-Hindustan Times The picture of rural Indian life today that emerges from what is probably the world's largest study ever of household deprivation is sobering and sombre. It describes a massive hinterland still imprisoned in persisting endemic impoverishment, want, illiteracy and indeed hopelessness. It tells a story that every thinking and caring Indian must heed. Advocates of free markets, opposed to building a welfare state, have long argued that accelerated market-led economic...

-The Hindu Thanks to the caste system, India has always been an unequal society. What is even more worrying is that inequality appears to have deepened in the past two decades The Boston Consulting Group’s 15th annual report, “Winning the Growth Game: Global Wealth 2015”, has received extensive coverage in the Indian media. The report comes on top of the Global Wealth Databook 2014 from Credit Suisse, which provides a much more...

-Centre for Budget and Governance Accountability (CBGA) Press Release   New Delhi: The direction indicated by the Finance Minister's Budget Speech in general and that of the taxation policies in particular indicate a quantum leap being taken towards Market Fundamentalism. In the absence of any increase in the overall spending capacity of the government (Centre and States combined), the steps for fiscal decentralization (from Centre to States) have been constrained, implying only...

-The Hindu The government deserves congratulations for its firm stand at the WTO, which finds support in Rodrik's trilemma The Princeton don Dani Rodrik is one of the world's leading economists. He is a firm believer in and supporter of globalisation. However, he has also posed a famous "globalisation trilemma." A trilemma describes a situation where only two of three things can hold true at the same time. If any two out...

-World Bank Blog The enormity of the global job-creation challenge is underscored in a comprehensive new analysis by the International Finance Corporation, which issued a wide-ranging Jobs Study at a recent IFC forum  on the urgency of the unemployment crisis. More than 200 million people are now unemployed worldwide – with another 1.5 billion people only marginally employed, and with an additional 2 billion working-age adults neither working nor seeking a...