-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...

-Frontline.thehindu.com The RBI’s proposal to loosen regulations for private lenders in the microfinance space will have disastrous consequences for the poor, especially women in rural areas. Microfinance, a category of financial services aimed at serving people from low-income households who lack access to conventional banking credit and services, was originally designed by international Finance capital institutions such as the World Bank as an alternative to providing direct concessional credit to the poor—which...

-Down to Earth The Taliban are set to overtake Kabul; but an expert believes they will spare the age-old Karez system of underground aqueducts in the country given its importance The resurgent Taliban is on the victory march to Kabul. It has already taken provincial capitals as well as Afghanistan’s third-largest city of Herat. As the Taliban appear at the gates of Kabul again after two decades, fears have grown about what...

-Macroscan.com/ Livemint.com There is a common trope, fed especially to generations born after 1991, that economic progress and modernization in India really occurred only after ‘liberalizing’ economic reforms were introduced three decades ago. This is a travesty of the truth. Certainly, conditions for most Indians have improved since that watershed year. Per capita income went up more rapidly than before, life expectancy went up, infant and maternal mortality decreased, income poverty...

-Hindustan Times Those sympathetic to the establishment argue that had it not been for the second wave, the economy would have been in a much better shape. Those who disagree claim that even the sequential recovery which was achieved was profit-led and inequality-generating in nature On June 28, finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman announced an economic package to deal with the adverse effects of the second wave of the pandemic. The contours of...