Prabhat Patnaik

By Prabhat Patnaik The unemployment situation is worse today than it has ever been in post-independence India. There are two distinct elements that have contributed to this situation. One is the fact that the output recovery from the fall caused by the pandemic-linked lockdown has not been accompanied by a comparable employment recovery. In fact, […]

The post Introduction Of Universal Employment Guarantee Scheme Is Need Of The Hour first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik Argentina’s new president Javier Milei proposes to use US dollars as the currency of his country, while abolishing its central bank altogether. What is involved in this proposal is not just maintaining a fixed exchange rate between the dollar and the domestic currency, but an abolition of the domestic currency altogether. The […]

The post Dollarisation Programme Of Argentina Will Impose Additional Burden On Its Workers first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik A country with relatively unrestricted trade will face two problems: the first is a balance of payments problem because its exports are insufficient relative to its imports. And the second, the creation of unemployment, and more generally of domestic resources remaining idle, because domestic goods cannot compete with imports. These two are […]

The post The Vacuity Of The Free Trade Argument first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik In an economy like ours where the work-force is not neatly divided into “the employed” and “the unemployed”, and instead there is massive and growing casualisation of work, measuring unemployment is a tricky business. It necessarily means asking a person how much work that person got over a certain period in the […]

The post India’s Working Force Has Remained Stagnant Over The Last Five Years first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik All fascistic outfits have one common characteristic: they reject outright all evidence that goes against the narrative they spin; and the Hindutva elements in power in India are no exception. Their narrative presents India as the fastest growing economy in the world where the people never had it so good; but if […]

The post Continuing Hostilities To Evidence Based Studies Mark Nine Years Of Modi Regime first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik The central government’s hounding of Newsclick reminds one of the children’s story about a tiger and a goat drinking water from the same stream. The tiger, wanting an excuse to attack the goat, accuses it of muddying the water it is drinking; when the goat points to the impossibility of this, as […]

The post Delhi Police Raids On Newsclick Is A Sort Of McCarthysm By The Centre first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik One of the most intriguing questions at present is why Europe’s political leadership has become complicit in what appear to be US efforts at undermining European economies. The well-known American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, having already provided evidence that the United States was responsible for the blowing up of the Nord Stream […]

The post European Political Leaderships Are Complicit In US Efforts To Undermine Their Economies first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik At the Johannesburg summit of the BRICS countries, it was decided to expand the group beyond its original five, namely, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, to include six more countries. These are: Argentina, Egypt, Iran, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. These six it appears were chosen out […]

The post In The Expanded BRICS Grouping, There Are Three Distinct Kinds Of Countries first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik When BJP rule in the country is dead and gone, a good deal of the damage it has caused to the Indian society, polity and economy will no doubt be reversed. But there are at least two areas where such reversal will be difficult: one is the architectural vandalism it has perpetrated. […]

The post Narendra Modi Government Has Destroyed The Academic Character Of Universities first appeared on Latest India news, analysis and reports on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik ON April 3 this year, the minister of state for planning, Rao Inderjeet Singh, said in the Rajya Sabha that the government had no data after 2011-12 for estimating poverty, and therefore had no idea how many people had been lifted out of poverty since then. On July 18 however the UNDP […]

The post Narendra Modi Govt’s Claim Of Large Reduction In Poverty Level Is Flawed first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik Fascistic elements exist in every modern society, but usually as fringe, marginal or minor elements. They move centre-stage only when they get the support of monopoly capital which provides them with ample money and media coverage; and this happens when there is a capitalist crisis that substantially increases unemployment and puts a […]

The post India Is Witnessing A Unique Case Of Crony Capitalism Based On Corporate-Hindutva Nexus first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik How exactly is the dollar’s status as reserve currency related to imperialism? This question has two parts: how this status of the dollar is related to US imperialism, and how it is related to the overall imperialist arrangement. The dollar’s being a reserve currency makes it (and dollar-denominated assets in general) a […]

The post Hegemony Of US Dollar Is Under Threat, Steady Decline May Follow first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik How exactly is the dollar’s status as reserve currency related to imperialism? This question has two parts: how this status of the dollar is related to US imperialism, and how it is related to the overall imperialist arrangement. The dollar’s being a reserve currency makes it (and dollar-denominated assets in general) a […]

The post Hegemony Of US Dollar Is Under Threat, Steady Decline May Follow first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik The estimates of India’s Gross Domestic Product for the fourth quarter of 2023 were released on May 31. These show a growth rate of 6.1 per cent over the fourth quarter of the previous year, which is higher than the 4.4 per cent growth that the October-December quarter had recorded over the […]

The post High Q4 GDP Data Makes No Difference To The Poor State Of Indian Economy first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik Most people, including even trained economists, fail to appreciate the fact that an exchange rate depreciation, if it is to work in reducing the trade deficit in a capitalist economy, must necessarily hurt the working class by lowering the real wage rate. A capitalist economy, looking at it differently, improves its trade […]

