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 Economic Survey 2022-23, released today, has flagged threats to the Indian economy, even as it forecasts a GDP growth rate of 6.5% for the next fiscal year. The survey has said that the challenge of the Indian rupee depreciating remains. "However, the challenge of the depreciating rupee, although better performing than most other currencies, persists with the likelihood of further increases in policy rates by the US Fed". What...

There is some respite expected for India in terms of prices of imported commodities. This may ease the depletion of its foreign exchange reserves. The country has faced a widening of its merchandise trade deficit from US$ -17.91 billion to US$ -26.91 billion between October 2021 and October 2022. The commodity price data provided by the World Bank in December 2022 (termed as The Pink Sheet) shows that energy prices plummeted by...

-The Hindu Business Line Policy deficit. The widening trade deficit with China points to a weakness in India’s industrial growth path It was headline news when Chinese customs statistics at the end of September 2022 indicated that for a second calendar year, India’s trade with China would settle at well above $100 billion. That was only partly because of the positive implications of burgeoning trade between the two countries that only two...

-The Hindu Business Line Under-invoicing of imports is just one part of the story. Data asymmetries have many other factors. The trade data mismatch of India and China has attracted wide coverage from both electronic and print media. This mismatch is attributed to ‘under-invoicing’ by Indian importers for the imports originating from China. There is mismatch of $12 billion with China reporting its exports to India over $103 billion. Indian agencies, on the...