-The Hindu As inflation is driven by supply-side factors, tax policy can be used to cushion its impact With the Union Budget 10 days away, many economic observers are now focused on what support the Centre can offer the economy, which is still struggling to recover from the pandemic. Some analysts believe that the government must keep its spending in check to prevent price rise from getting out of control. Retail inflation...

-Hindustan Times Gross domestic product (GDP) statistics are released at both current and constant prices. The latter discounts inflation (more on this later) from the base year of the current GDP series. Let’s assume it takes a tonne of steel to build half a kilometre of road. Let’s also assume steel costs ₹1,000 a tonne and there is a tax of 10% on steel. Now, if steel prices doubled in a year,...

-The Hindu Business Line At present, panchayats make no contribution to the design of schemes. Their autonomy is negligible. This needs to change Decentralisation has long been recognised as an efficient instrument for promoting economic democracy, and delivering services to meet the needs of people. There are three different channels for decentralisation — political, administrative and fiscal. Political decentralisation promotes trust and cooperation between government agencies and citizens. Administrative decentralisation enables authority...

-Newsclick.in Modi government has restrained spending of various ministries including education, social justice, environment and others. Continuing with its policy of cutting down spending, the central government has spent only 47% of the budgeted amount by the end of September 2021. That’s half of the financial year 2021-22 gone. This is a new low (see graph below), and bizarrely, it comes at a time when tax revenues have picked up. As can be...

-Newsclick.in The Biden administration is realising this. The need of the hour, therefore, is to build a post-pandemic growth strategy centred on an increase in public investment and public spending. The period of neo-liberalism witnesses an increase in the share of economic surplus in total output both in individual countries and also for the world as a whole. This is because the “opening” up of the economy to freer trade in goods...