Can flying geese-Gujarat, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu-Power India’s growth with stability?

State government performance is going to matter in the coming months of fiscal and economic stress. The national performance will depend in the near term, crucially, on how the better-performing states pull their weight. One criterion of state performance is the budget allocations for fiscal 2023-24 starting April 1st and the outlook on fiscal rectitude. […]

Indian Economy: Reading the Tea Leaves

In India, the Union government takes on a much broader fiscal mandate than is necessary. Some of this is driven by the constitutional allocation of tax mandates, which favor tax flows to the Union government. Nearly 20 per cent, on an average, of a state government’s revenue flows in a “waterfall arrangement” from the Centre […]

Budget Bounties 2023-24

Our garden is full of goodies come and get what you need. This is what Finance Minister Sitharaman conveyed to the people (and voters) of India in her 2023-24 budget speech. Adding to the ever deepening gift bag that the Modi administration has held out to voters since 2015, the budget not only slashed income […]

Saving Asia from Stalling Growth

Book Review The Connections World: The future of Asian Capitalism Author: Simon Commander & Saul Estrin Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pages: 253 Price: £74.99 The “Asia” that this book addresses spreads northwards across the Pacific Ocean from Indonesia till the borders of China, North Korea and Japan and westwards to Pakistan on the Indian Ocean, […]

Fiscal Options for Budget 2023-24

Between spending and saving, governments are generally better at the former. High growth comes with the advantage that government revenue expands and gets spent, as is happening this fiscal. But this is also habit forming. If growth tapers down – as is expected in FY 2024- cutting back government spending will be politically rocky just […]

Supreme Court Demonetisation Verdit & rBI’s autonomy

The dissenting, minority judgement of Supreme Court Justice Nagarathna, in the Writ Petition Vivek Narayan Sharma versus Union of India—popularly known as the demonetisation case—has regurgitated the vexed issue of whether the RBI is sufficiently autonomous and resilient in discharging its mandate. India is new to autonomous regulation. Autonomous regulators were a rarity till the […]

India vignettes from 2022 and beyond

2020 was the year of fear as COVID-19 decimated the economy and killed people–both rich and poor– seemingly. 2021 was the year of hope. The bite of the pandemic dulled, thanks to the massive vaccination program, ramped-up emergency medical facilities and the roll-out of special social protection measures like free cereals for 800 million citizens. […]

Indian Economy between A Rock and A Hard space

Growth is slowing in India. In July to September this year there were six major economies- Malaysia, Greece, Philippines, Israel, Colombia, Argentina (The Economist December 1) with growth higher than the 6.3 percent India achieved in the April to September quarter of this fiscal. Growth by year end is unlikely to be vastly different. Is […]

Monetary Policy needs a supportive fiscal Policy

The Reserve Bank of India has an impossible task. It must contain inflation without compromising growth, using four arrows in its quiver- setting domestic interest rates; managing liquidity; using its foreign exchange war chest to fight exchange rate volatility and the mandate to regulate banking operations-the last being an atypical central bank function. It can […]

Valuing Our Common Future

Ecologists and environmental economists’ scorn how superficially countries maintain their financial and national accounts. Amounts spent on building human skills, providing education, nutrition, safeguarding health, land, air and water quality or forests are classified as consumption expenditure in the national accounts, except for the associated construction and equipment purchased. Budgetary allocations in India for such […]

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