Sole emphasis on GDP growth is misguided policy

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The Tribune India

 Pritam Singh – Professor Emeritus, Oxford Brookes Business School, Oxford

The ‘Competitiveness Road Map for India@100’, recently released by the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, charts out the plan for India to become an upper-middle-income country by 2047. It looks impressive at first glance. However, a closer reading of the theory underpinning this policy goal would show this to be seriously flawed.

When GDP was introduced as an economic concept, it was rightly assumed to be an annual measure of exchangeable goods and services in a country and not as a direct measure of the welfare of the people in the country. Even GDP per capita, which is a better measure than the gross GDP because it takes into account the population in the country, is a flawed measure of welfare. The major weakness of GDP per capita is that it ignores the distributional dimension of GDP

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What Now?

Is Trump capable of judging Iran’s Peace Proposal?

With neither side agreeing to a peace deal, Ali Vaez, director of the Iran Project at the International Crisis Group, told Al Jazeera that “no amount of economic coercion or military force will compel Iran to capitulate to maximalist US demands”.

“Trump is therefore left with two bad options: escalate a war he cannot win, or accept a compromise he cannot sell,” he said.

Mark Pfeifle, a former US national security adviser, pointed out that Tehran and Washington remain in the same position they were in before the negotiations even began.
However, he argued that Trump is unlikely to resume the war.

“One of the things that Mr Trump and his secretary of state did recently is they said that Operation Epic Fury is over, which takes off the table, at least, from a rhetorical standpoint, the possibility of re-engaging in some heavy military operation,” Pfeifle told Al Jazeera.
“Trump is now likely to ramp up the economic pressure on Iran through the US blockade and ‘do a military action, maybe around the coast of the Strait of Hormuz’.