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Tag Archives: Economics

Economics


By Utsa Patnaik
EXPLORING THE POVERTY QUESTION
2025

However, while these are valid points, the new ‘norm’ of calorie intake cannot be arbitrarily arrived at without a systematic assessment of the population structure, work patterns and bio-medical status of the population. An exercise like that, involving professional nutritionists, statisticians and economists will be more than welcome periodically to see how the norms of poverty are changing.


Reviewed by: Arindam Banerjee

Edited by Amita Batra and A.K. Bhattacharya
A WORLD IN FLUX: INDIA’S ECONOMIC PRIORITIES
2025

The chapter highlights increased financial inclusion via UPI, economic formalization, and improved productivity through digital business models as key developmental drivers, but warns against complacency. The concentration of data power, a global public good in a few hands remains a regulatory challenge.


Reviewed by: Ram Singh

By Ian Kumekawa
EMPTY VESSEL: THE STORY OF THE GLOBAL ECONOMY IN ONE BARGE
2025

To avoid tax and regulatory burdens in their home countries, several shipping firms would register their companies in Panama, Liberia, Hong Kong, the Bahamas, and other Caribbean imperial outposts. These registries became offshore tax havens. With a new flag-of-convenience registered in the Bahamas in the late 1980s,


Reviewed by: Adarsh Badri

By David Matthews
THE CLASS STRUGGLE AND WELFARE: SOCIAL POLICY UNDER CAPITALISM
2025

Notwithstanding the struggles waged by the British working class against Capitalism, this work could have deployed a more analytical approach to the history of colonialism and its relationship with the development and the evolution of not only the labour, but also the material origins of that robust post-War welfare state which perhaps would have been a nonstarter, had it not been for the colonial legacy.


Reviewed by: Moggallan Bharti

By Devesh Kapur and Arvind Subramanian
A SIXTH OF HUMANITY: INDEPENDENT INDIA’S DEVELOPMENT ODYSSEY
2025

The concluding part brings together the book’s core themes through three chapters that examine India’s development journey with both hindsight and forward-looking insight. These chapters confront the paradoxes and pathologies that have emerged over decades—such as the coexistence of democratic vibrancy with institutional fragility


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan

All by A. K. Bhattacharya
INDIA’S FINANCE MINISTERS: FROM INDEPENDENCE TO EMERGENCY (1947-1977)
2023

The Congress came back to power in 1980 and late in 1981 it took a huge IMF loan whose condition forced austerity on the two Finance Ministers it had, R Venkataraman and Pranab Mukherjee. All things considered they both had an easy time because there were no major crises.


Reviewed by: TCA Srinivasa-Raghavan

By David C. Engerman
APOSTLES OF DEVELOPMENT: SIX ECONOMISTS AND THE WORLD THEY MADE
2025

In contrast, Jagdish Bhagwati was one of the leading global defenders of trade liberalization. While Sen worried about social justice, Bhagwati argued that open markets and rapid growth would lift all boats. His influential Planning for Industrialisation co-authored in 1970 with Padma Desai, critiqued the inefficiencies of India’s import substitution strategy and the ‘Licence Permit Raj’ that was stifling rather than promoting industrial growth. He has regularly and publicly clashed with Sen over the proper sequencing of reforms.


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan

Compiled by Y.V. Reddy with Ravi Menon, Shaji Vikraman, and Kavi Yaga
WORK, WISDOM, LEGACY: 31 ESSAYS FROM INDIA
2025

Part V of the book on ‘Media’ has five articles where the authors refer to themselves as ‘journalists’ rather than media persons; each piece contains fascinating details of their encounter with people and events in all walks of life, including challenges that had to be resolved internally within the organization and those encountered in the course of one’s work journey.


Reviewed by: Padmini Swaminathan

Edited by Michael D. Bordo, John H. Cochrane, and John B. Taylor
GETTING MONETARY POLICY BACK ON TRACK
2023

The second section of the book deals with the challenges of financial regulation and its relationship with monetary policy. The discussion revolves around the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) which failed in early 2023. The SVB was a successful new age financial institution, with a clientele drawn from the technology and startup sectors. Established in 1983


Reviewed by: TCA Anant

By Swati Narayan
UN EQUAL: WHY INDIA LAGS BEHIND ITS NEIGHBOURS
2023

The author provides a detailed account of her field-work methodology and the challenges faced by her while traversing across borders. Her analysis is divided into ‘two geographic comparisons of contiguous regions in specific time periods’


