Agriculture, as a sector, has been playing a decisive role in shaping the overall growth trajectories of the Indian economy since Independence.

This article gives an overview of various dimensions of wage inequality prevalent in India. Consumption data corroborates horizontal and vertical inequality across regions and sectors

The Report of the UN High Level Panel acknowledges the criticality of improving governance. Whether the post-2015 development goals should be about outcomes alone or about both outcomes and some of its core inputs (like quality of governance and public institutions) has been a matter of debate.

The need for enhancing transparency in government budgets has been discussed widely in recent years. Issues relating to lack of transparency have been raised in several domains of public expenditure in the country, but Centrally Sponsored Schemes (CSS) have drawn considerable attention in this regard.

The article provides an overview of the issues and challenges of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and examines India’s role and achievements.

The emergence of BRICS represents an important change in the global economy. It is anticipated that BRICS will play a progressive role on economic and social issues at the regional and global levels. In this backdrop, the article discusses the prospects and challenges of BRICS and India’s role in this global forum.

The G-20 rose to prominence during the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, when it played an arguably influential role in coordinating international responses to the crisis. Overtime, G20 has also focused on a broad range of longer-term economic issues of interest to its members.

The article illustrates that India’s total budgetary spending on social sectors is not adequate. Citing examples of some flagship schemes, it highlights the problem of poor utilization of funds in these schemes. Though the factors affecting the extent and quality of fund utilization vary across schemes, the article argues that institutional and procedural bottlenecks along with some aspects of the country’s fiscal policy are the causal factors underlying this trend of poor utilization of funds.

The article gives an overview of some of the issues related to Black Money in India. It also contextualises these issues in relation to global debates on illicit money currently being discussed. The author suggests that there is a need to focus on ensuring that black money does not leave the country rather than bringing it back.

The 14th Finance Commission announced in 2013 has already embarked upon its task for formulating recommendations for the transfer of resources to states and local bodies for the period 2015-16 to 2019-20.

Subsidy refers to a transfer of resources by the government to the buyer or seller of a good or service that has the effect of reducing the price paid by the buyers, increasing the price received by the sellers, or reducing the cost of production of the good or service.

India has witnessed a number of reforms in indirect taxes over the last two decades with the replacement of State Sales Taxes by Value Added Tax (VAT) in 2005 marking a watershed in this regard.