Arvind Subramanian

The RBI must come out with an official explanation, but until it does, we can only guess. But there are a few reasonable hypotheses

India now holds about $650 billion in reserves, enough to finance nearly a year of imports. The problem is that global financial markets have even more firepower

In our earlier piece in these pages, we highlighted the unwelcome consequences of the exchange rate policy adopted under the outgoing Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regime

A more principled response would be to initiate talks with the US on a bilateral deal or free-trade agreement. India stands to gain from trade liberalisation

Ever since the liberalisation in 1991, the RBI has pursued a flexible exchange rate policy

Why Colonial Origins of Comparative Development is Nobel-worthy

One of the most intriguing and relatively undocumented developments of the last 20 yrs has been "multi-plants," whereby a single firm operates not one but multiple production facilities within a state

In multi-plant units, flexibility in hiring & firing labour comes from fact of having many plants. In single plants, there is no such flexibility, which renders use of contract labour more important

US and Europe should understand the issues and discuss them with China, tailoring responses to the underlying diagnosis, rather than taking knee-jerk protectionist measures that only stoke tensions

Why is consumption soft, employment growth weak, and core inflation low, when the economy is apparently growing strongly?

There's no reason for the cess to be retained in its current form. That's because the cess rates themselves are monstrously complicated, varying not only in magnitude but also according to end-use

Over the past few years, most commentators have rightly emphasised the tensions in Centre-state fiscal relations, pointing especially to the Centre's repeated recourse to non-sharable cesses

India offers a prime example. It has successfully attracted several Western firms exiting China since launching its 'China Plus One' strategy in 2014

What can we learn from the latest survey? Before we answer this question, we need to recognise the limitations of comparing NSS figures with the ones from the NIA

The Modi government needs to thank previous governments for midwifing the GST and highlighting its value, which helped overcome Modi's own reservations about the reform

Its experience underscores that unanimous advocacy for carbon taxation can be misguided, as it ignores country-specific realities

Contrary to belief, GST underperformed the old tax regime in its initial years but has now begun to exceed expectations, six years after implementation

The nominal figures track the real numbers until the first half of FY23, but then decline by a whopping 14 percentage points over the past three quarters

Arvind Subramanian is a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Josh Felman is a principal at JH Consulting

America has drawn India into a one-sided quasi-alliance: it seems to have taken one, at most one-and-a-half, to tango. The strategic rationale, of course, is the need to counter-balance China