-Livemint.com The Centre’s plan to pay off food subsidy arrears is likely to distort our GDP readings for multiple years A puzzle of sorts has arisen—again—in India’s official gross domestic product (GDP) estimates. They don’t meet the smell test. Back in 2015, the Central Statistics Office’s practice of using ‘single deflation’ instead of ‘double deflation’ during a period of falling commodity prices had distorted growth prints, as per our analysis. This time, too,...
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Women's Day: UNDP bats for temporary basic income to combat COVID-19 -Madhumita Paul
-Down to Earth Monthly investment of 0.07-0.31% of a developing countries’ GDP can provide financial security to 613 million working-age women living in poverty A temporary basic income (TBI) for poor women in developing countries can help millions of them cope with the effects of the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic, according to United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) findings released on March 4, 2021 ahead of International Working Women’s Day. The large-scale...
More »Number Theory: The data India needs to diagnose the economy -Roshan Kishore
-Hindustan Times Most forecasters, institutional and private, have revised their GDP estimates for both 2020-21 and 2021-22. India imposed one of the world’s most stringent lockdowns -- it went on for 68 days -- starting on March 25 to curb the spread of Covid-19 infections. It was this lockdown which triggered a record contraction of 24% in India’s gross domestic product (GDP) in the first quarter of fiscal 2020-21. The economic shock...
More »Budget 2021-22: Over-reliance on infrastructure investment to spur growth? -Sarmistha Pal
-IdeasforIndia.in Commenting on the strong infrastructure push in the 2021-22 Budget, Sarmistha Pal argues that an emphasis on investment in infrastructure may not necessarily bring India out of the current economic recession – with the Budget’s negligence of the education sector and insufficient health expenditure, making matters worse. The 2021-22 Union Budget, announced on 1 February 2021, made a definitive turn to the right as it turned its back on providing any...
More »Fiscal transparency jacks up ‘expenditure’ numbers in the Union Budget 2021-22
In order to understand why the Union Budget 2021-22 is being termed as ‘transparent’, it has to be read simultaneously with the 15th Finance Commission Main Report for 2021-26. But first, let us discuss 'fertilizer subsidy'. The budget documents for Union Budget 2021-22 show that the spending on ‘fertilizer subsidy’ was slashed from Rs. 1,33,947 crore in 2020-21 (revised estimate) to Rs. 79,530 crore in 2021-22 (budget estimate). However, the budgetary...
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