-The Indian Express To get the engine of the economy revving, an expansionary fiscal policy that harnesses the energy of the informal sector to boost aggregate demand is the order of the day. That India is in the midst of a serious economic slowdown is no longer in question. The debates are now mostly about what to do about it: Whether to opt for a fiscal expansion to boost demand or to...

-NDTV Lately, the January releases from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) about the advanced estimates of national income have a touch of seasonal chill. The estimate of the Real GDP growth rate for 2019-20 has touched 5%, falling from 6.8% in 2018-19, continuing a downward slide that started in 2016-17. This is the lowest growth rate since 2008-09, which was the year of the global financial crisis. Indeed, in the entire...

-The Hindu Misplaced optimism needs to cede ground to tangible policy interventions The government’s advance estimates for economic output and growth for the fiscal year ending in March may raise eyebrows, but only for the wrong reasons. The National Statistical Office (NSO) has estimated that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will expand by 5% in the 12-month period, in line with the Reserve Bank of India’s sharp downward revision last month in its...

-The Indian Express Growing divergence between consumption expenditure estimates from NSO surveys and GDP data is too big to be pushed under the carpet Recently, we had expressed concerns that with the GDP growth rate falling in the post 2011-12 period, the decline in the poverty ratio would be slow. During 2011-12 to 2018-19, both GDP and agriculture growth were lower than in the earlier period. The terms of trade were not...

-The Indian Express The ongoing price recovery in major crops is in danger of being stymied by knee-jerk government response. A lot of analyst commentary on the latest quarterly GDP numbers for India has focused on the low growth in “nominal” terms: Gross value added (GVA) at current prices grew by just 6.3% year-on-year in July-September and 7.1% for April-September. If this first-half trend holds for the rest of 2019-20, it would...