Showing 1-10 of 27 results
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Butter before guns please, Mr Modi
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 17/06/2016
» The breathless excitement that surrounded Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to Washington, DC last week wasn't completely undeserved. By pushing forward Indo-US defence and strategic ties -- in spite of considerable domestic opposition to any de facto alliance -- Mr Modi can claim to have made India stronger. Yet unless he puts similar effort into fixing economic relations between the two nations, much of that progress could be at risk.
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Could India be the first country to get rid of cash?
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 22/07/2016
» 'Black money" -- the colloquial name for a vast network of off-the-book cash transactions and unbanked savings -- is one of India's biggest scourges. Amounting to as much as $460 billion (16 trillion baht) a year, bigger than the GDP of Argentina, all that money lies beyond the reach of the tax authorities, creditors and anti-corruption investigators.
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'Gradualist' reform slowed growth
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 26/07/2016
» On July 26, 1991, Manmohan Singh -- then Finance Minister, and later prime minister for 10 years -- rose in parliament to deliver an address that would transform India. That speech, outlining the first budget of a just-elected government under Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao, launched India's journey of economic reform, dismantling many decades-old socialist-style controls on the private sector.
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Manufacturing can thrive before the robots arrive
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 16/09/2016
» One of the most striking ways in which Narendra Modi's government has changed the policy narrative in India is to make manufacturing central to its ambitions. This is an overdue recognition of the fact that India -- whose workforce is overwhelmingly poor and underemployed, and growing at the rate of a million people every month -- needs to create mass factory jobs if it's to prosper.
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Indian protectionism isn't patriotic
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 15/12/2016
» Samuel Johnson got it wrong: Patriotism is the last refuge of the unprofitable. The Indian e-commerce giant Flipkart Online Services Pvt lost 23 billion rupees (about 12.1 billion baht) last year, and so its co-founder and executive chairman, Sachin Bansal, has suddenly morphed into a great champion of local companies. "We need to take a more India-centric approach" to regulation, he told a Bengaluru audience last week, citing Donald Trump approvingly.
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Cash crunch woes only beginning
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 06/01/2017
» 'Give me 50 days, friends," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi asked citizens after he cancelled 86% of the country's currency notes. After Dec 30, if Indians saw his decision as flawed, he promised to "suffer any punishment". But, he said confidently, if they could bear 50 days of disruption, they would have the "India of their dreams".
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In the Trump era, Asia must unite
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 24/01/2017
» Every new occupant of the White House has his -- still, unfortunately, "his" -- way of looking at the world. America's allies, friends and rivals have always adjusted to these shifts in worldview. But so far they've been relatively straightforward. Some presidents have sought to extend democratic values, others to fight grand strategic battles. The last swore not to "do stupid stuff". Adjusting to President Donald Trump won't be that easy.
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Trump can't kill the TPP
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 27/01/2017
» When President Donald Trump withdrew US support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Monday, he made it harder for American companies to compete. In the name of US labour, he compromised the interests of the American worker, for the TPP would've forced labour standards onto the trade agenda for the first time in history. Mr Trump turned his back on America's allies and handed China a giant strategic victory. What he didn't do was kill what the TPP stands for.
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Budget misses chance of jobs focus
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 03/02/2017
» Prime Minister Narendra Modi swept to power in India in May 2014 ardently promising -- like so many chest-thumping leaders elsewhere in the world -- that he would create jobs. The angry and under-employed young people of heavily populated north India, in particular, decided to trust a man who sold himself as a strong, sound steward of the economy.
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Modi is a different nationalist to Putin or Trump
News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 06/04/2017
» Over the past year, Russia's Vladimir Putin has emerged as the ideological patron of a certain brand of conservatism worldwide. Politicians from France's Marine Le Pen, to Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, to Donald Trump appear drawn to Mr Putin's vision of a world marked by weaker transnational power blocs, fewer meddlesome liberals and a harder line against radical Islam.
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