By Udaibir Das

Absa and OMFIF have given Africa a decade of disciplined comparison. The next task is to make the consequences of reform equally visible. A country should be able to name an investment that happened because its market improved. Success is not more capital entering markets. It is more productive investment, financed without greater fragility. That is financial sovereignty on the ground.

By Udaibir Das

Policy-makers cannot prevent every shock, but they can influence how prepared the economy is to deal with them, by reducing exposures, protecting essential functions and preserving policy room. Asia built its first generation of financial defenses after a crisis. It should build the second before the next.

By Udaibir Das

The new financial order may be more fluid, but it will place heavier demands on its foundations. Innovation will not make sovereignty obsolete. It will raise the value of credible sovereignty, and the cost of trying to preserve it without credible institutions.

By Udaibir Das

Can capital take on purpose without money losing the fungibility on which markets depend? The question must be asked while the machinery is still being chosen.

By Udaibir Das

Technology changes the form of money. The institution behind the promise still sets its quality.

By Udaibir Das

Two decades of relief and reform treated debt management as a capacity problem. In a low-income country, it is statecraft; the office must stand as an institution of the state, mandated, autonomous and accountable. Reforming it and holding the sovereign and parliament accountable for outcomes means the debt cycle finally has a circuit breaker.

By Udaibir Das

If the governor is the last port of call, choosing one is not a staffing decision. The question is no longer who is senior or who is loyal, but who can fight a fire, who can say no and whose word the market will trust at three in the morning. Independence can be hollowed without being repealed. The clause reads perfectly while the substance is gone.

By Udaibir Das

Drawing on the public sector balance sheet literature, the economics of sovereign self-insurance, and the Knightian distinction between risk and uncertainty, this paper argues that conventional sovereign asset-liability management is necessary but incomplete.

By Udaibir Das

More moves of this kind should be expected, extending beyond energy into critical minerals, technology standards, industrial policy, and cross-border finance. The UAE’s decision is not an outlier. It is a marker — not of fragmentation, but of redefinition.

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 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 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 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 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.