-The Hindu Rising fuel prices remain a festering pressure point for households The urban poor have been the worst-hit by the high inflation that has prevailed over the past one-and-a-half years, and the persistent uptick in fuel prices continues to pose a major threat for them, rating agency Crisil said in a note on Friday. While inflation shrinks Purchasing Power across the board, the impact on different income classes varies with their share...

-NetworkIdeas.org In terms of economic policy, the Modi government must be perhaps the most conservative in the world. During the entire period of the pandemic when millions of people lost their incomes and livelihood support, most governments around the world provided universal cash transfers to the people, but not the Modi government. True, many other third world countries too did not provide such universal cash transfers, but their hands were tied;...

-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,...

During the last one year, India seems to have lost the race in becoming the world leader in terms of development, prosperity and growth thanks to the recession brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. The total number of poor people in the country has swelled and the middle class has shrunk in 2020 in comparison to what was anticipated earlier. A new study by the United States based think tank Pew...

-The Hindu Subjective well-being and income are intricately linked The question whether the rich are more satisfied with their lives is often taken for granted, even though surveys, like the Gallup World Poll, show that the relationship between subjective well-being and income is often weak, except in low-income countries in Africa and South Asia. Researcher Daniel Kahneman and his collaborators, for example, report that the correlation between household income and reported life...