Not all forms of tradition are good. How does civil society attempt to change these conventions? In particular can legislation be effective at all in such cases? Have there been instances when societies have successfully legislated a convention into oblivion? These are the questions that this...

When analyzing the appropriate response for monetary policy during a currency crisis it is important to keep in mind two distinct channels: (a) the impact of raising interest rates on exchange rates; and (b) the direct impact of exchange rate changes on output. The first pertains to the monetary...

Report of the Expert Group

The increase in direct taxes has not been able to offset the decline that resulted from the reduction in customs tariff and decline in excise revenue. The task facing the policymakers now is to explore ways in which the tax ratio can be pushed up without going back on the basic elements of the...

The robust performance of the Indian economy continued during the second quarter (July-September) of 2005-06. According to the Central Statistical Organisation (CSO), the economy recorded a real GDP growth of 8.0 per cent in the second quarter of 2005-06 maintaining the momentum of growth in the...

* Repo Rate increased to 7.25 per cent from 7.0 per cent. * The flexibility to conduct overnight repo or longer term repo including the right to accept or reject tender(s) under the LAF, wholly or partially is retained. * Reverse Repo Rate, Bank Rate and CRR kept unchanged. * GDP growth forecast...

Commenting on recent research articles which look at the potential health benefits of behaviour change, the PLoS Medicine Editors say that publication of the findings of such research is only one part of the behaviour-change process.

For many decades, macro-policy in India was conducted in an environment with five key elements: Agricultural shocks rather than a conventional business cycle; A closed economy; deeply distortionary tax policy coupled with a fiscal crisis; financial markets that lacked speculative price discovery,...

There has been a very rapid rise since the early 1990s in foreign reserves held by developing countries. These reserves have climbed to almost 30 percent of developing countries' GDP and 8 months of imports. Assuming reasonable spreads between the yield on reserve assets and the cost of foreign...