The Policy Monitor
Poverty is multidimensional and thus the concept of it has to be extended beyond the deprivation of income; not only extended to the deprivation of basic necessities such as food, clothing and shelter or access to social securities of health and education, but also to the deprivation of freedom (such as political freedom) or social acceptance.
The benefits of natural experiments to create innovative research designs, aimed at finding credible evidence to answer important policy questions are well-known. Recently, David Card, Joshua D. Angrist, and Guido W. Imbens received the prestigious Nobel Prize 2021 award for offering new insights on labour markets and showing what conclusions about cause-andeffect can be drawn from natural experiments.
Bangladesh has
seen both structural transformation and the rise of sectors capable of generating decent foreign
exchange earnings, which has helped policymakers sustain comfortable macroeconomic
fundamentals
A recent study by LSE found that 52% of urban workers went without work or pay and received no financial assistance for over a month. Bihar’s emergency assistance programme has been cited as a rare example of sub-national government’s efforts to identify, onboard and disburse payments to the migrants during the ongoing pandemic.
However, a lot more goes behind the inner workings of a buffet system than just our sense of consumption according to our sense of value rather than appetite. The law of diminishing marginal utility is at the center of the whole business model.
In sum, revenue contraction, expenditure-side stimulus measures, and low denominator GDP – these three factors have collectively contributed to the high fiscal deficit in 2020-21 RE.
India’s institutional policy has to complement its industrial policy and not the other way round
Any enforcement of mutual exchange becomes exploitative even within free markets if over-riding socio-economic inequalities are ignored and institutions are imposed from the top.
Romanticism has led to greater economic and political centralisation often sub-verting the liberal democratic model of governance. Therefore for the sake of our democracy and sustainable economic growth/development, Indian policy-makers and opinion-makers need to rethink their obsession with the GDP growth.
In the presence of limited economic resources for public allocation, human rights should be a policy imperative for the organization of economic system itself