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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | The mistaken obsession with the fiscal deficit -CP Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

The mistaken obsession with the fiscal deficit -CP Chandrasekhar and Jayati Ghosh

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published Published on Jan 31, 2019   modified Modified on Jan 31, 2019
-Networkideas.org

It’s that time of year again – the time when all eyes turn to those magic numbers, the actual and proposed fiscal deficits of the central government as shares of GDP. Breathless news anchors will interrogate financial investors on what the numbers mean, and why 3.5 per cent or 3.7 per cent is fatally worse than, say, 3.4 per cent or 3.2 per cent or less. Everyone will breathe a sigh of relief if the Finance Minister achieves his fiscal targets, while there will be gloom, doom and concern if the government is found to have overstepped.

All this scrutiny presupposes that the numbers the government generates for the Budget are an accurate description of actual spending and revenue collection, and that it has estimated the likely GDP more or less correctly. But suppose none of this is true? Suppose both the revenue and expenditure statistics are fudged, and give no real indication of the fiscal or revenue deficit?

This is essentially what a damning report from the CAG suggests. The Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General of India on Compliance of the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, 2003 for the year 2016-17 (Report No 20 of 2018) says that the central government overstates its receipts and understates its expenditures. In effect, its fiscal and revenue deficits are both much larger than what is presented in the Union Budget.

To start with, there is the problem that the Budget documents differ from the Annual Financial Statement (a statement of receipts and expenditure) laid before both the Houses of Parliament in compliance with Article 112(1) of the Constitution. Figure 1 shows that this has varied dramatically in some years like 2015-16 – something that the government has sought to explain on the grounds that “fiscally neutral” non-cash transactions have been netted out.

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Networkideas.org, 29 January, 2019, http://www.networkideas.org/featured-articles/2019/01/the-mistaken-obsession-with-the-fiscal-deficit/?fbclid=IwAR3yDJ7KTSGiH8UXtFbYxQKcqteCfCz46MzJqIY-MJiSO9sJHQX7T


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