The current food inflation is a result of food output growth not keeping pace with population growth Few recall that, just last month, there was a food security summit in Rome. In sharp contrast to the almost overwhelming coverage of the Copenhagen climate summit, it attracted far lesser attention from the heads of governments, as also from the media. This is somewhat strange as a food (and water) crisis can hit...

As far as natural resources like minerals, land and water are concerned, Jharkhand is among the richest States of India. Yet, its people are among the poorest. Mind you, almost 30 per cent of them are tribal. Out of the total population of 288.46 lakhs, 223.1 lakhs live in rural areas and only 65.36 lakhs are urban dwellers. Even a cursory glance is sufficient to convince that most of the...

I first met Paul Samuelson in 1962, as a student at MIT. A decade later, I had the pleasure of co-authoring with him a paper on the Theory of Index Numbers (American Economic Review, 1974) and another in the Royal Economic Society’s Economic Journal (1984). I last met him a couple of years back, on a sidewalk in Belmont, Massachussets. He was driving down the street and stopped upon seeing...

Democracy is, everywhere, a work in progress. Like many other countries, India has imposed electoral quotas to improve the political empowerment of women and racial-ethnic minorities – that is, it has a political system that requires women to be elected to certain leadership positions. These rules represent a form of affirmative action, but they also resemble a feature of our own Constitution that reserves space in the Senate for two representatives...

Borrowing was both the shaky foundation of global growth and the cause of its collapse. It started with a bust and it ended with an even bigger bust. In between was sandwiched an unsustainable boom. Banks have been humbled. Economists have been found wanting. Geopolitical power began to shift from west to east. That was the noughties that was. It barely seems five minutes ago that policymakers were fretting about the...