• OPINION

  Budget must address India's reputation problem

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 31/01/2017

  » One of the least enviable jobs in the world at the moment has to be that of the Indian finance minister. Arun Jaitley is to present his fourth annual budget to India's parliament tomorrow amid terrible headwinds -- mostly caused by his government's bewildering and disruptive decision to invalidate 86% of India's currency last November. If he's to revive growth, the first thing he has to do is rethink his priorities.

• OPINION

  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.

• OPINION

  No end in sight to India's slow-motion bank crisis

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 01/03/2017

  » India's slow-moving banking crisis continues to drag on, as ponderous and unstoppable as the state-controlled banking sector itself. A recent study found that the gross "non-performing assets" of state banks rose by 55% in 2016, and 135% in the last two years. They now account for 11% of all state bank loans.

• OPINION

  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.

• OPINION

  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.

• OPINION

  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".

• OPINION

  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.

• OPINION

  State can't fill India's dangerous investment gap

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 25/10/2016

  » India's celebrated position as the world's fastest-growing large economy conceals a dangerous weakness: too few people seem to want to invest there. Even by the government's growth figures, private investment is shrinking at an increasing pace -- by 1.9% between January and March and 3.1% between April and June.

• OPINION

  India starts to abandon cash, maybe a bit too fast

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 10/11/2016

  » It certainly took everyone in India by surprise. But then, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has a flair for the dramatic. In an unexpected prime time address on Tuesday, he announced that in a few hours, millions of high-denomination currency notes would no longer be legal tender. It was the only way, he insisted, to deal with "the disease" of unaccounted-for income -- or "black money", as it's called in India. "Your money will remain yours," he assured a stunned citizenry -- as long as you get around to depositing it in post offices sometime over the next several weeks.

• OPINION

  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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