In 2014, the BJP showed it could conduct a campaign that was more sophisticated than anything India had seen before. Now, incumbency, money, friendly media, lessons from previous success, and boots on the ground all favour ru
Indian policymakers just do not seem able to make a clear enough assessment of where growth will occur, where India’s opportunities are, and how to create a playing field in which the most dynamic and well-run Indian firms
The Budget displayed a maturity and rationality of thought and action in terms of basic public finance policies. Within the economic sphere, what India still needs is careful rethinking of the balances and boundaries between
“An Economic Strategy for India” covers many important areas of policy action and reform, but it does not bring all the pieces together where it matters, in creating conditions where firms will be established at higher ra
The basic autonomy of RBI does need to be protected. The most serious, and unprecedented violation of this, not to speak of being a bad policy, was demonetisation
Neither RBI nor the central government has been doing an ideal job of managing key aspects of the economy. If RBI failed in bank regulation when bad loans were being made, the government’s failure to allow or enable banks,
At India’s stage of economic and institutional development, kleptocracy in the private and public sector, which is most lucrative for large-scale, long-term investments, is the country’s biggest economic problem.
The threatened narrowing of what it means to be American, going beyond any individual, no matter how prominent, will adversely affect Indian Americans, whatever their social status or income level.
The financing of firms and the skilling of workers are both activities that can be done more efficiently with better management, catalysing the relaxation of other constraints on the performance of the economy,
Supporting development of private sector initiatives in training and skilling ought to be an urgent focus of government policy, rather than trying to create an overall taxonomy of jobs and skills.
The next general election is less than a year away, and this is a good time to take stock of where India’s economy might be headed. Recent academic research seems to support the hypothesis that democracies do better than au
Financial sector reforms have to be governed by the goal of increasing the flow of funds to productive and efficient firms, those which can create good jobs by investing well.
Job growth in India that accompanies output growth is anaemic, although not absent. We need to focus on the process of creating jobs in which workers are more productive.
In my last column, on “good jobs” for India, I noted the importance of scale and complementarities in creating such jobs, and the possibility of focusing on coastal economic zones (CEZs), an idea from Chinese experience
The basic economic insights are obvious, but tend to get lost in discussions of formal versus informal sector and self-employment versus employment by another person or organisation.
