-The Hindu In a year of economic slowdown and growing inequality, we have been presented with a stingy Budget that fails to ensure the bare necessities for all While the country continues to grapple with the health and economic crisis as a result of COVID-19, widespread hunger and food insecurity is a silent emergency that has not been getting sufficient attention. Unfortunately, the Union Budget also does not include any significant measures...
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Despite some hits, the Budget has crucial misses -R Nagaraj
-The Hindu That there is no targeted employment programme to alleviate the immediate crisis is a matter of concern The Budget, at its simplest, is the government’s tentative income and expenditure statement. Like all financial statements, the devil lies in the fine print. At its broadest, the Budget is a pious statement of the government’s policy and ideological intentions. It is also the government’s statement of how it seeks to tackle the...
More »Budgeting in a time of crisis -TCA Ramanujam
-The Hindu Keynesian economics offers guidelines for preparing the Budget The Great Depression wrecked the economies of the U.S. and Europe. In the words of Jonathan Alter, when Franklin Roosevelt became the American President in 1933, he was told: “Mr. President, if your programme succeeds you would be the greatest President in American history. If it fails, you will be the worst one”. Roosevelt replied: “If it fails, I will be the...
More »The country should worry about further worsening of economic inequality in the post-COVID period
The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...
More »The awkward myth of a revival in the country’s rural economy -Himanshu
-Livemint.com Low incomes and poor farm-gate prices capture the reality of relentless distress in our hinterland National accounts data released last month estimated that the economy has contracted by 7.5% in the second quarter of 2020-21 compared to last year. For many, this was a sign of recovery, given expectations that India’s gross domestic product (GDP) would contract by around 10%. It is, no doubt, an improvement from the 23.9% GDP decline...
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