V Anantha Nageswaran may be named next chief economic adviser

Nageswaran is a visiting distinguished professor of economics at Krea University in Andhra Pradesh

By Vrishti Beniwal and Siddhartha Singh

Venkatraman Anantha Nageswaran, an academic and former executive with Credit Suisse Group AG and Julius Baer Group, has emerged as the frontrunner to be the chief economic adviser for India’s finance minister, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

An announcement on the decision, which hasn’t been finalised, could come as soon as this week, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public.

Nageswaran didn’t immediately reply to an email and calls to his office outside of business hours in India. A finance ministry spokesman couldn’t be immediately reached for comment.

If appointed, he would succeed Krishnamurthy Subramanian, who returned to academia at the end of his three-year tenure in December.

Asia’s third-largest economy is showing signs of gaining recovery momentum from the pandemic. While the nation is on track to grow at the world’s quickest pace, it has seen inequalities and unemployment rise, putting pressure on the government to address those concerns for sustainable growth.

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The new chief economic adviser will be expected to provide a recipe for high growth, while reviving investments and containing the budget gap. The role requires advising on key policy matters to the finance minister, as well as being the lead author of the Economic Survey -- the annual report card of the economy that gets tabled in Parliament ahead of the budget.

Previous advisers have used the platform to bounce off ideas before the public. Subramanian, for instance, used “Thalinomics” -- equivalent to The Economist’s Big Mac Index -- to show how prices for a plate of food moved. The post had also been held by former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and former central bank governor Raghuram Rajan.

Nageswaran is a visiting distinguished professor of economics at Krea University in India’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh. He got his doctorate in finance from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for his work on the empirical behaviour of exchange rates, and has worked as a part-time member of the Prime Minister’s economic advisory council between 2019 and 2021.

He recently wrote about the need to open educational institutions, saying the costs of closure exceeds covid-safety gains as the virus weakens. In a January 24 column in the Mint newspaper, Nageswaran wrote that the world faces risks including asset-price corrections and inflationary pressure from food and fuel.

He was also previously the global chief investment officer for Bank Julius Baer & Co., based in Singapore, until 2011.

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