In the absence of income or expenditure-based headcount ratio, the growth in the real wages (i.e., nominal wages adjusted against retail inflation) of the manual workers is considered to be a good proxy to assess the trends in poverty. This is because the manual, unskilled/ semi-skilled labourers exist at the bottom of the pyramid or economic hierarchy, and most of them belong to the social categories Scheduled Castes (SCs) and...
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India’s new budget: much fanfare, missed opportunity -Happy Pant and Sarah Farooqui
-CBGA Blog India presented its latest Union Budget (for FY 2022 -23) in early February amid much hope, as the country is still reeling from the aftermath of Covid-19 pandemic, which has lasted for two years. To deal with the pandemic induced socio-economic crisis, countries across the world have been announcing policy measures outside of their annual budgets. The Indian government, too, made many such announcements, but given the scale of the...
More »The alarming rise of food shares -Nidhi Kaicker, Aashi Gupta, and Raghav Gaiha
-The Hindu Spells of impoverishment during the pandemic were not infrequent, and lower castes and minorities bore the brunt of it Few observations survive the test of time. Fewer gain significance over time. Engel’s Law is a case in point. A version is that the poorer a family, “the greater the proportion of the total outgo which must be used for food. The proportion of the outgo used for food, other things...
More »Poor Country With Affluent Elite, India Is Going Nowhere -Jayati Ghosh
- The India Cable/ TheWire.in India is now one of the most unequal countries for both income and wealth inequality — and has shown the most rapid increases in inequality. The Paris-based World Inequality Lab has become a major source of data on global inequality, based on careful aggregation of national data from a multitude of sources, of both income and wealth inequality, at national, regional and global levels. Their latest World...
More »GDP Numbers: What’s Wrong With How India Measures Manufacturing Output Data -Kaushal Shroff
-TheWire.in A claim of an 8.4% real GDP growth rate has little relevance even as rural India battles plummeting wage levels, depleted incomes and widespread unemployment. With the release of the GDP figures for the quarter ending September, the government machinery has been in full swing advancing the narrative that economic growth is indeed back on track. However, sorely missing from these narratives is the inconvenient factoid on the currently dismal state of...
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