Randomized control trials are a useful tool in development economics. But RCTs are not a gold standard; like other tools they face problems of inference, they cannot claim to have established…
The 2019 Nobel laureates in Economics should use their new stature to call for a moratorium on experiments done on vulnerable populations since poor ethical standards often mark the design and…
Common Service Centres, a component of Digital India, are supposed to be transformational in how they meet the citizen's documentation needs that are essential to access government services. A…
India has enough food; does it have too many people working in agriculture? The pressure on land is an outcome of policy, which condemns most people to marginal farming. India needs a different set…
In the absence of structural reforms for transformative growth, a rural-led growth strategy is the only option for economic revival at this point of time. Growth may be slower but it will be…
The free LPG connection scheme has seen a huge increase in the number of poor rural homes with gas stoves; more needs to be done to make LPG affordable and encourage the use of this clean fuel,…
A distinct exercise to validate the official estimates of India’s GDP growth during the years 2011-12 to 2017-18 finds that there was an over-estimation in the new series, similar to the conclusions…
Unemployment today is at an all-time high but that is not the only challenge in jobs: more and more workers are withdrawing from the labour force, the wages of casual workers are below a reasonable…
How do we measure the exchange rate? Why do we not have a fixed exchange rate which would make life simpler? Why does the US dollar enjoy a near-supreme power? Why has the value of the Indian rupee…
In making the shift to renewable energy, India has to manage the disruption of long-standing institutional and political arrangements in ways that enable clean energy in a sustainable manner.
