THE IMF managing director Kristalina Georgieva has now openly admitted that the year 2023 will witness the slowing down of the world economy to a point where as much as one-third of it will see an actual contraction in gross domestic product. This is because all the three major economic powers in the world, the US, the European Union, and China, will witness slowdowns, the last of these because of the renewed Covid upsurge.

THE hegemony of imperialism is invariably associated with an agrarian crisis in countries of the global south; in fact agrarian crisis is just the other side of the ascendancy of imperialism. This is evident from the case of Indian agriculture. The colonial period saw a more or less perpetual agrarian crisis, whose starkest manifestation was in the form of recurring famines. Colonial rule in India began with the East India Company acquiring the revenue-collecting rights over Bengal from the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam in 1765.

THE fact that income and wealth inequalities have increased quite dramatically under the neo-liberal regime is beyond dispute. The empirical work by Piketty’s team bears out the increase in income inequality. They use income tax data to infer about the share of the top 1 per cent of the population of a country in its national income. One may raise objections to this method of estimation, but the conclusions are so overwhelming that one can scarcely quarrel with them.

THE post-second world war period had seen a spate of welfare state measures in the advanced capitalist countries, especially in Europe, in emulation of what the Soviet Union was effecting. Capitalism had to accept these measures, notwithstanding its hostility to them, because it was in the midst of an existential crisis, weakened by the war, shaken by the upsurge in working-class anger, and terrified by the spread of socialism in Eastern Europe. With the subsequent consolidation of its position, however, its hostility to welfare state measures manifested itself openly.

THERE are two defining and portentous features of the current world economic situation. One, which is well discussed, is the world-wide increase in interest rates in response to the pervasive inflationary upsurge; it would indubitably generate recession and unemployment, which, notwithstanding all protestations to the contrary, is the real objective behind it.