IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ehl/lserod/20722.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Budgetary aspects of stabilization and structural adjustment in India: the painful road to a sustainable fiscal-financial-monetary plan

Author

Listed:
  • Buiter, Willem H.
  • Patel, U.

Abstract

This study updates and extends to the period 88/89-92-93 our earlier analysis of the public finances of India. With the collapse of the communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, India found itself, by early 1991, in the unenviable position of having possibly the most over-regulated economic system in the world. In addition, there had been, during the eighties, a break with India''s long tradition of fiscal prudence. Following the foreign exchange crisis of 1991, the government implemented a package of restrictive fiscal and monetary measures and a, by Indian standards, ambitious program of structural adjustment and reform of the Union budget, of regulation and licensing, of the domestic financial sector and of international trade and international financial relations. As regards the magnitude of the fiscal corrections that were undertaken, our conclusion is that it was insufficient. Continuations of past and present expenditure and revenue patterns would result in a steady increase in the public debt-GDP ratio and in the discounted value of the public debt. Inflationary financing of the "primary" gap is not a viable option. We calculate that a further permanent increase in the public surplus of about four and a half points of GDP is needed to achieve the modest objective of stabilizing the public debt-GDP ratio. On the reverse side, this necessary increase in the primary surplus is best achieved by expanding the direct and indirect tax bases and improving tax administration, collection and enforcement. On the expenditure side, reductions in the general government wage bill (by reductions in employment rather than by public sector wage cuts), in fertilizer subsidies, in some (but not all) food subsidies and in operating and capital subsidies to public sector enterprises are recommended. For efficiency reasons and to support the proposed expenditure cuts, overwhelming majority of the public sector enterprises should be cut off from the further government subsidies and be privatized or corporatized.

