-Scroll.in India was the third-worst performer in South Asia, after Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bangladesh topped the list in the region. India has fallen 28 spots to rank 140th among 156 countries on the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index. In 2020, India had ranked 112th among 153 countries on the index. “The index benchmarks the evolution of gender-based gaps among four key dimensions – Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and...

-Press release by International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems dated 30th March, 2021 * New report sounds alarm on control of food tech, farming data, and corporate takeover of UN multilateral agencies. * Civil society  and social movements can fight back, boosting post-pandemic resilience, slashing agriculture’s GHG emissions by 75%, and shifting $4 trillion to sustainable food and farming. The future planned by agribusiness giants could accelerate environmental breakdown and jeopardize...

-The Hindu The issue is about checking their monopoly power while encouraging their positive externalities and consumer surplus There are ongoing investigations worldwide, including in the European Union and the United States, on the abuse of monopolistic power by the Big Tech Firms, especially Facebook and Google. Many compare this with the earlier antitrust investigations in the U.S. on the telecom industry and the break-up of the AT&T dictated by the Department...

-The Hindu The Wistron incident is an example of how exploitative labour practices could accompany businesses moving to India Apple’s decision to place its Taiwanese supplier, Wistron Corp., on probation by not giving new orders — after an audit of the serious lapses in labour practices that led to violence in its facility in Narasapura in Karnataka — is a step forward in corporate accountability and ethical business operations. Pressured by Apple’s...

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...