Exports

India has embarked on the path of self-reliance with no clear road map. This paper highlights the need to demystify the concept and argues that any path to self-reliance would require creating new productive capabilities that would be determined not by what the country can produce but what it can export. Following the “product-space” perspective, promoted by Ricardo Hausmann and others at the Growth Lab of Harvard University stating that a country’s capacity to add new capabilities depends strongly on the existing ones, I assess India’s export performance since 1988 along three dimensions: growth, diversification, and upgrading, with the objective to understand how well India is prepared to achieve the goal in this globalised world and recommend developing a well-informed export strategy.

Looking at existing policy instruments and goals, and the economic and social outcomes they promise to deliver, it is argued that majoritarian politics and social and cultural outcomes are not part of fringe thinking. The politics of hate actually works to build a consensus for ruling class economics. It is not surprising, therefore, that the only "nationalist outlook" of our times is to stand firmly behind the policy programme for the global investor.

It is generally believed that India is doing far better than most emerging market economies in these times of global economic turmoil. Emerging markets are facing capital flight, with large-scale outflows, especially since the second half of 2015, with the trend expected to continue in 2016. India has been less affected than others, but is clearly vulnerable due to the large number of Indian firms that are exposed to external borrowings, a weak rupee, a year or more of declining merchandise exports, falling corporate profitability, and stressed corporate balance sheets.

RBI May Well Be Right The outlook for inflation in 2003-04 is expected to remain benign, according to the Reserve Bank. This at a time when inflation, measured by point-to-point changes in the wholesale price index, is well over 6 per cent and the monsoon, or at least the Met office, promises another difficult year. International commodity prices, too, show signs of hardening, despite the welcome signs of crude prices remaining soft. Is it time then to take the central bank

Market for Mangoes and More The Indian mango has been an unexpected casualty of the US war on Iraq. The conflict has left mango exports to the Gulf region stranded in transit, dealing a blow to exporters as west Asian countries, mainly Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Oman, account for 70-80 per cent of India