KEY TRENDS   • Oxfam India's 2023 India Supplement report on poverty and inequality in India reveals that the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Following the pandemic in 2019, the bottom 50 per cent of the population have continued to see their wealth chipped away. By 2020, their income share was estimated to have fallen to only 13 per cent of the national income and have less than 3...

-The Telegraph Many experts, including former RBI governor D Subbarao, have flagged concerns over the privacy aspect of CBDC Mumbai: The RBI on Wednesday said the central bank digital currency (CBDC) will remain anonymous and regulations that are applicable to paper currency will prevail on the e-rupee. Earlier this month, the RBI had begun a pilot for the retail digital rupee after it launched another project for wholesale digital rupee among financial institutions. Many...

-The Telegraph In a remarkable development, for the first time in 20 years, currency in circulation (CIC) declined during Diwali week. With the increased acceptance of digital payments in the country, over-reliance on cash is slowly fading away. Over the years, the Indian cash-led economy has now changed to a smart-phone led payment economy, says a research note.   In the report, Dr Soumya Kanti Ghosh, group chief economic adviser of State Bank...

-Livemint.com The sheer scale of transactions and transparency issues associated with digital markets add to the complexity. But our advantage is our Competition Act is quite flexible, CCI chairman said Competition Commission of India (CCI) will set up a digital market unit (DMU) to better understand and assess the conduct of e-commerce platforms and other digital economy firms so that any anti-competitive behaviour of new age businesses do not go undetected by...

-The Hindu Policy efforts to formalise the economy will have limited results as the bulk of informal units are petty producers Since 2016, the Government has made several efforts to formalise the economy. Currency demonetisation, introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), digitalisation of financial transactions and enrolment of informal sector workers on numerous government Internet portals are all meant to encourage the formalisation of the economy. But why the impetus...