• OPINION

  Investment will not bring peace to Kashmir

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 08/08/2019

  » India's parliament has rubber-stamped the government's decision to end Kashmir's 70 years of autonomy and turn it into a "union territory" closely supervised by New Delhi.

• OPINION

  China should remember its old friends

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 19/12/2018

  » Nobody can know if, when Deng Xiaoping launched his strategy of "Reform and Opening Up" 40 years ago, even he could have predicted the near-miraculous transformation of the Chinese economy that would follow. In the years since then, hundreds of millions have been lifted out of abject poverty and into the ranks of the global middle class; China's industrial heartland became the workshop of the world; and the People's Republic has muscled its way into the first rank of global powers.

• OPINION

  Why India's airlines fail to take off

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 03/12/2018

  » Anyone puzzled by how the Indian economy manages to grow swiftly while somehow failing to be prosperous could do worse than look at the state of India's airlines. Over the past four years, passenger growth in India has been rapid: The number of flights taken has increased between 15% and 20% per year. Demand growth this year is likely to be the highest in the world. Yet the industry itself hasn't benefited. Almost every Indian airline is struggling.

• OPINION

  Why demonetisation was a 'failure'

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 03/09/2018

  » The Indian central bank's final tally of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 2016 demonetisation drive -- intended to take money derived from tax evasion out of circulation -- showed that 99.3% of outlawed high-value banknotes had been returned. That's a severe loss of face for officials, who had argued that holders of the cash would rather destroy it than return it to banks, providing a windfall for the government.

• OPINION

  Indians' skills don't match up -- yet

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 16/11/2017

  » If India is to live up the expectations of its own people and become a successful middle-income country in a few decades, the country has multiple problems to solve -- its sclerotic politics, its clogged infrastructure, its choked judicial system, its lack of investable capital, its interfering and inefficient state. But perhaps the greatest hurdle is its poor stock of human capital. Without better education, health and skills, India won't be able to build a middle class and its efforts to become the next China can't succeed.

• OPINION

  Bad advice is driving India's bulls

  News, Mihir Sharma, Published on 15/09/2017

  » India's economy is not doing as well as many had hoped. Growth has been slowing for several quarters, and even if there's a slight recovery in coming quarters, the signs for the medium term aren't propitious.

• 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

  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

  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.

1 2 Next Last