-The Hindu Business Line   Over 340 million destitute people live here, mostly in rural areas NEW DELHI: India is home to over 340 million destitute people and is the second poorest country in South Asia after strife-torn Afghanistan, says a poverty estimation study by Oxford University, UK.   Forty per cent of all poor in 49 countries live in India, mostly in rural areas, according to the Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index (MPI) 2014, a tool...

-The Hindu   The World of Work Report 2014 catalogues the impressive strides developing countries are making to catch up with advanced nations. But the International Labour Organisation study also contains important caveats on the cost from continuing sharp inequalities. Per capita income has grown on average by 3.3 per cent per annum in 140 countries over the past three decades, as against 1.8 per cent in the advanced economies. But this...

-The Business Standard     They were unimpressed by the UPA's misguided socialism, but they worry about the new regime's free-market orientation too Consider this paradox. The Congress Party-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) was decimated in the elections in spite of several years of good monsoon and rising agricultural production. Consider another paradox. This was the regime that implemented policies that were presumed to be pro-farmer: the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, the...

-The United Nations   In the aftermath of the global economic crisis, more than 70 per cent of the world population is without proper social protections, the United Nations labour agency today reported, urging governments to scale up investment in child and family benefits, pensions and other public expenditures. "The global community agreed in 1948 that social security and health care for children, working age people who face unemployment or injury and older...

-Outlook   The author of the surprise international bestseller, Capital, in the 21st Century, thinks that abolishing Income Tax is not a good idea Books on economy rarely move beyond the peer group of economists and their academic circle. But those old presumptions are now being put to the test and the rules are being rewritten from the time 42-year old French economist, Thomas Piketty, went viral. The publication of the English edition...