India’s economy is coming out of its worst slowdown in a quarter-century, but needs major structural reforms if it is to return to pre-2011 growth levels, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said yesterday.
The OECD said in its India Economic Survey that annual growth should top 6.5 percent in the coming years, but reducing barriers to manufacturing growth was “critical.”
India’s growth has languished at below 5 percent for the last two financial years, hit by high interest rates, stubborn inflation and weak investment.
The OECD report called for a “simpler and more flexible labor law, covering more workers, coupled with better education and training programs.”
India’s economy grew by 4.7 percent in the prior fiscal year to March and the central bank projects 5.5 percent expansion this year.
“Structural reforms would raise India’s economic growth,” the report said. “In their absence, however, growth will remain below the 8 percent growth achieved during the previous decade.”
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party government was elected to power in May, has already taken some action to chop away at India’s thicket of regulations, seen by economists as discouraging crucial investment.
However, the report said the government needed to do more to simplify the nation’s infamous bureaucratic red tape to speed up commissioning of industrial projects and other investment.
It must also improve governance to crack down on widespread corruption, the report said.
Separately, Anglo-Dutch energy giant Royal Dutch Shell has won a multimillion-dollar court battle against Indian authorities, marking a significant victory for multinationals involved in tax wrangles in the nation.
The Bombay High Court ruled in favor of Shell, whose Indian unit was accused of underpricing shares issued to its parent firm by about 180 billion rupees (US$2.91 billion).
The company had challenged a demand by Indian authorities for tax on the interest that would have been earned. The judges on Tuesday quashed the income-tax department order, a move Shell welcomed.
“This is a positive outcome which should provide a further boost to the government initiatives to improve the investment climate,” the company said in a statement.
The high tax claim was one in a series ordered by Indian authorities on foreign firms including HSBC Holdings PLC, IBM Corp and Nokia Oyj. A court ruled last month in favor of British mobile giant Vodafone Group, which had been engaged in a US$490 million tax battle with Indian authorities after they accused the company of also underpricing its shares.
Foreign companies allege that Indian tax laws are sometimes applied in an uneven and capricious manner, making it difficult to do business in the nation.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained