If India wants to use GVCs to strengthen its export flows, it will have to liberalise the entry of imported goods, specifically inputs/intermediate goods, by lowering the import tariffs.

While the determinants of declining consumption of overall cereal and food-related items need further investigation, it is useful to understand how undernutrition varies across income quintiles. 

As the global trade policy has moved away from World Trade Organisation (WTO) led multilateralism, towards Regional Trade Agreements, this blog tries to understand the evolution of India’s Regional Trade Agreement (RTA) strategy.

Constantino Xavier and Riya Sinha comment on the MEA Budget and how India can become a leading power in an increasingly uncertain, competitive and complex international arena.

Jaimini Bhagwati, Distinguished Fellow, CSEP, and former Indian Foreign Service officer, talks to Constantino Xavier, Fellow, CSEP about the impact of the Russia-Ukraine crises on India's economic interests in the short and medium term.

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget 2022-23 on February 1. CSEP scholars Rakesh Mohan, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Vikram Singh Mehta, and Jaimini Bhagwati analyse the Budget and reflect on some of the key takeaways. 

On the one-year anniversary of CSEP, we bring you eight essential readings on the Indian economy.

The study looks at the evolving dynamics of the civil society/non-profit sector and examines variations in governance, changes in funding etc. which influence positive outcomes, while also looking at what constitutes positive outcomes.

India has been highly susceptible to the spread of pandemics. The 1918 pandemic caused devastation across the country, with an excess mortality of 4.5%. While a century has passed since then, the present conditions of dense living and a weak public healthcare system makes the possibility ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has sent shockwaves throughout the global economy. Some economies have been affected more severely than others. It started with a few deaths in Wuhan, China, with the earliest reported case on November 17, 2019. By December 31, 2019, when the Chinese authorities first ...

Coronavirus cases are quickly increasing across the globe, with just 580 reported cases (on January 22, 2020), in the span of a few weeks, the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases have increased to over half a million across the world. The surge in coronavirus cases ...

With growing number of coronavirus cases in India (and worldwide), policymakers have sprung into action – more information is being disseminated about preventive measures such as hand washing and not touching the face. Social distancing has been suggested as a tool to “flatten the curve”, or ...

On November 4, 2019, Brookings India hosted the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for a panel discussion around reforms based on inclusive and sustainable growth in South Asia with a particular focus on India. The IMF paper, titled “Is South Asia Ready for Take Off? A Sustainable ...

This is a tentative and an exploratory analysis to assess the productivity of the Supreme Court of India (SC) under different Chief Justices of India (CJI) in terms of accomplished adjudications, which is its core function. In particular, we study the number of judgements passed by ...

Globally, women remain vastly underrepresented in local and national politics. As of 2018, according to the Inter Parliamentary Union, only 24%[i] of parliamentarians are women. Can public policy, in general, and affirmative action, in particular, result in political inclusion of women? Data from the International Institute ...

Between 2001 and 2011, India’s elderly population increased from 70 million to 104 million (Census estimates). In 2011, the population over 60 years of age comprised 8.6% of the total population. With falling population growth rates this share is only expected to increase further in the ...

On July 29th, 2019, Brookings India hosted Sonia Bhalotra for a Development Seminar on Women’s Political Participation and Development. She presented two co-authored papers, “Women Legislators and Economic Performance” (2018)[1] and “Maternal Mortality and Women’s Political Participation” (2018)[2]. The two discussants for the event were Atishi, leader ...

On July 19, 2019, Brookings India hosted a Development Seminar on gender in the North East, under its Property Rights Initiative and Gender Secretariat Initiative, which is a platform for developing and discussing research that fuels impact on policy related to gender in India. Patricia Mukhim, ...

Gender discrimination in access to healthcare has not been systematically studied in India or many other developing countries. This is primarily due to a lack of reliable data. In this paper, we use extensive data collected on clinical appointments from a large public-funded tertiary care hospital ...

In a democratic polity, political representation is an inherent aspect of political participation. In this view, whether or not women are able to exercise political participation depends, to a large extent, on the terms of their inclusion and the extent to which the rules of the ...

As the largest democracy in the world, India has boasted a consistent record of free and fair elections. A democratic government derives its legitimacy and power to implement policy from the “consent of the governed”. But if a significant chunk of the population is “missing”, does ...

There are 80 million teenage girls in India. A clear understanding of their current realities and their aspirations is essential in order to design effective policies for them. However, a key impediment for data-driven policy design, in order to address the needs of teenage girls in ...

Connectivity is a prime factor in determining livability, employment and growth in a country. In this view, a well-connected India provides the prospect of a better India from better access to services to better livelihoods and opportunities. Setting out to understand how connectivity in India had ...

Tuberculosis is an infectious disease that is most prevalent in South Asia. It is caused by the bacillus Mycobacterium tuberculosis and primarily affects the lungs. A small fraction of infected individuals develop symptoms and the capability of transmission. In 2015, India accounted for 2.2 million of ...

Heralded as the world’s largest school feeding programme, the Mid-Day Meal Programme in India reaches out to over 120 million children in over 1.26 million schools. State governments, along with funding from the national government, supply free lunches to children in primary and upper primary classes ...

Do machines make mistakes? How often and at what cost? When can we truly trust machines? From SIRI to self-driving cars, Google’s search algorithms to autonomous weapons and drones, the past few decades have witnessed some of the fastest, almost meteoric, rises in Artificial Intelligence (AI). ...

Advances in artificial intelligence and data analytics are propelling innovation in many parts of the world.[1] China, for example, has committed $150 billion towards its goal of becoming a world leader by 2030.[2] And while the United States government is investing only $1.1 billion in non-classified ...

The National Family Health Survey 2015-16 conducted by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare provides information at an individual, household, district, state, and country level about various metrics related to health. The survey’s 800,000+ household observations are appropriately weighted by the International Institute of Population ...

Declining shares of manufacturing jobs in overall employment have been a concern for policymakers for years in advanced and some developing economies. This concern stems from the widely held belief that manufacturing plays a unique role as a catalyst for productivity growth and income convergence and ...

The “fourth industrial revolution” which has been characterised by end-to-end digitalisation has led to unprecedented increases in connectivity and data flows. By 2017, Asia had the largest number of internet users in the world, with 1.9 billion people online. Joshua Meltzer, Senior Fellow, Global Economy and ...

Inflation in the U.S. has averaged 1.9 per cent between 1996 and 2009 while mean inflation rate in 21 advanced economies (AE), excluding the U.S., has averaged some 25 basis points lower than that. During a Brookings India Development Seminar, Surjit Bhalla, member of the Prime ...

The Indian banking system is beleaguered with non-performing assets (NPAs). According to the Reserve Bank of India’s Financial Stability Report of December 2017, they currently stand at 10.2 per cent of all assets, while stressed assets, which are believed to be NPAs in effect, stand at ...

On December 11, the results of five Indian state elections – in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and Mizoram – were announced. These will be the last state elections before the 2019 Indian general election, about which speculation will now begin in earnest. Predicting national elections ...

India’s health care sector is poised at a crossroads, and the direction taken now will be critical in determining its trajectory for years to come. In a recent Brookings India paper on the Indian government’s health care policy, Shamika Ravi and Rahul Ahluwalia argue that it should prioritize ...