Deprecated (16384): The ArrayAccess methods will be removed in 4.0.0.Use getParam(), getData() and getQuery() instead. - /home/brlfuser/public_html/src/Controller/ArtileDetailController.php, line: 150
 You can disable deprecation warnings by setting `Error.errorLevel` to `E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED` in your config/app.php. [CORE/src/Core/functions.php, line 311]
Deprecated (16384): The ArrayAccess methods will be removed in 4.0.0.Use getParam(), getData() and getQuery() instead. - /home/brlfuser/public_html/src/Controller/ArtileDetailController.php, line: 151
 You can disable deprecation warnings by setting `Error.errorLevel` to `E_ALL & ~E_USER_DEPRECATED` in your config/app.php. [CORE/src/Core/functions.php, line 311]
Warning (512): Unable to emit headers. Headers sent in file=/home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php line=853 [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 48]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php:853) [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 148]
Warning (2): Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/brlfuser/public_html/vendor/cakephp/cakephp/src/Error/Debugger.php:853) [CORE/src/Http/ResponseEmitter.php, line 181]
LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Narendra Modi gets a stellar economic advisory panel but will he listen to it in an election year? -Seetha

Narendra Modi gets a stellar economic advisory panel but will he listen to it in an election year? -Seetha

Share this article Share this article
published Published on Sep 26, 2017   modified Modified on Sep 26, 2017
-Firstpost.com

So, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has got his three wise men and one wise woman to advise him on managing the economy. The Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PMEAC) has been revived with Bibek Debroy as chairman and Surjit Bhalla, Rathin Roy and Ashima Goyal as members. Ratan Watal, a career bureaucrat, will be member secretary.

No one can deny that it’s a great team with impeccable credentials, both as economists and as advocates of liberal economics. Along with Rajiv Kumar at NITI Aayog and Arvind Subramaniam and Sanjeev Sanyal in the finance ministry, this is probably the most pro-market economic management team of any government till now. (We’ll ignore, for now, the snide comments that support for liberal economics isn’t compatible with the support for demonetisation that Debroy, Bhalla and Kumar have voiced).

Debroy is pretty much an all-rounder, his work ranging from international trade to legal reforms for economic development. Bhalla isn’t just about obsession with interest rates; he has done a lot of work on poverty and inequality and is a strong votary of growth, rather than redistribution, as a solution to this twin problem. Roy trained as a development economist with significant work on inclusive development but has also developed a strong base in fiscal policy. He was economic advisor to the Thirteenth Finance Commission and, more recently, has been a member of the Seventh Pay Commission and the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Committee headed by N K Singh. Goyal has specialised in finance and monetary economics and has a very sound macro-economic base.

But what will this dream team do? And, if Narendra Modi managed for three years without an economic advisory council, why set up one now?

Though it’s a trifle hard to shush voices which say this is much ado about nothing, that it is just a cosmetic exercise to manage sentiment, the move is getting some guarded welcome.

Pronab Sen of the India Growth Centre, who spent many years in the Planning Commission, says a PMEAC is an important and necessary institution that provides the Prime Minister with an independent perspective on economic management than what he gets from within the government. “It is a valuable sounding board on economic issues,” he says.

Abheek Barua of HDFC Bank agrees that “the Prime Minister can do with these inputs but, at this stage, the critical issues are project implementation and building a set of projects that can absorb funds quickly and get off the ground.” Perhaps this is an independent perspective that the PMEAC can give.

Sen points out that earlier prime ministers had an economic adviser to the Prime Minister (Sukhamoy Chakravarty, Arjun Sengupta and Montek Singh Ahluwalia, for example, were advisers to Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi), but this institution fell by the wayside after that.

It was Atal Behari Vajpayee who introduced the institution of a PMEAC, setting up a 10-member one in August 1998, a few months after his government took charge. His PMEAC was far more ideologically diverse – liberals like I G Patel and Ashok Desai rubbed shoulders with the socialist-inclined P N Dhar and Arjun Sengupta. Manmohan Singh too set up a PMEAC headed by Suresh Tendulkar in the very first year of UPA-1 and did the same soon after UPA-2 took charge; this time C Rangarajan headed it.

Please click here to read more.

Firstpost.com, 26 September, 2017, http://www.firstpost.com/business/narendra-modi-gets-a-stellar-economic-advisory-panel-but-will-he-listen-to-it-in-an-election-year-4082413.html


Related Articles

 

Write Comments

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

Video Archives

Archives

share on Facebook
Twitter
RSS
Feedback
Read Later

Contact Form

Please enter security code
      Close