We examine how the source of foreign aid affects the composition of the recipient government's spending. Does the source of aid--bilateral or multilateral--influence recipient policy-makers' choice between development and nondevelopment expenditure? We depart from previous literature by...

This paper underscores the substantial spatial disparities across India and evaluates the case for putting together (various versions) of the Goods and Service Tax (GST) and also indicates the risks involved in the process. This paper argues that, on balance, there is a case for an appropriately...

Revenue generation is an important goal of tax reform. The built-in responsiveness of revenues to changes in income, tax elasticity, provides very critical information for tax policy formulation. This paper utilises a time series approach to empirically estimate tax elasticities for India for...

This paper reviews the status of rural and urban local governments in India. The focus is on the recent constitutional reforms that strengthen local government, (including subsequent supporting legislation), and the implications for changing local government to achieve more effective delivery of...

A subset of the costs (and benefits) of sub-national fiscal autonomy in federations is examined, with the major focus being road check-posts. The examination is done with reference to Indian states and using elementary, partial equilibrium, diagrammatic analysis. Empirical analyses of the...

By providing a conducive policy environment in the early days, the Government tried to build a base for the fertilizer industry by encouraging fertilizer products' consumption and distribution. But all these caused a high cost on Government as the subsidy out goes to the sector was mounting....

In this paper we bring out the performance of the Indian economy, and review the approach of macroeconomic policy especially demand management in the Indian economy. After the shock of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), India’s economy did not dip much due to the well-directed fiscal stimulus...

The situation prior to the COVID, as brought out in Morris, Sebastian (2020), was problematic with major slowdown and heightened uncertainty in the financial sector in the last year before the Crisis. The response of the RBI, free from its conservative shackles, now followed the US into...

This paper examines varies areas of India´s fiscal policy, in particular fiscal discipline, the structure of government spending, the tax system and fiscal federalism. It describes reforms over the past decades which, as part of the overall economic reform agenda, helped lifting the Indian...