Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline...

The near total political paralysis of one of India's largest states, Andhra Pradesh, over its proposed carve-up, raises fresh questions about how the world's largest democracy will handle questions of identity and territory in this young century. Telangana, the new state proposed, is not a fresh demand, but even as it seems closer than ever to materialising, it opens a Pandora's box in a vast country of over a billion...

We Indians implicitly believe in India’s great past. Recently, that past has been given a statistical underpinning by Angus Maddison. To celebrate the beginning of the 21st century, Maddison wrote a book called The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective. There he says that India was the world’s largest economy in the first millennium AD. It produced one-third of the world’s income in the first century, and 29 per cent in...

Momentum suggests 9 per cent for the full year The overall Index of Industrial Production (IIP), which includes the three components of manufacturing, mining and electricity, grew at a pace of 10.3 per cent during October. This is lower than what was expected, but higher than the 9.1 per cent for September. With this, the April to October growth rose to 7.1 per cent, up from 6.5 per cent in the...

Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from...