The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is a blot on the nation. In no nation reputed to be civilized is there a law that allows the State to pick up literally anybody and keep the person in jail for years, without trial and without bail; and if at the end of the trial, whenever it occurs, the person is found innocent, then there is no question of the State being obliged to pay any compensation for the lost years of the person’s life. But this is exactly what the UAPA does. Even the British colonial government did not arrogate to itself such sweeping powers. True, it had the infamous Sedition Law, but the person charged under it was at least given a swift trial, not incarcerated for years awaiting it. The leaders of the freedom struggle went to jail many times, and spent altogether many years in jail; but on each…

Sahmat, Social Scientist and Tulika Books invite you to a symposium in honour of Professor Irfan Habib on his 90th birthday IN DEFENCE OF HISTORY Thursday, 12 August 2021, 6.30 to 8.30 pm (IST) SPEAKERS Romila Thapar Amiya Kumar Bagchi Aditya Mukherjee Irfan Habib CHAIR: Prabhat Patnaik FELICITATION BY Sitaram Yechury Shireen Moosvi   Join us at:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87631723427?pwd=TnBlbVEyMVRMTTlaRzBUWFo4amdQQT09   Meeting ID: 876 3172 3427 Passcode: 4j2r6W   This is an online event. No registration required.

Hopes for an inclusive global economic recovery are fast fading. As rich countries have done little to ensure poor countries’ access to vaccines and fiscal resources, North-South “fault lines” will certainly widen. Enhancing relief, recovery, transformation While the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has revised rich countries’ recovery prospects upward, the United Nations (UN) notes formidable challenges, especially for developing countries, due to the pandemic. The UN warns of more setbacks for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), already behind schedule before the pandemic. Grim recovery prospects have been worsened by debt distress and dramatic drops in investment and trade. Designing appropriate relief, recovery and reforms well is necessary. For the IMF, growth-enhancing reforms could significantly improve growth in emerging market and developing economies over the next decade. Countries must quickly spend much more to contain the pandemic and offset adverse effects of policy responses. This is needed to protect incomes, jobs and businesses, while paying…

Lori Wallach, of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch, and Jayati Ghosh, economics professor at UMass Amherst, discuss how first world countries are protecting pharma companies’ exorbitant profits, at the expense of vaccinating people living in the Global South and thereby also endangering everyone in the world. Click here for Transcript (This podcast was originally published in in the Institute for New Economic Thinking on Aug 2, 2021)

It is thirty years since India adopted neo-liberal policies in 1991, though some would date their introduction even earlier to 1985. Newspapers are full of assessments of the impact of these policies on the economy, and liberalizers from Manmohan Singh downwards, have suddenly become visible, lauding their handiwork, while lamenting at best that the benefits of liberalization have been unevenly distributed. Manmohan Singh has recently said that “a healthy and dignified life for every Indian must be prioritised”; one wonders what prevented him from doing so when he was at the helm of affairs. Such an assessment, that liberalization greatly boosted India’s GDP growth rate and thereby improved the lives of almost every Indian, lifting vast masses of them from the clutches of absolute poverty, even though it increased income and wealth inequality in the country, would be commonly accepted, not just by the votaries of liberalization, but even by…

One thing most economists agree on regardless of their ideological persuasion, is the importance of productivity increases. Yet, of all economic concepts widely in use, that of aggregate productivity may be the most problematic and full of conceptual and measurement holes. Click here for full article (This article was originally published in in the Real World Economics Review, Issue No 96)

Contrary to conventional views which suggest that the collapse of Bretton Woods represented the beginning of the end of the global hegemonic position of the dollar, the collapse of the system liberated American policy from convertibility to gold, and imposed a global fiat system still dominated by the floating dollar. The end of Bretton Woods and the set of regulations that imposed capital controls were part of the agenda of many powerful groups within the US, and led to the creation of a more dollarized world. The challenge to the dollar might arise, eventually, from the decline in the United States’ power to determine the pricing of key commodities in global markets; but it is premature to think about the demise of the dollar. The limitations of the dominant views about Bretton Woods are ultimately tied to mainstream economics. 02_2021 (Download the full text in PDF format)

On 16 July 2021 India’s foreign exchange reserves stood at $612.7 billion. That was almost 30 per cent higher than its level of $475.6 billion at the end of March 2020, when the effects of the pandemic began to be felt. It also reflected a $95 billion increase from the level of reserves a year earlier and a $35.7 billion rise over the level touched at the end of financial year 2020-21. This evidence, which could be construed as a sign of resilience in a time of crisis, is, however, no cause for celebration. Rather it points to effects of the economic contraction induced by the pandemic and the new vulnerabilities that the circumstances accompanying the pandemic have generated. Data recently released by the Reserve Bank of India show that India’s foreign exchange reserves position improved by $99.2 billion in financial year 2020-21 as compared with $64.9 billion in 2019-20.…