Suggested Citation

  • Buiter, Willem H. & Patel, U., 1995. "Budgetary aspects of stabilization and structural adjustment in India: the painful road to a sustainable fiscal-financial-monetary plan," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 20722, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    • Handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:20722
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/20722/
    File Function: Open access version.
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kwiatkowski, Denis & Phillips, Peter C. B. & Schmidt, Peter & Shin, Yongcheol, 1992. "Testing the null hypothesis of stationarity against the alternative of a unit root : How sure are we that economic time series have a unit root?," Journal of Econometrics, Elsevier, vol. 54(1-3), pages 159-178.
    2. Phillips, Peter C B, 1988. "Regression Theory for Near-Integrated Time Series," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(5), pages 1021-1043, September.
    3. Buiter, W.H. & Corsetti, G. & Roubini, N., 1992. "Excessive Deficits: Sense and Nonsence in the Treaty of Maastricht," Papers 674, Yale - Economic Growth Center.
    4. Diebold, Francis X. & Rudebusch, Glenn D., 1991. "On the power of Dickey-Fuller tests against fractional alternatives," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 35(2), pages 155-160, February.
    5. Missale, Alessandro & Blanchard, Olivier Jean, 1994. "The Debt Burden and Debt Maturity," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 84(1), pages 309-319, March.
    6. Dickey, David A & Fuller, Wayne A, 1981. "Likelihood Ratio Statistics for Autoregressive Time Series with a Unit Root," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 49(4), pages 1057-1072, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Makrydakis, Stelios & Tzavalis, Elias & Balfoussias, Athanassios, 1998. "Policy regime changes and the long-run sustainability of fiscal policy: an application to Greece," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 71-86, January.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Derek Bond & Michael J. Harrison & Edward J. O'Brien, 2005. "Testing for Long Memory and Nonlinear Time Series: A Demand for Money Study," Trinity Economics Papers tep20021, Trinity College Dublin, Department of Economics.
    2. Marmol, Francesc, 1998. "Searching for fractional evidence using combined unit root tests," DES - Working Papers. Statistics and Econometrics. WS 10613, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Departamento de Estadística.
    3. Peter C. B. Phillips & Zhijie Xiao, 1998. "A Primer on Unit Root Testing," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 12(5), pages 423-470, December.
    4. Wang, Dabin & Tomek, William G., 2004. "Commodity Prices And Unit Root Tests," 2004 Annual meeting, August 1-4, Denver, CO 20141, American Agricultural Economics Association (New Name 2008: Agricultural and Applied Economics Association).
    5. María Dolores Gadea & Laura Mayoral, 2006. "The Persistence of Inflation in OECD Countries: A Fractionally Integrated Approach," International Journal of Central Banking, International Journal of Central Banking, vol. 2(1), March.
    6. Cunado, J. & Gil-Alana, L.A. & Gracia, Fernando Perez de, 2010. "Mean reversion in stock market prices: New evidence based on bull and bear markets," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 24(2), pages 113-122, June.
    7. John Barkoulas & Christopher F. Baum & Gurkan S. Oguz, 1996. "Fractional Cointegration Analysis of Long Term International Interest Rates," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 315., Boston College Department of Economics.
    8. Jan Babecký & Fabrizio Coricelli & Roman Horváth, 2009. "Assessing Inflation Persistence: Micro Evidence on an Inflation Targeting Economy," Czech Journal of Economics and Finance (Finance a uver), Charles University Prague, Faculty of Social Sciences, vol. 59(2), pages 102-127, June.
    9. Hu, Junjie & López Cabrera, Brenda & Melzer, Awdesch, 2021. "Advanced statistical learning on short term load process forecasting," IRTG 1792 Discussion Papers 2021-020, Humboldt University of Berlin, International Research Training Group 1792 "High Dimensional Nonstationary Time Series".
    10. Isabel Cortés-Jiménez & Manuel Artís, 2005. "The role of the tourism sector in economic development - Lessons from the Spanish experience," ERSA conference papers ersa05p488, European Regional Science Association.
    11. Philippe Andrade & Catherine Bruneau, 2002. "Excess returns, portfolio choices and exchange rate dynamics. The yen/dollar case, 1980–1998," Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, Department of Economics, University of Oxford, vol. 64(3), pages 233-256, July.
    12. Francis Ahking, 2003. "Efficient unit root tests of real exchange rates in the post-Bretton Woods era," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 6(7), pages 1-12.
    13. Wang, Peijie & Brand, Steven, 2015. "A new approach to estimating value–income ratios with income growth and time-varying yields," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 242(1), pages 182-187.
    14. Frédérique Bec & Mélika Ben Salem & Marine Carrasco, 2010. "Detecting Mean Reversion in Real Exchange Rates from a Multiple Regime star Model," Annals of Economics and Statistics, GENES, issue 99-100, pages 395-427.
    15. Pär Österholm, 2005. "The Taylor Rule: A Spurious Regression?," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 57(3), pages 217-247, July.
    16. Boris Hofmann, 2003. "Bank Lending and Property Prices: Some International Evidence," Working Papers 222003, Hong Kong Institute for Monetary Research.
    17. Garg, Bhavesh & Prabheesh, K.P., 2021. "Testing the intertemporal sustainability of current account in the presence of endogenous structural breaks: Evidence from the top deficit countries," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 97(C), pages 365-379.
    18. Pao, Hsiao-Tien & Fu, Hsin-Chia, 2013. "The causal relationship between energy resources and economic growth in Brazil," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 793-801.
    19. Hondroyiannis, George & Lolos, Sarantis & Papapetrou, Evangelia, 2005. "Financial markets and economic growth in Greece, 1986-1999," Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, Elsevier, vol. 15(2), pages 173-188, April.
    20. Kyritsis, Evangelos & Serletis, Apostolos, 2018. "The zero lower bound and market spillovers: Evidence from the G7 and Norway," Research in International Business and Finance, Elsevier, vol. 44(C), pages 100-123.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • F3 - International Economics - - International Finance
    • G3 - Financial Economics - - Corporate Finance and Governance

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ehl:lserod:20722. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: LSERO Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/lsepsuk.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.