-The Times of India NEW DELHI: Jean Dreze, eminent economist and a former member of the National Advisory Council during the UPA regime, was dropped from a high profile economics conference organized by the finance ministry.  Dreze, who has been critical of some of the measures of the NDA government, was invited to speak at the Delhi Economics Conclave on Friday.  "This is the invitation I received and accepted some time ago. On...

-The Indian Express My mother does not work”. In country after country, this expression is heard each time someone describes a woman not engaged in paid employment. A recent study by McKinsey, titled “The Power of Parity: How equality for women could drive $ 2 trillion in global growth”, has evidence that every “stay-at-home” woman directly damages a country’s GDP by billions. Its message is that every woman should “work”; India’s...

-The Hindu Denies PMO's comments saying the report was the personal opinion of an employee Moody’s Analytics has denied that its report expressing concern over what it called the belligerent provocation of various Indian minorities and warning Prime Minister Narendra Modi that unless he steps in to rein in the members of the BJP, India runs the risk of losing domestic and global credibility, was the personal opinion of an analyst...

-The Indian Express There is a worrying dearth of Indian economists working on agriculture today. In his classic Money: Whence It Came, Where It Went, John Kenneth Galbraith observed how the economics profession had a well-defined order of precedence. At the top were the economic theorists and specialists in banking and finance. At the bottom of the hierarchy were agricultural economists. George F. Warren from Cornell University was even worse — a...

-The Hindu Agricultural experts say small farmers are working under severe economic constraints — their earnings are very low and they are indebted — and hence many are compelled to leave farming. Punjab’s farming sector is in crisis and showing signs of sickness as it suffers from falling productivity and shrinking returns. Farmers are reeling under debt, and owing to low profitability, small farmers, in particular, are quitting farming. In the past...