By Dhruva Jaishankar
The new joint defense declaration between India and Australia articulated a more ambitious objective of defense industrial cooperation, including to “develop arrangements for advanced defense science and technology collaboration.” This may appear challenging, but India has made remarkable developments in its defense industrial capabilities over the past five years. These offer little-appreciated opportunities for many of its partners, including Australia.
By Dhruva Jaishankar
A world in which freedom of navigation or energy supplies can be imperiled by the actions of others will require more international partnerships. A consolidation of relations between the governments of India and New Zealand makes eminent sense in this context. While an FTA is a welcome development, it remains just one step toward what can be a much more broad-based and mutually-beneficial partnership.
By Piyush Verma and Andrei Covatariu
Much of the conversation in Geneva rightly focused on managing AI's growing energy demand. That work is essential, but it is only half the story. The larger opportunity lies in how AI can reduce energy use across industry, buildings, transport and power systems, while enabling greater integration of renewable energy.
By Vasabjit Banerjee
China evidently recognises the Calcutta Port System as an economic force multiplier for India’s economic power in the region. The Indian government has recently advanced several solutions, from modernisation to expansion of the port system. Yet, more needs to be done by the Indian government and private investors to strengthen the port system to ward off Chinese influence.
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
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.
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 Brian Webster, Alan Gelb, and Anit Mukherjee
Shifting the payment of social transfers from cash to direct deposit via bank or mobile money accounts can directly improve efficiency for governments and convenience for beneficiaries. It may also produce positive spillovers such as boosting financial inclusion and empowering women. But do these spillovers materialize, and under what circumstances?
By Udaibir Das
The Trevor Manuel G20 Africa Expert Panel Report reframes Africa’s constraints as a single system of mispricing, debt compression and governance asymmetry. Its proposals for refinancing, collective bargaining and International Monetary Fund quota reform mark the first coordinated attempt to shift power within the international financial architecture.
By Udaibir Das
Ubuntu economics does not invoke moral claims. It advances a structural argument: Africa’s demographic momentum, mineral endowments and ecological assets are central to global prosperity, and instability in the region imposes system-wide costs. The reform frameworks are now primarily in place. The question is whether the political and institutional conditions of 2026 permit their implementation.
By Udaibir Das
While stability prevails in institutional titles, resilience prevails in policy content. This shift influences the oversight and allocation of approximately $470tn in global financial assets. This has structural implications and affects public accountability.
By Udaibir Das
What began as a spread on a bond has become a spread across the sovereign balance sheet. The 2025 annual meetings have made clear that incremental adjustments will not suffice. Until new institutions and norms emerge, sovereigns will continue to pay in basis points and in ownership and discover that what the premium buys is not sovereignty, but postponement.
By Udaibir Das
In a climate emergency, redundancy might be precisely what resilience requires. The sovereignty premium is that insurance price. Whether it’s worth paying depends on how much autonomy matters versus efficiency – and whether choice exists at all.
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