-National Herald Maitreesh Ghatak, Professor of Economics at London School of Economics, in an interview to Tathagata Bhattacharya says the government has failed on many counts At the end of the day, it is growth and employment generation via new investment that is key to long-term economic progress. Various welfare schemes are a way of providing a social safety net to the poor in the short-run. It is performance along these two...

-MoneyControl.com A continued property market slowdown and a vegetable glut may have pushed landless labourers back to villages, seeking daily jobs and depressing wage growth India’s gross domestic product (GDP) growth looks set to cruise along the 7-7.5 percent trail, partly aided by steady farm incomes and record harvests on the back of plentiful summer rains over the last three years. But it may still be early to open the bubbly yet.  The...

-Livemint.com A consumption-driven growth not only fuels inflation, but also can arguably lead to a slackening of future growth Economic growth of 8.2% for the June quarter may have beaten all estimates, but the big question is: what kind of growth is it? Is the economy firing on all the engines of domestic consumption, investment demand and external demand? Let’s look at the numbers. The anecdotal evidence of a spurt in consumption growth...

-The Hindu The former Chief Statistician on calculating GDP back series, on indicators of development, and the fall of the rupee The draft of the back series GDP data, which was made public by the government recently, is unlikely to change drastically even if other methods of calculation are used, says former Chief Statistician of India, Pronab Sen. The noted economist discusses GDP, employment and poverty data; the value of the rupee;...

-Livemint.com The job of policy strategists is always to identify the binding constraints to growth and then try to figure out which policies will help ease them Economists of a certain vintage will remember the old development models in which rapid economic growth was held back by three key constraints. The first was the savings constraint. A poor country such as India could not save enough of its annual national income to sustain...