By Udaibir Das
Fiscal space, financial space and institutional credibility are no longer separable policy domains. They are jointly binding constraints. The IMF flagships document their components but not the mechanism.
By Sujai Shivakumar, Hideki Tomoshige, and Jeffrey D. Bean
India is positioning itself as an increasingly important node in the global semiconductor ecosystem, building on its established strengths in chip design and deep pool of STEM talent. These efforts come at a time when global semiconductor supply chains remain highly concentrated, creating opportunities for India to contribute to diversification and resilience.
By Udaibir Das
Under conditions of armed conflict and state rupture, banking shifts away from decentralized intermediation towards directed, survival-orientated finance. Yet the policy conversation has concentrated on sanctions, commodities and trade — the institutional reorganization of banking under conflict remains less well examined.
By Udaibir Das
Adopted by the National People’s Congress in March 2026, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan does not treat finance as a supporting function for economic growth. It treats finance as a strategic instrument of technological capability.
By Dhruva Jaishankar
For countries around the world — whether allies, partners, or competitors of the United States — there are important and immediate questions of how much and to what degree they will accommodate, or hedge against, the United States’ new approach to the world.
By Udaibir Das
Fiscal space, financial space and institutional credibility are no longer separable policy domains. They are jointly binding constraints. The IMF flagships document their components but not the mechanism.
By Sujai Shivakumar, Hideki Tomoshige, and Jeffrey D. Bean
India is positioning itself as an increasingly important node in the global semiconductor ecosystem, building on its established strengths in chip design and deep pool of STEM talent. These efforts come at a time when global semiconductor supply chains remain highly concentrated, creating opportunities for India to contribute to diversification and resilience.
By Udaibir Das
Under conditions of armed conflict and state rupture, banking shifts away from decentralized intermediation towards directed, survival-orientated finance. Yet the policy conversation has concentrated on sanctions, commodities and trade — the institutional reorganization of banking under conflict remains less well examined.
By Udaibir Das
Adopted by the National People’s Congress in March 2026, China’s 15th Five-Year Plan does not treat finance as a supporting function for economic growth. It treats finance as a strategic instrument of technological capability.
By Dhruva Jaishankar
For countries around the world — whether allies, partners, or competitors of the United States — there are important and immediate questions of how much and to what degree they will accommodate, or hedge against, the United States’ new approach to the world.
By Andreas Kuehn
Technology alliances are emerging as the decisive arena of AI competition, where leadership depends less on model breakthroughs than on the global diffusion of trusted infrastructure, standards, and ecosystems.
By Udaibir Das
Africa’s debt story is usually told as a liability problem: too much debt, the wrong currency, the wrong creditor, the wrong maturity. Those issues matter. But long-run sustainability is a balance-sheet question: is borrowing being converted into assets that raise the repayment base?
By Benjamin Tkach and Vasabjit Banerjee
While India-Taiwan collaboration on submarine technology would represent a step change from pre-existing economic cooperation, improving domestic production capacity necessitates pursuing mutual gains wherever possible.
By Udaibir Das
Africa’s debt story is not about waiting for easier global money. It is about whether domestic financial systems can absorb sovereign risk without amplifying internal fragility – and whether policy space purchased at 10% to 13% builds assets that justify the cost.
By Piyush Verma
Energy need not be a constraint on India's AI ambitions. It can be a competitive advantage. Encouraging data-centre locations that reflect grid readiness and renewable availability can reduce system stress while improving reliability. Expanding frameworks for round-the-clock clean power supported by storage and flexible resources can ensure AI growth strengthens climate goals rather than complicates them.
By Dhruva Jaishankar
For both India and New Zealand, their trade agreement represents, more than anything else, a risk mitigation strategy. Concerned about over-dependence on China and the United States as both producers and consumers — and the failure of multilateral trade negotiations at the World Trade Organization — New Delhi and Wellington have opted to bet on each other and bring a modicum of certainty to an uncertain world.
By Udaibir Das
The current metrics of India–Africa economic diplomacy focused on mobilization volume, systematically fail along the diplomatic-financial chain. An integrated balance-sheet framework could realign these incentives through institutional capacity thresholds, end-use governance, and countercyclical safeguards, transforming diplomatic finance from a source of vulnerability into genuine development capital.
By Udaibir Das
For the first time in years, the Budget addresses not just who issues debt but also whether it actually trades afterwards. A new market-making framework for corporate bonds, accompanied by instruments that let investors take positions on bond performance without holding the bonds, marks a departure from India's longstanding focus on issuance while ignoring liquidity.
Edited Volume
By Dhruva Jaishankar, Anit Mukherjee, Anirban Sarma, Mannat Jaspal, Nilanjan Ghosh, and Sunaina Kumar
Editors: Sharon Stirling and Eszter Karacsony
Special Report No. 7
By Piyush Verma, Medha Prasanna, Caroline Arkalji, Erlijn Van Genuchten, and Siddharth Sharma
By Udaibir Das
Global financial institutions continue to frame the 2026 outlook for emerging markets through a familiar cyclical lens. The consensus assumes U.S. monetary easing, a softer dollar and a modest global slowdown will favor local-currency assets, credible disinflation paths and balance-sheet repair. This narrative is historically grounded and internally coherent. It is also increasingly insufficient.
By Medha Prasanna
Without intentional strategies to strengthen energy infrastructure, the Global South will remain largely a consumer of AI technologies.
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