ECONOMIC NOTES

THE BRICS BANK

ON July 15, the five BRICS countries, Brazil , Russia, India, China, and South Africa formally created a New Development Bank at Forteleza, Brazil, which would be headquartered in Shanghai and would have an Indian as its first president. It would have a capital base of $50 billion to start with, contributed by the five governments, and would provide development funding to all governments for infrastructure projects.

The Rise and Fall of The Global South

A PICTURE that was painted of globalisation went as follows: the real wages in the south are much lower than in the north, since the south is saddled with large labour reserves. In a world where capital is mobile, even if labour is not, capital from the north will shift the location of its production activity from the north to the south, to take advantage of these low wages, for meeting global demand.

UNION BUDGET 2014-15

FOUR things stand out about the union budget for 2014-15 presented to parliament on July 10. First, the figures it presents are palpably unreal. Second, the basic fiscal strategy it embodies consists in providing concessions to the better off segments of the population, viz., the corporate elite and the upper middle class, at the expense of the poorer strata. Third, it unfolds a roadmap for the future that involves a significant privatisation of the economy, both through a pervasive reliance on Public-Private Partnerships and also through a massive sale of public sector equity.

The Dangers of Regressive Income Redistribution

THE budget season is upon us, and soon there will be pundits appearing on television channels to tell the government what it should do. And the typical advice will be: restrict or wind up the “populist” schemes of the UPA; use the funds generated by such restrictions to provide “incentives” to capitalists to stimulate growth, so that the Indian economy, which has been woefully stagnant of late, experiences a revival. The moral of their story in short would be: an income redistribution from the poor to the rich is good for growth. Is it in fact the case?

On The Global Economic Crisis

THE global economic crisis is usually seen as the sequel to the collapse of the housing bubble in the United States. This understanding however is inadequate. The formation of that bubble and its collapse are episodes which are themselves embedded within a deeper structural crisis that afflicts contemporary capitalism, one related to the phenomenon of “globalisation”.

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