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In RealTime posts, PIIE senior staff and colleagues discuss the fast-moving economic news, financial developments, and public policy choices confronting the United States and the world.
On April 1, the Indian Supreme Court rejected the attempt by Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceutical company, to patent a new version of the leukemia drug Glivec. The latest verdict follows previous rulings that granted compulsory licenses to an Indian generic drug manufacturer for a kidney cancer drug (Nexavar) patented by Bayer. Five important questions are [...]
Is the world making progress on climate change? Recently, the OECD [pdf] struck a hopeful note, reporting that emissions were growing more slowly than GDP in both the high-income and developing countries, including China. This decoupling of emissions and growth, if true, would be good news indeed, since it would suggest that the world can [...]
Given the scale of India’s slowing rate of growth and other economic difficulties, there was one and only metric by which the new budget presented on February 28 would and should be assessed. Had this United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government fundamentally repudiated fiscal populism because it believed that such populism was no longer electorally popular? [...]
In the Financial Times today (January 14), I argue that multilateral trade as we know it could soon become history. In the past, we have seen regional trade agreements between large and small countries. Now for the first time, we are seeing the prospects of regional trade agreements between the major trading nations: the United [...]
Within the space of two days, the Indian government, spearheaded it appears by the Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, has taken a series of policy steps to get India out of the funk it had been sliding into. First, it enacted measures to reduce fuel subsidies on diesel and limit the subsidy on cooking gas. Second, [...]
In Lord Richard Attenborough’s movie Gandhi, an underling of the British Empire heatedly warns his supercilious boss that Mahatma Gandhi’s impending protest march to the sea poses a far greater threat than the Raj realizes: “Salt, sir, is a symbol.” This elicits the memorable sneering put-down from the boss (played by Sir John Gielgud): “Don’t [...]
What seems like an arcane squabble over relative growth rates between Iceland and Latvia has erupted into an argument between two heavyweight voices on economic policy—the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Paul Krugman. Obscure though it may be, their disagreement is important. It is actually a proxy for a much bigger debate on whether [...]
Is the decade-old Indian growth miracle over? India’s latest growth number of 5.3 percent for the first quarter of the current fiscal year prompts that worrying question. It falls short of two important benchmarks in India: It is 3 to 4 percentage points below the growth in China, and, critically, it is almost 4 percentage [...]
More than a year ago, I argued that China’s GDP in purchasing power parity (PPP) dollars had overtaken that of the United States in 2010. This calculation is used in my book, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance and plays a role in my conclusion that China has overtaken or is close [...]
“In Washington, the truth is just another special interest, and one that is not particularly well-financed.” That quotation from a short paper by Mike Mussa in the American Economic Review (Papers and Proceedings, Vol. 83. No. 2, 1993) on why it is so difficult to convince the general public about the merits of free trade, [...]