JOAN Robinson, the well-known economist, had drawn attention to a fundamental difference between foreign direct investment in the manufacturing sector and foreign direct investment in a sector that extracted an exhaustible resource, such as a mineral product. This difference can be illustrated with an example.Suppose in both sectors profits worth Rs 100 are earned and repatriated abroad each year by the foreign company; and suppose the life of the mine is 10 years.

THE hallmark of a systemic, as distinct from a cyclical or sporadic, crisis of capitalism is that every effort to resolve the crisis within the broad confines of the system, defined in terms of its prevailing class configuration, only worsens the crisis. It is in this sense that neoliberal capitalism has now entered a systemic crisis.

IN justification of the move to end Kashmir’s special status, Amit Shah in his speech in the Rajya Sabha brought in the question of Kashmir’s “development”, arguing that closer integration with the rest of India will bring in much investment into the region. He especially appealed to the youth of Kashmir, promising that they would have larger employment opportunities.When unemployment in India has never been as bad as now in the last 45 years, to claim that closer integration with India will improve Kashmir’s employment prospects, is ironical.

FIFTY years ago on July 19, 1969, fourteen large private banks had been nationalised.

THE growth in tax revenue of the union government has slowed down perceptibly in the last two years. The growth (over the previous year) in total tax revenue accruing to the centre was 17 per cent in 2016-17; it slowed to 11 per cent in 2017-18, and further to a mere 8 per cent in 2018-19. Since this growth is in nominal terms, the growth in real terms has been even slower. In fact in 2018-19 the growth in real tax revenue could not have been more than about 3 per cent over the previous year, which is much less than the growth in the real GDP of the country.