-Business Standard How support for left and right-leaning parties is changing in social composition Some decades back the typical voting pattern in many democracies used to be that the rich and upper middle classes used to vote in general for right-leaning parties, while the relatively poor voted for left-leaning parties. But in recent decades this pattern has been shifting: many of the professional or more educated voters in some of those countries...

The World Economic Outlook – a bi-annual publication of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) -- released in October 2020 has anticipated that the economic progress made by the countries since the 1990s to reduce poverty would be turned upside down by the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, economic disparity would rise too in the post-COVID world because the crisis has disproportionately impacted women, informal sector workers and people with...

-The Hindu Nationalism is not going to solve the big problems, says the economist. If the catastrophic human toll of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic was the first wave to strike the world this year, its severe economic consequences – including loss of livelihoods of the poor across countries, leading to massive internal displacement and starvation in many cases – have been the second wave. It is in this context that the seminal work...

-TheWire.in In 'Capital and Ideology', the economist expands his investigations across the globe and over long periods of history to explore the role of ideologies in fuelling inequality. Thomas Piketty made his name in 2014, when his Capital in the Twenty-First Century became an unlikely bestseller. Overnight, he achieved rockstar status – a rarity for an economist. The book seemed to express the outrage against economic inequality, which was making headlines then,...

-TheWire.in To rectify this gap between perception and reality, inequality of opportunities and the lack of emphasis on primary education need to feature more prominently in Indian policy discussions. We are constantly reminded of how Narendra Modi started from humble beginnings by selling tea and rose to occupy the position of the prime minister of India. Irrespective of which side of the political divide one is on, there is no disputing the...