The Growing Crisis of Unemployment
In an economy like ours where the work-force is not neatly divided into “the employed” and “the unemployed”, and instead there is massive and growing casualisation of work, measuring unemployment is a...
View ArticleWithout Debt Relief, Sri Lanka’s Economy will keep Deteriorating
Both poverty and political repression have been worsening in Sri Lanka since last year’s sovereign default. Here is the assessment of Ahilan Kadirgamar of the University of Jaffna. Sri Lanka’s...
View ArticleA Interview on Argentina Economic Policies
As Argentina gears up for a presidential run-off vote this Sunday, the economy and economic policy has been center stage. To shed light on some of these topical economic policy issues, the...
View ArticleFaced with Crushing Debts, World’s Poorest Nations to Slash Public Spending...
The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are returning to Africa, for the first time in decades, with the “same old failed message”. “Cut your spending, sack public service workers,...
View ArticleThe Pervasiveness of Poverty in India
One of the striking findings of the Bihar Caste Survey, which bears out what the Left has been asserting for a long time, is that absolute poverty in the country is far more pervasive than what...
View ArticleThe Vacuity of the Free Trade Argument
Imagine a country that is exposed to relatively unrestricted trade. There are two obvious problems that it can face because of this trade policy: the first is a balance of payments problem because its...
View ArticleAn Education Policy for Colonising Minds
Imperialist hegemony over the third world is exercised not just through arms and economic might but also through the hegemony of ideas, by making the victims see the world the way imperialism wants...
View ArticleThe Question of Pensions
We observe a strange phenomenon everyday, so strange that its strangeness goes generally unnoticed. Government spokespersons from the prime minister downwards go on repeating ad nauseam that India is...
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Workshop on “Political Economy of Underdevelopment”
IDEAs is organising a workshop in partnership with the Sam Moyo African Institute for Agrarian Studies (SMAIAS) on the “Political Economy of Underdevelopment” in Harare, Zimbabwe. The workshop is...
View ArticleThe Reality of Bidenomics: How good was Biden for the Economy?
Political economists Radhika Desai and Michael Hudson discuss the rhetoric and reality of Bidenomics, and how good US President Joe Biden really was for the economy.
View ArticleThe Abuse of the Concept of “Populism”
All regimes based on class antagonism require a discourse to legitimise class oppression and this discourse in turn requires a vocabulary of its own. The neoliberal regime too has developed its own...
View ArticleTightening the Screws
We all know that the Narendra Modi government has strong centralising tendencies — not just between the Centre and the state governments but even within Central ministries, with the Prime Minister’s...
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Lecture on “The Informal Economy, Self-employment and Petty Production –...
In this informative lecture, Professor Barbara Harriss-White offers an in-depth analysis of the informal economy, self-employment, and petty production from a political economy perspective. By...
View ArticleFinance Minister’s Misleading Statement
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a misleading statement the other day that is not expected from a responsible member of the union cabinet. Talking about the resource transfer to the states in...
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Lecture on “The Informal Economy, Self-employment and Petty Production –...
In her lecture on the informal economy, self-employment, and petty production, Prof. Barbara Harriss-White examines the complex dynamics and challenges that influence these informal economic...
View ArticleTreating Infrastructure as a Holy Cow
There is an impression shared by even progressive intellectuals that the entity that goes by the name of “physical infrastructure” is an absolute necessity in each country, and that the actual amount...
View ArticleThe “Hindu Rate of Growth”: Then and now
For a large part of the dirigiste period, the gross domestic product of the Indian economy grew at a rate of around 4 per cent per annum or less, which, though an improvement compared to the colonial...
View ArticleThe Rubber Farmers’ Woes
Rubber prices, which had recovered a little after the fall during the pandemic, have collapsed again, with the farmers in Kerala, which grows 80 per cent of the country’s rubber crop, being badly hit....
View ArticleThe Current State of India’s Economy
Government officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world. What they never mention is the fact that India had witnessed perhaps the sharpest...
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Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The political economy of agrarian...
ISBN 9781612498355 Publication Date Summer 6-15-2023 Publisher Purdue University Press About the Book Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The Political Economy of Agrarian Transition in Developing...
View ArticleThe Grim Unemployment Scenario
The data on unemployment brough out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting...
View ArticleThe Q4 GDP Estimates for 2022-23
The estimates of India’s Gross Domestic Product for the fourth quarter of 2023 were released on May 31. These show a growth rate of 6.1 per cent over the fourth quarter of the previous year, which is...
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On the FDI Route to Manufacturing Success
By far the most significant ‘innovation’ in industrial policy under the current NDA government is the production linked incentive (PLI) scheme. It provides an incentive pay out or subsidy of 4-6 per...
View ArticleYoung Scholars Conference Political Economy of Contemporary South Asia
Our key theme is the political economy of contemporary South Asia. At the core of these transformations are the fraught and so-called “truncated transition,” where South Asian societies are not making...
View ArticlePitfalls of Export-Led Growth
After Sri Lanka and Pakistan, Bangladesh has become the third country in our neighbourhood to become afflicted by a serious economic crisis. It has asked for a $4.5 billion loan from the IMF, apart...
