-IndiaSpend.com Bengaluru: Global economic output is expected to contract by 4.9% in 2020 owing to the COVID-19 lockdown. India announced a lockdown on March 24, 2020, which was extended over two months, and continues in pockets of states depending on the spread of the disease, which has now infected more than half a million people in the country. The lockdown impacted millions of inter-state migrant workers who form the bulwark of India’s...

-Mongabay.com * The COVID-19 pandemic has shown up major fault lines in our development trajectory and one of the issues is how we account for growth and progress with the Gross National Product (GNP) calculated as a single bottom line, without paying heed to the ecological, environmental and social costs. * Air and water pollution have been shown to add a significant cost to India’s GNP. A greener GNP will take these...

-The Hindu The trend across developing countries is to give State governments as much discretion as possible India urgently needs to increase fiscal support for COVID-19 relief and rebuilding. Among comparable developing countries with similar Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, India has spent the least as a share of its GDP. While the Central government has announced measures amounting to 0.8% of GDP, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that State-level relief...

Most reports and studies by official agencies, international think tanks and private entities indicate the cataclysmic impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the economy and society. They anticipate that lockdowns imposed by various countries across the globe to reduce the exponential diffusion of COVID-19 (i.e. for flattening the curve by social distancing and quarantines) would adversely affect economic growth and disrupt supply chains in most sectors, on top of causing...

-The Hindu The latest GDP data show that there has been an undeniable decline in the growth rate over seven consecutive quarters On February 28, as per its release calendar, the National Statistical Office (NSO) put out the third quarter gross domestic product (GDP) estimates, that is, for October-December 2020. It showed that domestic output grew at 4.7% at constant prices (that is, net of inflation), compared to the same period the...