C P Chandrasekhar & Jayati Ghosh

While the government’s official pronouncements emphasise the need to reduce the fiscal deficit, its actual performance in recent years has been well below projections, especially because of lower receipts. In this edition of MacroScan, C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh investigate the current fiscal trends and their implications.

In recent times there has been much discussion of how world trade is changing dramatically because of the “rise” of some large developing countries, including China and India. In this edition of MacroScan, C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh examine recent trends in trade of six important emerging nations to assess the actual extent of this shift, as well as India’s position within this group.

India’s economic difficulties are attributed to a combination of global influences and inadequate reform. But a comparison with other Asian economies regarding some macroeconomic underpinnings of that growth suggests that the problem could lie elsewhere.

The view that the return to growth in Asia offers a ray of hope for a world steeped in recession is based on the assessment that this growth is driven by domestic stimuli. The difficulty, argue C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh, is that those stimuli may be ephemeral.

Domestic work is emerging as and is likely to remain an important activity for women workers in several developing countries, including in urban India. This makes the task of improving labour conditions in such work a difficult but urgent imperative, argue C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh.

Routine assessments of financial stability extol the robustness of India’s banks and their ability to bear stress. But this is largely because large, questionable loans to private investors in capital-intensive sectors have been restructured to keep them ‘performing,’ argue C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh in this edition of MacroScan.

Developments on export and balance of payments fronts suggest that India is on the verge of a sharp downturn in output and employment unless the policy response is strong, argue C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh in this edition of MacroScan.

While Europe totters on the brink of another major crisis and growth slows in India, the Sensex appears to be faring rather well. In this edition of Macroscan, C.P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh discuss what could explain this divergence in trends in the real economy and the financial market.

Within a relatively short time, perhaps just a decade, micro finance has gone from being hero to zero in the development discourse: from being lauded ...