World Bank

Rural poverty is now four times that of the urban levels, and it accounts for 90% of the nation’s poor.

In contrast to the extensive literature on the assessment of goods trade and trade barriers, limited attention has been paid to quantify the regulatory restrictiveness of services trade across the globe. This study attempts to build on the services trade restrictiveness index of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development by proposing an alternative that makes the OECD data more amenable to policy purposes.

A damning critique does not allow India to remain self-complacent on the economic and health fronts.

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.

Unchanging India, and even the World Bank has now joined the troupe of excuse-mongers: India has been unable to reap the full advantages of liberalisation because of natural calamities that have befallen the country. Suppose some dull character were to ask whether the entire point of development was not to extricate the economy from the vicissitudes of nature, what answer would the mandarins, including the foreign ones, provide?