-The Indian Express Budget needs to ramp up spending on health and education. Pandemic has enhanced inequalities, shown up absence of safety nets. India is committed to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, and social sector development is important in reaching them. Progress in this sector has intrinsic (for its own sake) and instrumental (for higher growth) value. It is needed even to build a $5 trillion economy faster. Inequalities...
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If improvement is norm, it is important to be alert to patterns of stagnation in child nutrition indicators -Jean Dreze
-The Indian Express Jean Dreze writes: Surjit Bhalla picks on data, but fails to debunk evidence of alarming trends in child nutrition. I must thank Surjit Bhalla (‘Ideology trumps evidence’, IE December 26) for confirming the main point of an earlier article of mine (‘Give children weight’, IE December 17) — namely, that child undernutrition tends to be taken lightly in the corridors of power. His intention, of course, was the opposite...
More »A brief history of the Indian economy in 2020 -Udit Misra
-The Indian Express India started the calendar year by recording the slowest GDP growth rate in six years and ended it by entering a technical recession. Here's how it all unfolded. Dear Readers, Right through the year, at ExplainSpeaking, we have strived to make sense of the most important developments in the Indian economy. As the year ends, here are the highlights from 2020 and five things to watch out for in 2021. The...
More »The country should worry about further worsening of economic inequality in the post-COVID period
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...
More »The awkward myth of a revival in the country’s rural economy -Himanshu
-Livemint.com Low incomes and poor farm-gate prices capture the reality of relentless distress in our hinterland National accounts data released last month estimated that the economy has contracted by 7.5% in the second quarter of 2020-21 compared to last year. For many, this was a sign of recovery, given expectations that India’s gross domestic product (GDP) would contract by around 10%. It is, no doubt, an improvement from the 23.9% GDP decline...
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