The Narendra Modi government’s decision to appoint Arvind Subramanian, the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics as its Chief Economic Advisor (CEA) could give the Centre’s war on food inflation a key strategist as the CEA normally heads the Inter-Ministerial Group on inflation, if the Modi government decides to retain it. This group has not met since the exit of Dr. Raghuram Rajan last September despite inflation running high.
Mr. Subramanian has worked with the International Monetary Fund and the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) during the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations. He has taught at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government from 1999 to 2000 and at the Johns Hopkins’ School for Advanced International Studies from 2008 to 2010.
The UPA government had appointed him as a member of the Finance Minister’s Expert Group on the G20. Mr. Subramanian’s likely appointment as CEA comes even as he had critiqued Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s Budget as being optimistic on revenue targets and for failing to set deadlines for undertaking tax and subsidy reforms mentioned in the speech. He had also flagged non-transparency in the Budget’s fiscal accounting.
Mr. Subramanian’s book, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance, was published in September 2011. He also co-authored, Who Needs to Open the Capital Account? Another book titled, India’s Turn: Understanding the Economic Transformation, was published in 2008.
In 2011, he had sounded the alarm on China’s economic ascendance – his claim to fame in the world of economics for which Foreign Policy magazine included him in its world’s top 100 global thinkers for the year 2011.
Mr. Subramanian studied economics at St. Stephens College, Delhi. He obtained his MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and his M.Phil and D.Phil from Oxford University, UK.
