Prabhat Patnaik The report of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) conducted in 2017-18 is finally out, and it confirms what had been leaked earlier, namely a dramatic increase in the unemployment rate in the Indian economy. The unemployment rate is given under two heads: usual...
Tejvan Pettinger Funding free licence fees for over-75s cost the government £608m in 2013-14 – about a fifth of the BBC’s budget. By 2021/22 funding free license fees for the over-75s would cost £745m. Under the new scheme, pensioners receiving pension credit will be eligible for a...
Tejvan Pettinger Dynamic pricing is a method firms use to constantly adjust the price of goods/services depending on demand. For example, if there is a surge in demand, firms respond to the market data by increasing price. New technology has increased the scope for more variable...
Tejvan Pettinger Readers Question: To what extent does the trade war between USA and China actually impact on the economies of other nations? A trade war between the US and China is concerning for other countries because a trade war can precipitate a fall in global trade,...
The fundamental economic problem is a scarcity of resources. Definition of efficiency Efficiency is concerned with the optimal production and distribution of these scarce resources. There are different types of efficiency 1. Productive efficiency This occurs when the maximum number of goods and services are produced with a given amount...
Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Nazran Zhafri Ahmad Johari With growing economic conflicts triggered by US President Donald Trump’s novel neo-mercantilist approach to overcoming his nation’s economic malaises, many voices now argue that bad free trade agreements are better than nothing. After US withdrawal following Trump’s inauguration in...
Tejvan Pettinger In recent years, many advanced (high-income) economies have seen a marked fall in unemployment but only very slow or even negative real wage growth. This phenomenon of slow wage growth, despite falling unemployment, is marked in countries such as the UK, Japan and the...
C. P. Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh World trade is in deceleration mode. After having recovered smartly from 2.3 and 1.6 per cent in 2015 and 2016 to 4.6 per cent in 2017, the growth in the volume of world merchandise trade slowed to 3.0 per cent...
Jomo Kwame Sundaram and Michael Lim Mah Hui The emergence and growth of financialization from the 1980s has been driven by several factors operating at various levels – national and international, ideological and political, and of course, technological. The 1971 collapse of the Bretton Woods (BW)...
Jomo Kwame Sundaram At the risk of reiterating what should be obvious, the question of private or public ownership is distinct from the issue of competition or market forces. Despite the misleading claim that privatization promotes competition, it is competition policy, not privatization, that promotes competition. Privatization...