Democracy tends to cultivate short-sighted politicians, for whom the horizon extends more or less till next election. This feature gives rise to a discrepancy between the time rate of discount of a country’s polity and the interest rates at which the country borrows. I show how this...

The impact assessment of macroeconomic policies on public health expenditure is very relevant in Indian economy because of tax reform, fiscal consoli- dation, and expenditure policy reform. These have been undertaken after economic liberalization in order to sustain a high economic growth....

A fiscal shock due to a shift in taxes or in government spending will, at some point in time, constrain the future path of taxes and spending, since the government’s intertemporal budget constraint will eventually have to be met. This simple fact is surprisingly overlooked in analyses of the...