Former International Monetary Fund chief economist Raghuram Rajan has been appointed the chief economic advisor in the Ministry of Finance. The Appointments Committee of the Cabinet approved his name on Friday, a finance ministry official said. Rajan succeeds Kaushik Basu, who would return to a professorship at Cornell University in the US.
Rajan, the Eric J Gleacher Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, would join the finance ministry at a time when the economy is going through a difficult phase, with high inflation and interest rates, slowing growth, declining industrial production, muted tax collections and wide fiscal deficit.