Paul A. Samuelson, the first American Nobel laureate in economics and the foremost academic economist of the 20th century, died Sunday at his home in Belmont, Mass. He was 94. His death was announced by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which Samuelson helped build into one of the world’s great centres of graduate education in economics. In receiving the Nobel Prize in 1970, Samuelson was credited with transforming his discipline from...

Even as reports pour in of a softening of food price futures, the spectre of food price inflation haunts households across the country. But to imagine that the inflation genie can be put back into the bottle through legislative fiat is the height of parliamentary fantasy. The Estimates Committee of the Lok Sabha has recommended just that! It wants new legislation to check price rise of essential commodities by capping...

In a year of sparse rains and spiralling food prices, with hundreds of districts being officially declared as drought-hit, a rally by activists in the capital demands a Food Entitlements Act.  Perhaps the most vocal demands at the rally were those aimed at a complete revamp of the Public Distribution System (PDS), starting with universal — instead of targeted — coverage. Over 5,000 grassroots activists, agricultural workers, farmers, lawyers, doctors and...

The United Nations agency entrusted with accelerating sustainable industrial development in poorer states today pledged to help the world’s 49 least developed countries (LDCs), 33 of them in Africa, to withstand global financial crisis. “The global financial crisis is moving many LDCs into troubled waters with heightened risk to exports, investment, credit, banking systems, budgets, the balance of payments, and remittances, and, the most vulnerable are those countries which depend...

There are now one billion hungry people on the globe, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said recently. A statistic that is shameful and shocking at the same time. The global financial crisis too has led to a dramatic rise in hunger across the world. Ban warned that the food crisis is a wake-up call for tomorrow since by 2050 the planet's population will be 9.1 billion people, over two billion more...