A Hungry Nation

THE Global Hunger Index brought out annually by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has just been published for 2017. The fact that India occupies the 100th rank among the 119 nations specifically studied by IFPRI (for whom hunger is a problem), with only two other Asian countries, Pakistan and Afghanistan, below India in the rankings, has attracted some attention in the media.

Structural Changes within Imperialism

FOR long one could divide the world’s currencies into three distinct categories: (i) the leading currency, typically belonging to the leading imperialist power,in the present case the United States, which was considered “as good as gold” by the world’s wealth-holders; (ii) other metropolitan currencies in terms of which the world’s wealth-holders also held their wealth, but which, precisely by virtue of not being considered “as good as gold”, had to maintain a certain stable value vis-à-vis the leading currency through the pursuit of appropriate macroeconomic policies, including contraction

The Class Content of Goods and Services Tax

THE discussion on the Goods and Services Tax (GST) until now has focussed almost exclusively on the distribution of its burden across commodities, on the difficulties of meeting its stringent bureaucratic demands, and on the delays in obtaining claims for refunds. Even the view that it is pushing the economy into a recession has attributed this looming recession merely to its stringent procedural demands which supposedly have tied most sellers in knots. In all this however the class content of this new tax regime has been missed.

The Growing Income Inequality

THOMAS Piketty and Lucas Chancel have just written a paper as part of their work for the World Inequality Report discussing the movement of income inequality in India. And their conclusion is that the extent of income inequality in India at present is greater than it has ever been at any time in the last one hundred years.

A Bull in a China Shop

THE BJP government, like a bull in a China shop, is wrecking the economy. A neoliberal regime, even at the best of times, i.e., even when the economy is booming, brings misery to the vast mass of the working people by imposing upon the petty production sector a process of primitive accumulation of capital, through a withdrawal of State support from it and through leaving it to the mercy of the “spontaneous” working of untrammelled capitalism.

MNCs and Third World States

DR Timothy Wise, a well-known expert on agriculture based in the US, tells an instructive story about Monsanto and Malawi, a country currently in the process of finalising its seed policy. In Malawi, as in most other third world countries, peasants have traditionally stored their seeds from the previous harvest for their next planting, and have met and exchanged seeds among themselves in local seed-fairs.

America’s Turn towards Fascism and its Contradictions

THE fact that fascist elements in the US have started raising their sinister head and that Donald Trump has started showing his open sympathy for such elements is borne out by several recent incidents.

RBI Data Confirms Note Ban was a Total Failure

In a severe jolt to the Modi government’s tall claims that last year’s note ban had destroyed black money in India, RBI data shows that 99 per cent of the banned 1000-rupee notes were returned to the RBI.

On Niti Aayog’s Three Year Action Agenda

WITH the replacement of the Planning Commission by the Niti Aayog, the Fifteen Year Vision, Seven Year Strategy and Three Year Action Agenda process is to come in place of the original Five Year Planning one. While the first two are still being developed, the NITI Aayog released some time back the final version of Three Year Action Agenda (TYAA) for the period 2017-18 to 2019-20, the remaining part of the Fourteenth Finance Commission period. The document claims that it “charts an ambitious, transformational yet achievable Action Agenda for the government during 2017-18 to 2019-20”.

The Truth about Demonetisation

AFTER months of dilly-dallying, the Reserve Bank of India has finally come out with the figure that nearly 99 per cent of the currency notes demonetised in November 2016, came back to the banking system. The total value of demonetised currency, in the form of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 notes, was Rs 15.44 lakh crores, of which Rs 15.28 lakh crores came back to the banking system, which is 98.96 per cent.

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