-NDTV Lately, the January releases from the Central Statistics Office (CSO) about the advanced estimates of national income have a touch of seasonal chill. The estimate of the Real GDP growth rate for 2019-20 has touched 5%, falling from 6.8% in 2018-19, continuing a downward slide that started in 2016-17. This is the lowest growth rate since 2008-09, which was the year of the global financial crisis. Indeed, in the entire...
More »SEARCH RESULT
Reality check: on govt projecting slower GDP growth
-The Hindu Misplaced optimism needs to cede ground to tangible policy interventions The government’s advance estimates for economic output and growth for the fiscal year ending in March may raise eyebrows, but only for the wrong reasons. The National Statistical Office (NSO) has estimated that Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will expand by 5% in the 12-month period, in line with the Reserve Bank of India’s sharp downward revision last month in its...
More »Mind the statistics gap -C Rangarajan & S Mahendra Dev
-The Indian Express Growing divergence between consumption expenditure estimates from NSO surveys and GDP data is too big to be pushed under the carpet Recently, we had expressed concerns that with the GDP growth rate falling in the post 2011-12 period, the decline in the poverty ratio would be slow. During 2011-12 to 2018-19, both GDP and agriculture growth were lower than in the earlier period. The terms of trade were not...
More »Serious questions confront policymakers. Yet data are not reliable enough for them to be answered -Arvind Subramanian & Josh Felman
-The Indian Express Running an economy, especially one that is in a predicament such as India’s today, is infinitely more complicated and the data demands are hence commensurately greater. A Data Big Bang effort along the lines proposed here would make that difficult task less challenging. As the government responds to the challenges posed by the economic slowdown, there’s an ignored area of reform, where simple measures could have potentially big payoffs....
More »Looking up: The farm hope -Harish Damodaran
-The Indian Express The ongoing price recovery in major crops is in danger of being stymied by knee-jerk government response. A lot of analyst commentary on the latest quarterly GDP numbers for India has focused on the low growth in “nominal” terms: Gross value added (GVA) at current prices grew by just 6.3% year-on-year in July-September and 7.1% for April-September. If this first-half trend holds for the rest of 2019-20, it would...
More »