Substantial international aid is spent reducing the cost of contraception in developing countries, as part of a larger effort to reduce global fertility and increase investment per child worldwide. The importance for fertility behaviors of keeping contraceptive prices low, however, remains...

At this moment, the world is undergoing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression of 1930s. It is not clear exactly which factors instigated the crisis, but there are many candidates; the formation of an asset bubble in the US, and its subsequent crash, continued excessive consumption...

Rajesh Komath gives a description the conflicts between his socio-material position as a Teyyam performer, and persona/personality as a student of economics.

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...

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,...

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...

It is interesting to note that nearly three decades of new paradigms in macroeconomic theory and policy have hardly gone beyond the ivory towers of the academic world. The extent to which a scientific discipline is open to new ideas and approaches is a measure of its health. The enrichment of...

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...