-The Hindu The WTO Panel reports are a pointer to the U.S. — the once undisputed trade hegemon — turning away from free trade and moving toward growing protectionism In a significant development in international trade law, four separate World Trade Organization (WTO) Panel reports have ruled that the tariffs of 25% and 10% on steel and aluminium, respectively, that the United States (U.S.) had imposed during the presidency of Donald Trump...

Quite often it is argued by mainstream economists that a sizeable chunk of the Union Budget every year is wasted because the Government spends that on food and fertiliser subsidies. The burgeoning size of these two subsidies relative to the entire budget as well as the gross domestic product (GDP) is often used to build the argument that economic as well as environmental sustainability of the country is at stake...

-The Indian Express Arvind Subramanian, Shoumitro Chatterjee write: Our growth model has been export-led and should not be abandoned. Export opportunities in general and in specific sectors could be significant even in a post-COVID world. India’s intellectual and policy community has embraced atmanirbharta. This inward turn — actually return — amounts to abandoning two core principles of the post-1991 consensus: Export-orientation on the macro-economic side, and slow but steady liberalisation on the...

-The Hindu As the U.S. loses interest in multilateralism in trade, India should actively try to arrest the organisation’s slide Less than 25 years after the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was created, its future as a body overseeing multilateral trade rules is in doubt. The failure of the recent ministerial meeting at Buenos Aires is only symptomatic of a decline in its importance. Too ambitious? When the WTO was born in 1995, replacing the...

-Frontline The inability to resolve pressing problems with respect to the production, distribution and availability of food is one of the important failures of the entire economic reform process. IN the fateful month of July 1991, when the devaluation of the Indian rupee presaged the introduction of a whole series of liberalising economic reforms, agriculture was very far from the minds of most policymakers and commentators. The immediate focus was on...