recovery from the Great Recession, but then moderated, while India’s inflation climbed to double digits. In India, moreover, a sharp growth slowdown seemed to do nothing to bring inflation down.
Mr Mohanty traces the start of India’s inflation spike to rises in the global prices of food, crude oil and other commodities. He refers to an unidentified analysis that pass-through of global price shocks to domestic prices increased in this recent period, and notes that corporate finance data are consistent with this increased pass-through.
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