Budget 2023-24: Hoax of ‘Populist’ Relief

THE first advance estimates released by the NSO on January 6, estimates the nominal GDP of India for the current financial year 2022-23 to be Rs 273 lakh crores and in this backdrop the budget proposed by the finance minister projects a 10.5 per cent nominal growth leading to a nominal GDP of 301 lakh crores for the financial year 2023-24. The Economic Survey 2022-23 estimates a real growth rate for the year 2023-24 to be 6.5 per cent as the baseline figure which indicates an implicit inflation to the tune of 4 per cent for the financial year 2023-24.

Productivity Slowdown: Capitalism Caught in its Own Trap

BESIDES gloomy global macroeconomic environment infested by high food and energy inflation leading to cost of living crisis together with rising costs of input and corporate credit because of higher interest rate triggered by inflation targeting monetary stance across countries, the crisis of capitalism is also manifested in a deeper manner by slowing down of aggregate productivity growth.Productivity in its different measures is a ratio of economic output to economic inputs.

Freebies and Lollipops to the Corporates

CUTTING down expenditures that impact upon the poor while bailing out the corporates has been the hallmark of neoliberal policies. Profit making by any means and favouring the rich by way of offering subsidies from state exchequer to the big corporates is being legitimised as pro-market and development enhancing strategies. Hardly any issues are being raised by the mainstream media on these sops while subsidies to farmers or to the middle class in terms of provisioning of electricity, water, education or health services has been termed as ‘freebies’ granted from tax payers money.

Emerging Conflicts in Capital’s Control on Labour

CONTROL on the labour process has been the key to capital relations. It is important because the origin and reproduction of capital relations depends on the alienation of labour from the process of production. One of the important means to exercise control by capital over labour is to separate the mental and physical labour through a hierarchical structure. It is meant for a division of labour which is curated to distinguish people who would be thinking and those who would be mindlessly executing instructions given by planners within the factory.

Second Quarter Estimates: Contraction in Manufacturing

THE quarterly estimates released for the second quarter (July-September) by the National Accounts Division estimate a GDP growth of 6.3 per cent which was pegged at 13.5 per cent in the first quarter of 2022-23. It is understandable that the previous figure was relatively high because of the low base effect and growth rates show moderate trends as situations normalise. On the sectoral growth trends what seems positive is the recovery of growth in contact-intensive services particularly the hospitality industry which suffered a huge contraction during the pandemic.

Dismal Picture of Youth Employment in India

THE alarming fact of India’s labour market in the second decade of the millennium is the increase in youth unemployment compared to the general increase in unemployment in the recent period. Despite the fact that the overall high open unemployment rate of roughly 5.8 per cent in the recent past in India is still much lower than the unemployment rate in advanced countries, that does not indicate a better picture.

Socialism and Emancipation of Labour

MARX’S unique concept of ‘mode of production’ implies production not in the narrow technological sense but a comprehensive unity of concrete relations between humans and nature captured by means of production and that between human beings themselves who consciously participate in the social processes of production defining production relations.Mode of production as a conceptual category helps us analyse the empirical regularities of history.

Is the Rupee Fall Over?

THE mounting pressure on rupee-dollar exchange rate is not going to ease out in the near future. In April 2021 one dollar was exchanged against 74.47 rupees which has touched 80.23 in September 2022 and exchange rate further fell to 83.2 per dollar on October 20, 2022.

Class Contestations on ‘Freebies’

IT has been almost an untold convention held by the pink papers and mainstream media that an expenditure from government exchequer that flows to the poor directly or indirectly are to be termed as ‘populist’ in political discourse and recently as ‘freebies’ in the context of ‘economic prudence’. A mirror image, in the lens of class, is the huge applaud the same media shower on policies that propose tax cuts or subsidies to capitalists.

Dwindling Growth, High Food Inflation, Low Employment

THE post-pandemic recovery in the world economy that picked up in 2021 is likely to slow down due to expectations of rising inflation, continuing war, restrictions due to the COVID-19 pandemic and prolonged real estate slump in China as well as a slower than anticipated consumer spending in the US. While global growth rates are revised downwards from 6.1 per cent in 2021 to 3.2 per cent in 2022 and further down to 2.9 per cent in 2023, inflation expectations are high due to soaring food and energy prices. The average inflation rate in developing countries is forecasted to be 7.3 per cent.

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Peoples Democracy

economic policy & Labour