Economy: Between a rock and a hard place

The government unveiled a series of half-hearted measures to address it and kept kicking the can down the road

The euphoria over the tag of becoming, once again, the world’s fastest-growing major economy should not lead to complacency. Just as the economy began recovering from self-inflicted policy mistakes, and began to grow rapidly again after a sharp slowdown in 2017, rising oil prices and trade protectionism threaten that recovery. 

India benefited from good luck since 2014 when it received a huge terms of trade windfall — estimated by the International Monetary Fund to be around 2 per cent of GDP. Even though remittances fell from an average of 3.5  per cent of GDP in the period 2010-14 to an average