BENJAMIN Franklin is supposed to have said that the only certain things in life are death and taxes. The certainty of taxes can be exaggerated, especially in India. But there is nothing uncertain about the fury of a taxman who has been scorned.
GOODS and Services Tax (GST) has completed six years since it was launched on midnight of June 30, 2017. It was billed as India’s second freedom. In a repetition of the then Parliament’s midnight meeting on August 14, 1947, the Parliament met dramatically in 2017 to hear the Prime Minister announce the launch of GST.
IT might seem a stretch to argue that corporate governance and bank asset quality depend on cleaning up India’s political funding. But it is not. It is simply the cold, hard truth. And since that reform is yet to happen, all talk of a robust financial sector and SEBI’s incremental success in reforming corporate governance is as hollow as the claim that India, long driven by caste hierarchy and grossly unequal distribution of social and cultural power, has democracy in its DNA.
The World Bank has forecast slower world growth, for the current year and the next, at 2.9% and 3%, respectively. Emerging markets and developing economies, which normally gallop ahead of the rest of the world, are expected to grow at just 3.4% this year, with Covid- and zero-Covid-afflicted China growing at a rate slower than the US for the first time in 40 years or so. Does this cripple India's chance of growing at least 7%? It does not, and not because the World Bank pegs India's growth rate at 7.5%, higher than the Reserve Bank of India's own estimate of 7.2%.
In the US, there is the concept of measuring the consumer feel-good factor through inflation expectation. If the consumer feels that inflation is likely to ease, they feel good about it and do not mind paying higher prices for cartels in the short run. In fact, the consumer settles for a higher price, and the business decides on a higher nominal wage.
The desired response from the RBI in an environment of falling inflation and a declining dollar index is to slash rates, not hold them steady
Rise of Bangladesh: Implications for India’s North-East | Panel Discussion | #DiplomacyDialogue | IMPRI #WebPolicyTalk #IMPRI Center for International Relations and Strategic Studies (CIRSS), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, invites you to an IMPRI #WebPolicyTalk event, as a part of…