"Intellectual" Discussions

Introduction An article on the Indian economy critical of the Government has something like this to say, “ At roughly 15.9 million units, two-wheeler sales in 2022-23 are where they were in 2014-15, when the Modi government came to power. These data sets have been brought out by Vivek Kaul in an article in The India Forum which makes the K-shaped recovery look increasingly grotesque. There is something seriously wrong, indeed inexplicable, about the structure of private consumption demand, going by the pattern of the sales of two-wheelers. A similar pattern is seen for entry-level passenger cars.” (Source: S1) K-Shaped recovery is something which one would have heard many times since we started recovering from the pandemic. As per Investopedia (Source: S2), “ A K-shaped recovery is one in which the performance of different parts of the economy diverges like the arms of the letter "K." In a K-shaped recovery, some parts of the economy may experience strong growth while ot...

Summary Some of the Government statistical data published (or leaked) in 2019 created quite a stir among the academic community and even among the general public. One was the Periodic Labour Force Survey of 2017-18 which put India's unemployment rates at 6.1%, the highest in 4 decades and the other was the Consumer Expenditure Survey of 2017-18 (whose results got leaked) which showed a dip in consumption expenditure from 2011-12 to 2017-18. The sample surveys conducted by National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) are generally regarded to provide the most authentic data about the social and economic conditions of the Indian population. These surveys cover a wide range of issues like employment, consumer expenditure, agricultural incomes, spending on education, spending on healthcare, time-use etc. Out of these, the surveys on employment (officially called the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS) from 2017-18 onwards and till 2011-12 it was called Employment-Unemployment Survey (EUS)) and...