-The Telegraph The Nobel laureate economist described 'India as a poster child of what not to do' Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz made a strong case for spending money to combat the long-term economic damage of the pandemic, saying that India would be well advised to focus on containing the contagion as the economic aftermath cannot be tackled without tackling the pandemic. Bracketing India with Brazil and the United States for its “utter...

-ThePrint.in In ‘Labouring women’, economist Jayati Ghosh writes about what Indian policymakers are getting wrong in their measure of poverty. Among the various aspects of deprivation related to poverty and inequality, one aspect which has seldom attracted the attention of scholars and policy-makers equally is that of time poverty. Ignoring this important dimension actually results from a related and possibly more substantive deficiency: the inadequate conception of what constitutes work that underlies...

-Hindustan Times The Industrial Relations Code, 2020, bring new rules for hiring and firing of labour in mid-sized and large industries, making retrenchment easier. Parliament on Wednesday passed the three labour code bills – the Occupational Safety, Health And Working Conditions Code, 2020; the Industrial Relations Code, 2020; and the Code on Social Security, 2020 – merging 24 central labour laws in a major boost to labour reforms. The National Democratic Alliance...

Although social activists and concerned economists demanded at least Rs. 1 lakh crore to be earmarked in favour of the Mahatma Gandhi Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (MGNREGS), the Finance Minister in her budget speech on 1st February allocated only Rs.61,500 crore to it for the financial year 2020-21. As compared to the fund spent on MGNREGA in 2019-20 (i.e. revised estimate of Rs.71,001.81 crore), the amount set aside for the...

-Livemint.com A Mint analysis suggests that the CMIE figures should not be considered a proxy for the official unemployment and labour force participation rates As the country went under lockdown, and everything, including the collection of statistics, came to a halt, analysts and economists were left scrambling for data to seize up just how badly the economy was doing. One dataset that has come to the rescue is the nationally representative employment-unemployment...