The post Exchange Rate Depreciation Leads To Lowering Of The Real Wages Rate first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik Under pressure from globalised finance capital, most countries of the world have enacted legislation fixing the size of the fiscal deficit as a proportion of GDP; generally it is 3 percent, and in India it is 3 per cent for the centre and 3 per cent for the states. The US however […]

The post US Debt Ceiling Programme Of President Joe Biden Is Beset With Contradictions first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik The data on unemployment brought out by the Centre for Monitoring the Indian Economy (CMIE) present a grim picture. Not only has the unemployment rate increased sharply for some years now, starting from even before the pandemic, but the figure which had shot up during the pandemic has not come down much […]

The post Present Acute Unemployment Crisis Can Not Be Dealt By Modi’s Neo-Liberal Agenda first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik Government officials never tire of repeating that India is currently the fastest growing major economy in the world. What they never mention is the fact that India had witnessed perhaps the sharpest absolute drop in GDP among the major economies of the world in 2020-21 because of its draconian lockdown; and the […]

The post More Fund Transfers To The Working Poor Can Boost Growth In Ailing Indian Economy first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik Except in war-time, capitalism invariably seeks to control inflation by creating a recession; and this is so even when the inflation has been caused by an autonomous increase in capitalists’ profit-margins which are downward inflexible and hence would not be reduced by a recession. This strategy is pursued because a recession invariably […]

The post Oil Output Cut By OPEC+ Countries Is A Testimony To Decline In Us Hegemony first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik For a large part of the dirigiste period, the gross domestic product of the Indian economy grew at a rate of around 4 per cent per annum or less, which, though an improvement compared to the colonial era that had witnessed virtual stagnation, was not very impressive. This low steady growth over […]

The post Conditions Of Working People Will Be Worse Under ‘Hindu Rate Of Growth’ first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman made a misleading statement the other day that is not expected from a responsible member of the union cabinet. Talking about the resource transfer to the states in the recent budget, she said that the magnitude of transfer had been raised “sharply”. Now, this statement, while creating the […]

The post Finance Minister’s Statement On Transfer Of Resources To States Is Misleading first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik Gautam Adani’s calling Hindenburg’s allegations of fraud against him an attack on the Indian nation is a matter of particular significance. Just before this episode, the BBC documentary on Modi had been labelled a product of the colonial mindset by the government and hence also construed to be an attack on the […]

The post Narendra Modi-Adani Combination Is The Symbol Of Corporate-Hindutva Alliance first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik The most outstanding feature of the Indian economy today is the sluggish increase in real consumption expenditure. Between 2019-20 and 2022-23 for instance the per capita real consumption expenditure has grown by less than 5 per cent which is less than the rate of growth of the gross domestic product. Even the […]

The post Modi 2’s Last Full Budget Ignores Indian Economy’s Basic Problem first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik All regimes based on class antagonism require a discourse to legitimise class oppression and this discourse in turn requires a vocabulary of its own. The neoliberal regime too has developed its own discourse and vocabulary and a key concept in this vocabulary is “populism”. This concept is given great currency by the […]

The post Capitalists Are Terming Social Welfare Schemes ‘Populist’ To Deny Benefits To Poor first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik The IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva has now openly admitted that the year 2023 will witness the slowing down of the world economy to a point where as much as one-third of it will see an actual contraction in gross domestic product. This is because all the three major economic powers in […]

The post Contraction Of GDP In One-Third Of Global Economy In 2023 Is Ominous first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik India’s current account deficit for the second quarter (July-September) of 2022-23 has reached a massive $36.4 billion which is 4.4 per cent of the gross domestic product, higher than at any time in the last nine years. It is only in October-December 2012 that the absolute level of the current deficit had […]

The post India’s Balance Of Payments Crisis Touches Precarious Level Under Modi Regime first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik The fact that income and wealth inequalities have increased quite dramatically under the neo-liberal regime is beyond dispute. The empirical work by Piketty’s team bears out the increase in income inequality. They use income tax data to infer about the share of the top 1 per cent of the population of a […]

The post Income And Wealth Inequalities Increase Substantially Under Neoliberal Regimes first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik There are two defining and portentous features of the current world economic situation. One, which is well discussed, is the world-wide increase in interest rates in response to the pervasive inflationary upsurge; it would indubitably generate recession and unemployment, which, notwithstanding all protestations to the contrary, is the real objective behind it. […]

The post Funds Outflow From Third World Countries Strengthening US Dollar first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik What is called OPEC+ that is the13 members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) together with 11 other petroleum exporting countries led by Russia, decided on October 5 to cut their oil production by 2 million barrels per day, starting from November. The US had been pressing OPEC not to […]

The post OPEC’s Decision To Cut Oil Output Is A Challenge To U.S. Hegemony first appeared on IPA Newspack.

By Prabhat Patnaik The estimates of Gross Domestic Product for the April-June quarter released by the government of   India on August 31 paint a dismal picture of the Indian economy. Since the GDP in real terms (at 2011-12 prices) shows an increase of 13.5 per cent over the first quarter GDP a year ago, and […]

The post Finance Ministry Officials Glossing Over First Quarter GDP Estimates first appeared on IPA Newspack.