Reserve Bank without its Reserve This is not the best of times for an economist to don the mantle of the governorship of the Reserve Bank of India. Whether it is the worst of the times- that only future can tell. Be that as it may, the public spat between the political executive and […]
Data Localization- Mercantilism in a Networked World Economic ideas do not die. They resurface again and again, repackaged and refurbished, when the time suits it. Mercantilism is such an idea that politicians and policy makers love to espouse, albeit periodically. The basic premise of this doctrine is that international trade is a zero-sum game. The […]
Prof Arvind Panagariya (AP) in his 2nd May article (here) in the Times of India edit page has argued that the number of new job seekers on an annual basis cannot be more than 7.8 million between 2016 and 2021. His article is a rebuttal to the claim made by India’s main opposition party that […]
Distrust in fiat currency, controlled by a state, was one of the principal motivations in designing of the Bitcoin protocol. It was designed to be a decentralized system of creation of new money by a transparent computational algorithm. Any person participating in the currency’s ecosystem can run this algorithm on a computer and generate new […]
Two unrelated events hogged the headlines in the last month. On 22nd February Amazon became the third most valuable company in the world, overtaking Microsoft. On 25th February the official news agency Xinhua announced that the ruling communist party is proposing to remove the constitutional provision of “no more than two consecutive terms” for the […]
The US government’s recent tariff imposition of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum imports from all countries except Canada and Mexico is a textbook example of economic policy making to serve narrow political interests. This article is not to examine the economic rationale of such a policy that its proponents have been offering. We […]