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FROM TOI PRINT EDITION
How to help the economy: Vaccinate all for free, jobs programme for urban poor, GST cut for consumer durables June 10, 2021, 8:55 PM IST
The writer is Royal Bank Research Professor of Economics, University of British Columbia
The Indian economy, having barely started showing some signs of flickering life, is bracing itself for another round of negative shocks. The marginally positive news of 1.6% GDP growth in the March quarter over the same period last year has already been superseded by the second Covid wave.
Economic costs of the second wave are showing in various indices. According to CMIE, the unemployment rate in May rose by almost 3 percentage points to 11.9%. RBI’s consumer future expectations index has declined by 11% since March. JP Morgan’s composite index in April and May has declined by 15% relative to the March quarter. People are losing jobs, people are afraid about the present and
The year was 1995. I was a Secretary in the Government of Kerala. I had been on central deputation from 1985 to 1990. The Chief Secretary of the time had a brainwave. He decided to.
Covid-19’s second wave in India has been a ‘perfect storm’. Premature abandonment of caution by people, unanticipated speed of the virus contagion, plus inadequacies of the health infrastructure and response capability have left lakhs sick,.
The events of the past month have been so tragic, so unspeakably ugly that the only rational response was to pretend it wasn’t happening. The raging second wave of the virus revealed not only the.
The virus humbles victors: Stories of national success in the pandemic have an embarrassingly short shelf-life May 24, 2021, 8:16 PM IST
Ruchir Sharma is the author of the upcoming ‘10 Rules of Successful Nations’
The oft-asked question – which nations are winning the fight against the pandemic – now has only one coherent answer. It depends on the month. The virus has repeatedly made losers of winners, and vice versa.
Not long ago, the United States and the UK were chastised for incompetent responses led by “illiberal populists” and inspired by Anglo imperial hubris, and a clueless “faith in their national greatness”. Now one of those populists, Donald Trump, is gone. The other, Boris Johnson, is not. But both nations are widely praised for rapid vaccine rollouts, and feted by many tourists as the safest places to vacation this summer.