-Livemint.com Farmers need structural reforms, crop diversification and greater public investment rather than subsidies and price support Indian agriculture has been relatively untouched by the structural reforms that lifted incomes in other parts of the economy. Low farm productivity meant that governments tried to improve the lot of farmers through price policy. The problem is that engineering a shift in the terms of trade through higher support prices usually leads to generalized...

-Business Standard The large informal sector is a consequence - not a cause - of the low level of development For decades, one of the central aims of economic policy in India has been to create conditions for workers to move from low- to high-income employment. This has usually implied a shift from the informal sector where productivity is low, to the formal sector where productivity is high. This process of “formalisation”...

-The Hindu India does not create 55 lakh new jobs every year, as claimed by a new report A recent research report titled “Towards a Payroll Reporting in India” authored by the Group Chief Economic Adviser of the State Bank of India and a professor from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore has caught the media’s and the Prime Minister’s fancy. Ostensibly, the main objective of the report was to make a...

-Down to Earth Income inequality makes agrarian crisis challenging; inequality is worse among farmers than the Formal Economy Economists Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty recently concluded after a long study that inequality is at its peak in India. It is embedded in popular conscience: “Top 1 per cent of earners captured 22 per cent of total income in the country.” Their study–covering consumption, government accounts and income tax data from 1922...

-The Hindu The Chief Statistician of India on the economy, the meaning of the new series of GDP data, and the need to wait for the impact of demonetisation to unfold T.C.A. Anant is the Chief Statistician of India, and Secretary, Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation. He has been in charge of several notable changes in the way economic data has been recently presented, including the new GDP and Gross Value...