• About

    I write a fortnightly "Letter from India" column for the International Herald Tribune, and occasionally for The New York Times

    I'm working on a non-fiction book about India, to be published by Riverhead in 2010

    I've written for The Atlantic, The Economist, Granta, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, and several other publications

  • Highlights

    Two articles on the five-year anniversary of the tsunami (1, 2), from The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times. These follow-up from my two original reports on the tsunami, published in The New Yorker (1, 2).

    See also a related article from Granta on coastal erosion in South India.

    Two articles on the social impact of rapid development, from The International Herald Tribune and The New York Times (1, 2).

    I've also written on development for The Atlantic (an essay review on Amartya Sen ) and The Economist (on the digital divide).

    I've written several literary essays and reviews over the years. See this one on VS Naipaul, from Transition, and this one on Indian literature, from The New Statesman.

Fiscal stimulus: Indian economy doing less well than US?

Christina Romer, the head of Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, defended the government’s stimulus plan by arguing that countries without substantial stimulus had done less well than those with a stimulus plan. She included India–along with France and Italy–on the list of countries that were doing less well. I’m confused. Isn’t India expected to grow by 6-7% this year (and isn’t the US’s GDP expected to shrink)?

Also, I wonder how she calculates the size of India’s stimulus. Although it’s true that the pure fiscal stimulus provided by the government is relatively small (around $4 billion last year), the country is also spending a fortune on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), which, as many economists have argued, functions as a de facto stimulus, boosting income and consumption in rural areas.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 6:14 am and is filed under blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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