The recent decline in gross domestic product (GDP) growth in India raised a debate about whether it is a trend or a business cycle slowdown. We observe a cyclical downturn post-global financial crisis due to external and domestic conditions. With global recovery strengthening and appropriate...

This paper reviews some of the more critical policy dilemmas facing the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in its pursuit of inflation stabilization and balanced growth objectives. The challenge in meeting these objectives further increased in the mid-2000s with the advent of large capital flows into...

The service sector is the largest and fastest growing sector in India and has the highest labor productivity, but employment has not kept pace with the share of the sector in gross domestic product and has not produced the number or quality of jobs needed. There is no policy leading to inclusive...

Some countries and regions have been more successful than others in developing information technology-business process outsourcing (IT-BPO) services industries. India and the Philippines in particular have offered educated human resources at low cost, attractive fiscal incentives, and industrial...

Many countries adopted safety net programs to deal with the food crisis of 2008. However, such programs are often beset with targeting errors, inefficiencies, and fraud. Despite this, there is no systematic comparative analysis of safety nets. The objective of this paper is to identify generic...

This paper examines the relationship between federal transfers and fiscal deficits in India. The system of federal transfers has been criticized on the grounds that it distorts the incentives for states to promote fiscal discipline. We analyze the relationship between transfers, state domestic...

Using data from more than 6,000 manufacturing firms in India for 1996–2008, we investigate the impact of financial constraints on the exporting behavior of Indian manufacturing firms while also focusing on the link between exchange rate movement and exports. We find that there is a strong...

Energy security has been an important global policy issue for more than 4 decades. Transport biofuels like bioethnol have been receiving increased attention in recent years as a solution to heavy dependence on imported petroleum fuels, which brings destabilizing price effects on the economy and...

We use establishment-level data from Indian manufacturing to describe the distribution of firm size in terms of employment, and discuss implications for public policy. A unique feature of our analysis is the use of nationally representative establishment-level data from both the registered...

This paper calculates the decline in costs involving merchandise trade between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and India during the period 1980–2008. Drawing from the recent literature, a comprehensive measure of trade costs is derived from a theory-founded gravity model of...