-The Hindu The Ease of Doing Business index was plagued with problems and deserves to be scrapped On September 16, the World Bank Group scrapped its flagship publication, the ‘Doing Business’ report. This report publishes the influential annual ranking of countries on the Ease of Doing Business (EDB) index. The Group acted on its commissioned study to examine the ethical issues flagged in preparing the 2018 and 2020 editions of the EDB...

-The Telegraph Inequality remains integral to India’s growth story This year marks three decades of market-friendly economic reforms introduced in 1991 by the P.V. Narasimha Rao administration. Manmohan Singh was considered the mastermind behind breaking the shackles of the license-permit raj, an inefficient government, a stifled private sector, and a strictly controlled import regime. All these led to low economic growth, large incidence of poverty, an inefficient, unwieldy public sector, and pervasive...

-The Hindu It is time to formulate a wage employment-based national urban livelihood scheme similar to MGNREGS During the pandemic, we have again and again faced the difficult choice of saving lives versus protecting livelihoods. According to the World Economic Outlook report of April, 2021 of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), almost all countries, except China, experienced economic contraction last year. The global GDP shrunk by 3.3%. The contraction in the U.S.,...

The pandemic's first wave had a devastating impact on the livelihoods of rural workers in Bihar (including the self-employed) last year, according to a survey based research, jointly done by economists from Centre for Development Economics and Sustainability at Monash University, Australia and the New Delhi-based Institute for Human Development. A recent press note issued by the authors of the study shows that almost 94.4 percent of the households participating...

-The Hindu This is ‘abject poverty’, and if the economy is to be repaired, the number of the poor has to be meticulously counted The son of a corn merchant-turned sociologist, Charles Booth had little patience for Charles Dickens and others in his time, who used lyrical prose to describe the desperation of the poor in working class London. Booth was also angry, in 1885, over the claims made by F.D. Hyndman,...