-Livemint.com The job of policy strategists is always to identify the binding constraints to growth and then try to figure out which policies will help ease them Economists of a certain vintage will remember the old development models in which rapid economic growth was held back by three key constraints. The first was the savings constraint. A poor country such as India could not save enough of its annual national income to sustain...

-The Hindu Trust in official statistics is vital for democracy — the new policy must avoid centralisation David Spiegelhalter, president of Royal Statistical Society in the U.K., gave a most unusual presidential address in 2017. Instead of talking about esoteric statistical techniques, he talked about declining trust in numbers in a post-truth society bombarded by fake news and alternative facts. He recommended to the statistical community that the best way of inspiring...

-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: The country is headed for good rabi season despite below normal monsoon rains, thanks to a surge of rainfall in the last week of September that replenished soil moisture, agriculture secretary Shobhana K Pattanayak has said. The late rains will benefit planting of rabi crops such as wheat and chana, Pattanayak said on Thursday. “We are expecting a very good rabi season, so that should make up...

-The Financial Express The distress in rural India on account of a glut-induced crash in prices of farm commodities will likely alleviate soon as prices tend to look up, but statistical factors will keep farm-sector growth subdued in the short-term. A crash in prices kept growth in nominal gross value added (GVA) for the agriculture and allied sector above the expansion in real term in Q1FY18 for the first time in five...

-The Telegraph Calcutta: Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, the chairman and managing director of biotechnology company Biocon, today said incidents like the Gorakhpur hospital child deaths should trigger the debate "why we spend only 1 per cent of our GDP on health care". Mazumdar-Shaw, who was awarded DSc (honoris causa) by Presidency University, said: "A very, very worrying trend in India is that we spend only 1 per cent of our GDP on health care....