Liberalisation

Although the new foreign direct investment policy and other policy packages, including “Make in India,” is expected to tap more foreign savings and better technology and transform the Indian economy into a manufacturing hub, most successful firms are investing abroad. Given this context, this paper makes an effort to understand the trends and nature of outward foreign direct Investment by Indian firms and their implications. The paper argues that though the Indian overseas acquiring manufacturing firms perform relatively better than their counterparts, its adverse impact on the trade deficit and balance of payments need to be tackled.

Recent trade models with fi rm heterogeneity predict that trade liberalisation reduces the number of fi rms and the fi rms’ markups, while it increases the average size of fi rms. The present study attempts to test these predictions in the context of trade reforms in India with the Annual Survey of Industries data over two decades (1987–88 to 2017–18) by using a difference-in-difference approach and comments on the recent policy framework in that light.

India’s economic order is far from neo-liberal. The state, and thus politicians, have retained very substantial powers over market forces. Expectations that the Modi government would liberalise audaciously have been disappointed. Especially since mid-2019, it has used its remaining powers to intimidate corporate interests, in pursuit of its main objective: top-down control over all power centres. Thus, in crucial ways, the economic order has become less liberal (or neo-liberal) than before.

Riba could mean usury, interest, economic rent and even surplus value (in the Marxian sense). Riba is “un-Islamic.” Without riba, capital accumulation, and capitalism itself will not be possible. However, those who own capital in the Muslim world have taken charge of defining what is Islamic and what is not. The result? They find ways to multiply it in modes that benefit only themselves, just as their non-Islamic counterparts.

Any contemporary education policy will need to address the democratic and economic aspirations of the younger citizenry and must declare those concrete steps that would endure the realisation of those aims. But that has not been the case with the National Policy on Education 2016. The new education policy, as proposed, chooses not to address the fundamental issues plaguing the education system but instead, it propagates a corporate, neo-liberal, neo-cultural, a Sanskritised, global and market-oriented education system which is governed by a wholly separate and centralised bureaucracy, where state government power and oversight is minimal.