Monthly Review of the Economy - April 2022

FEMA amended to allow 20 per cent FDI limit in LIC: The government has amended the rules of the Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA), paving the way for up to 20 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the insurance behemoth, the Life Insurance Corporation (LIC). [...] The capacity utilisation for the manufacturing sector has been picking up since the first quarter of 2021-22, rising to 72.4 per cent in Q3 2021-22 from 68.3 per cent in the previous quarter, indicating an improvement in manufacturing activities (Figure 3). [...] The GST collection touched an all-time high in March 2022, with the total collection amounting to Rs 14.2 billion, 6.7 per cent higher than the collection in February 2022, and 15 per cent higher than the collection in March 2021 (Figure 6B). [...] The scaling of colours has been done from red to yellow to green, wherein the colour shade for a particular month represents the percentile rank of the value for the variable, with red being the lowest, bright yellow representing the 50th percentile, and green being the highest. [...] In the US, headline inflation jumped to 8.5 per cent in March 2022 vis-à-vis March 2021, signifying the sharpest jump in the last four decades.