Articles by C P Chandrasekhar

The current crisis in emerging markets may signify the end of a phase of international capitalism in which deregulation and increased economic integration have led to increased volatility and uncertainty. This article examines - with a focus on Thailand and South Korea - the factors that led to financial liberalisation, the link between financial openness and crisis and the problems that persistence with open regimes creates for efforts to overcome the crisis. The experience shows that developing countries will have to control and regulate capital flows in accordance with national priorities.

All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go India Infrastructure Report Jayati Ghosh Abhijit Sen C P Chandrasekhar The basic strategy proposed in the India Infrastructure Report prepared by the Expert Group on the Commercialisation of Infrastructure Projects appointed by the ministry of finance is for the government to retreat as investor, to provide space for private participation, even while continuing to facilitate and provide numerous financial crutches for the private sector. But even all of these very expensive measures do not guarantee that the private sector would respond positively to invest in areas which are both risky and not-so-profitable.

C P Chandrasekhar A close scrutiny of the estimates of capital formation in the post-reform period shows that no linkage can be established between liberalisation, private investment and industrial growth. What liberalisation has done is to unleash a consumption boom, fuelled by a surge in consumer credit that has accompanied financial sector reform. Such a boom not only increases balance of payments vulnerability, but also offers, in terms of markets, only a once-for all boost that would exhaust itself unless some other stimuli ensure expansion of the home market for manufacturers.

The Rupee and Its Malcontents Exchange Rate Management in India Jayati Ghosh Abhijit Sen C P Chandrasekhar The sources of the current instability in the currency markets - portfolio capital inflows from foreign institutional investors, exporters withholding their foreign exchange earnings and reckless imports and import hunching by domestic firms are rendered the more potent because of the reduced ability of the government to intervene effectively, it having discarded many of the instruments it could earlier have used to determine the exchange rate of the rupee. Having tied its own hands so effectively, the government's external economic policy has become a prisoner of speculative forces rather than their master.

Prabhat Patnaik C P Chandrasekhar What comes through clearly from the Indian experience with structural adjustment is the dominant role of the process of globalisation of finance. Indeed the very design of the current package of structural adjustment hears the imprint of this process and the sequel to the introduction of the package shows that the real mobility witnessed is that of finance rather than that of capital-in-production.