View ArticleThe Implications of Dollar Hegemony
How exactly is the dollar’s status as reserve currency related to imperialism? This question has two parts: how this status of the dollar is related to U.S. imperialism, and how it is related to the...
View ArticleCountercyclical Policy in the Center and its Impact on the Periphery: A...
Hyman Minsky (1982, 1986a) argued that counter cyclical policies (lender-of-last resort interventions to expand the overall financing capacity of an economy, and deficit spending to sustain profits)...
View ArticleThe Political Economy of Remittances: The case of sub-saharan africa
The aim of the paper is to introduce and analyse the positive and negative micro- and macroeconomic effects of remittances in its complexity, in the migration-remittances-development context and to...
View ArticleSri Lankan Central Bank Moots Recast of Pension Funds, haircut on Sovereign...
Sri Lanka’s Central Bank has proposed restructuring the beleaguered nation’s debt by recasting the outgo on the country’s pension funds and offering international sovereign bondholders a repayment...
View ArticleThe FCI’s Bizarre Logic
The Karnataka government’s plan to launch its “Anna Bhagya” scheme on July 1 under which it was planning to provide 10 kg of free rice per month to each family below the poverty-line has run into...
View ArticleIs What We have “Crony Capitalism”?
Fascistic elements exist in every modern society, but usually as fringe, marginal or minor elements. They move centre-stage only when they get the support of monopoly capital which provides them with...
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Addressing Default: Lessons from an opaque experience
Around a month ago, The Reserve Bank of India, in a controversial circular, reversed its long-standing policy of not allowing banks to arrive at compromise settlements with willful defaulters or...
View ArticleThe Poverty of UN Poverty Estimates
On April 3 this year, the minister of state for planning, Rao Inderjeet Singh, said in the Rajya Sabha that the government had no data after 2011-12 for estimating poverty, and therefore had no idea...
View ArticleThe Problem with “Universal Basic Income”
Many economists have been advocating a universal basic income for India, an idea that was mooted even in the official Economic Survey for 2016-17. Of course the practical proposals towards this end...
View ArticleThe IMF Bias: Signals from Pakistan
On July 14 this year, the shaky government of a debt-stressed Pakistan, won itself a surprising reprieve. The country had experienced a collapse in foreign reserves to less than one month worth of...
View ArticleUN Must Reclaim Multilateral Governance from Pretenders
International governance arrangements are in trouble. Condemned as ‘dysfunctional’ by some, multilateral agreements have been discarded or ignored by the powerful except when useful to protect their...
View ArticleThe Destruction of Universities
When BJP rule in the country is dead and gone, a good deal of the damage it has caused to the Indian society, polity and economy will no doubt be reversed. But there are at least two areas where such...
View ArticleBehind BRICS Expansion
At the Johannesburg summit of the BRICS countries, it was decided to expand the group beyond its original five, namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, to include six more countries....
View ArticleBelieving One’s Own False Theories
Liberal bourgeois writers tend to explain the problems that arise under capitalism not by the immanent tendencies of the system but by the capriciousness of particular governments. This way they can...
View ArticleThe Silences of the Delhi Declaration
The G-20 meeting in Delhi was occurring in the midst of an acute economic crisis of the world economy. The advanced capitalist economies are expected by the IMF to witness a growth slowdown from 2.7...
View ArticleDestroying Forests for Profits
The Modi government, ever solicitous of corporate interests, has launched a plan whereby real estate developers and other corporates will be allowed to destroy large swathes of India’s forest cover...
View ArticleGlobalised Capital and National Leadership
One of the most intriguing questions at present is why Europe’s political leadership has become complicit in what appear to be US efforts at undermining European economies. The well-known American...
View ArticleWhen Numbers are Treated as Political Weapons
India has a robust and admired statistical system. But the government is suppressing data to suit its narrative. It is perilous not to know the reality of the governed No government in India has been...
View ArticleFascistic Hostility to Evidence
All fascistic outfits have one common characteristic: they reject outright all evidence that goes against the narrative they spin; and the Hindutva elements in power in India are no exception. Their...
View ArticleDistress and Displacement in Times of War
Recruitment drives held over the last week of January, in Lucknow in Uttar Pradesh and Rohtak in Haryana, for Indian workers to undertake construction and caregiver jobs in Israel have captured global...
View ArticleFederal Fracture: A nation in crisis
Indian federalism is on the verge of breakdown. Ministers from opposition-ruled States have taken to the streets in New Delhi to protest against discrimination by the Centre. And the Prime Minister,...
View ArticleIn the Name of the South: India’s aggressive economic diplomacy
India’s government has since the year of its G20 Presidency claimed to have restored the country’s role as the ‘Voice of the South’ in global dialogues. That is often backed up by reference to its...
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Recent Structural Change in the Indian Economy
The newly-released India Employment Report 2024, produced by the ILO and the Institute for Human Development, contains a wealth of information and analysis on past and current employment patterns, and...
View ArticleThe Double Life of the Indian Economy
As India gears up for a potentially momentous general election over the coming weeks, the general perception within and outside the country is that the result is a foregone conclusion, with the prime...
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The True Face of “Aid”
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), predominantly a club of rich market economy countries, has just released preliminary estimates of the flow of Overseas Development...
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