Reviewed by: Padmini Swaminathan

By Raghuram G. Rajan & Rohit Lamba
BREAKING THE MOULD: REIMAGINING INDIA’S ECONOMIC FUTURE
2024

The key argument of this thought-provoking book is that although the Indian economy is growing, yet its impact is seen to be very uneven


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan

Edited by R. Ramakumar
DISTRESS IN THE FIELDS: INDIAN AGRICULTURE AFTER ECONOMIC LIBERALIZATION
2022

Productivity. Input costs. Support Price. Policies.Investment.Risk. Capital. Market.Insurance.Credit. These have been and continue to be the key lexicons with which India’s agriculture and its economics are articulated and represented. This volume, a collection of essays from varied authors


Reviewed by: AR Vasavi

By Leela Fernandes
GOVERNING WATER IN INDIA: INEQUALITY, REFORM, AND THE STATE
2022

Chennai saw the flood of the century in 2015, which claimed more than five hundred lives. Four years later, the city hit ‘day zero’, where all the city’s reservoirs dried, and 11.2 million residents had no water.


Reviewed by: Lipika Ravichandran

By Vivek Mohan Dubey
RESISTANCE OR DIFFUSION: GLOBAL CULTURE MEETS NATIONAL IDENTITIES
2023

The book opens with an introduction that discusses the theoretical underpinnings and contestation about cultural globalization and whether it tends to erode the identities and culture of societies or not. Vivek Mohan Dubey starts the theoretical discussion with the ‘Traditional School of Thought’


Reviewed by: Mohammad Imtiyaz

V.S. Seshadri
FREE TRADE AGREEMENTS: INDIA AND THE WORLD
2023

The book provides a commentary on the relevance of the growing numbers of free trade agreements among different countries in the global economy, with a special reference to India. FTAs have a lot of significance for India. This is not only when India participates in such arrangements with one or the other trade partners but also without direct participation.


Reviewed by: Sunanda Sen

A. K. Bhattacharya
INDIA’S FINANCE MINISTERS: FROM INDEPENDENCE TO EMERGENCY (1947-77)
2023

Being a highly experienced journalist who covered the Finance Ministry for close to three decades, AKB has also been able to focus on the key events of each tenure which shape our recollections and perceptions of the tenure. This releases the book from the tyranny of the ‘one-damned-thing-after-another’ school of history.


Reviewed by: TCA Srinivasa Raghavan

V. Murali
HOP ON HOP OFF: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE CREATIVE CHAOS OF MANUFACTURING
2022

V Murali is a veteran who has spent his entire career in manufacturing, dabbling across various roles, and mastering a critical few, which have shaped him into a leader with a proven track record of a string of successes in business. Here, in the book Hop on Hop off, which comes across as his professional journal, he shares the recipe of those successes, from which scores of manufacturing professionals can draw vital lessons on making a turnaround when necessary.


Reviewed by: Shilpi Suman

Paul Tucker
GLOBAL DISCORD: VALUES AND POWER IN A FRACTURED WORLD ORDER
2022

This book is about Geo-Economics (the intersection of economic and geo-political objectives) and self-confessedly examines issues from a Euro-centric, or even at times, from a narrower Anglo-American perspective. It examines what, from this perspective, is the central question which bedevils global policy today: ‘How can liberal democracies maintain their values even as they find themselves interdependent with powers whose traditions and attitudes stand at odds with their own?’


Reviewed by: TCA Ranganathan

C. Rangarajan
FORKS IN THE ROAD: MY DAYS AT RBI AND BEYOND
2022

This book is the story of India’s monetary policy and its economic dilemmas written by a true savant and patriot who had to deal with a whole lot of crises. Dr Chakravarty Rangarajan, until his retirement in 2014, at the age of 82, devoted his entire life to serving the country in one capacity or another. He has been Deputy Governor at the Reserve Bank of India, member of the now abolished Planning Commission, then RBI Governor, the Governor of erstwhile Andhra Pradesh, and Chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council. He is currently the Chairman of the Madras School of Economics.


Reviewed by: TCA Srinivasa Raghavan

Rajesh Veeraraghavan 
PATCHING DEVELOPMENT: INFORMATION POLITICS AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN INDIA
2022

The history of welfare provision in post-Independent India has been replete with stories of failure and leakages. Almost every public welfare programme will throw up a side story on how only a fraction of the largesse has reached the intended beneficiaries. India is known for, what Jean Dreze calls, the ‘percentage system’ under which a fixed part of the money is siphoned off as bribe by a wide range of intermediaries across the system.


Reviewed by: Kalaiyarasan A & Srujana Yadav
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ISSN No. 0970-4175 (Print)