The Environment and Union Budget 2023-24 | Panel Discussion | #PlanetTalks Live Video YouTube: #IMPRI Center for Environment, Climate Change and Sustainable Development (CECCSD), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi invites you to an IMPRI #WebPolicyTalk series:…
Employment, Livelihoods, and Union Budget 2023-24 | Panel Discussion | #EmploymentDebate #IMPRI Center for Work and Welfare (CWW), IMPRI Impact and Policy Research Institute, New Delhi invites you to an IMPRI #WebPolicyTalk series: The State of Employment and Livelihoods- #EmploymentDebate A Panel…
How do donations via electoral bonds funded by legal or illegal money help curb undue influence on policymakers? Electoral bonds provide an additional of such funds.
The Union Government initiated the Electoral Bonds scheme, announced in the Union Budget 2017–18, on January 2, 2018. The aim was “to cleanse the system of political funding in the country”. While many other issues are also germane, the moot question is will this goal be achieved.
Few can vouch for the veracity or otherwise of Hindenburg’s research that raises serious allegations of wrongdoing against the Adani group. The present author certainly cannot. These charges could be accurate to varying degrees but that does not put Gautam Adani in the company of fly-by-night operators or the likes of arms brokers and others who profit purely from government patronage. Adani is a first-generation entrepreneur who has dreamed big, executed with excellence and has built chunks of the Indian economy’s essential infrastructure, whether ports, power plants, grain storage or renewable energy.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has come up with a Budget that did not deserve a thumbs down from the Nifty, which ended the day’s trading 0.26% lower. This was more on account of the troubles of the Adani Group and, by association, of public sector banks with exposure to the group.
The big boost to capital expenditure — including grants in aid of capex; the increase in capex is Rs 3.2 lakh crore, to Rs 13.7 lakh crore — is welcome and suggests that the Budget is pro-growth. That pro-growth glow loses some sheen when we take into account the total size of the Budget. It has come down from 16% of GDP in 2021-22 to 15.3% in 2022-23 and is slated to fall further to 14.9% next fiscal year. This reflects the longstanding inability of the system to significantly increase the share of taxes in GDP — the only way to raise total expenditure is to borrow, which means that fiscal correction also brings down the size of total spending.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) 2023 at Davos that got over recently was conspicuous in underlining the influence of geopolitics on contemporary global economic trends. Though this high-profile annual gathering in a Swiss resort is ostensibly aimed at reiterating the conventional economic wisdom on the need to further the agenda of economic globalization, there has been a distinct shift in the global mood over the last few years and there is no likelihood that things are going to return to “end of history" euphoria any time soon.
On December 1, 2022, India assumed the presidency of the G20 for a year. Preparations and blueprint for making it somewhat different than the previous ones were already afoot as India played a critical role at the Bali Summit in bridging the differences on the Russia-Ukraine issue and helping issuance of the Bali Declaration that was being dogged by the geo politics between Russia and the West.