We discuss the changes in the new 2011-12 base year series of the Index of Industrial Production (IIP) to ask, whether the new series has improved our understanding of the growth in the manufacturing sector. We develop a simple framework to separately estimate the contribution of value and volume based commodities in the growth of the manufacturing index. We find that growth in value based commodities contributes significantly in moving the index in either direction and that high growth in value based commodities coincides with periods of low inflation. Findings also show that movements in the IIP Index are increasingly influenced by the trends of WPI as growth in value based commodities may inflate or become subdued, given the fall or rise in the WPI index. As a case study of value based commodities, we compare the trends of IIP (Pharmaceuticals) and real Net Sales of firms in the pharmaceuticals sector. Our findings show that real Net Sales and IIP have contrasting trends. Such divergent trends between two measures of industrial activity raise crucial questions on the representativeness of the IIP.

We use a sample survey based experiment to estimate the effect of simplified life insurance disclosures. We randomise survey respondents into one of four product advertisements: 1) a baseline product with no additional disclosure; 2) disclosure of the actual rate of return on the product; 3) disclosure of the rate of return and a benchmark return of a similar product; and 4) the rate of return, benchmark return and product features of a more cost-effective competing product. We test if these incremental disclosures affect customer views of the product, and the intention to purchase. We find that relative to the baseline treatment, only treatment 2 had an effect on product perceptions. Treatments which show additional data did not have a differential effect relative to the baseline treatment. None of the treatments had any impact on the intention to purchase.

Abstract: The study presents an analysis of results of a laboratory experiment, conducted in 2015 to assess compliance behaviour in India. The experiment evaluates responses of 133 participants, to changes in key policy instruments like tax rate, penalty rate and audit probability. We find that changes in policy parameters generate varied responses across taxpayers. Audit probability is the only policy instrument that generates relatively consistent response. Further, the results show that individuals can be divided into those who respond to change in audit probability and those who respond to other policy variables, suggesting that no single policy would be adequate to induce suitable behavioural changes in all taxpayers.

Keywords: tax compliance, laboratory experiment, audit probability, tax rate, penalty, exemption threshold, stigma

JEL Classification Codes: H26, H3, C91

This paper analyses the performance of India’s Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) using measures of labour and overall efficiency and productivity indicators as opposed to financial returns. Using methods that correct for selection bias, the results show that performance contracts do not improve firm efficiency but disinvestment has a very strong positive effect on firm efficiency. Disinvestment improves labour productivity and efficiency, which is not surprising, but it also improves overall efficiency. India should pursue much bolder privatization even of PSUs which claim to be making operational profits – such as Air India, because privatization improves overall firm efficiency and unlocks capital for use elsewhere, especially in public infrastructure, and reduces the possibility of political interference in their functioning in future.

This paper derives the solution to differential games, when there are four sets of players, namely – two political parties (politicians), voters and a special interest group. The basic results are similar as Lambertini(2001, 2014). We find that, an open-loop equilibrium collapses to a closed-loop equilibrium. Therefore, the open-loop equilibrium is a sub-game perfect. Further, the private optimum is always higher than the social optimum in terms of the provision of the expenditure on public good. That is, if both the parties have access to public expenditure for the provision of the expenditure on public good they have the tendency to overspend and can incur higher deficits. Consequently, voters vote retrospectively to the party which overspend and results in higher fiscal deficits. Similarly, a larger private optimal regulatory benefit helps the political parties to receive higher financial contribution. Overall, the fiscal deficit in excess of certain level of threshold can create higher cost to the voters and hence the economy as the future tax and this is more so in the presence of special interest group.

The present study assesses the public procurement system and recent reform initiatives in India and outlines the need for changes in the institutional frameworks. There are several issues in the public procurement activities in India, which stem from fragmented procedures and rules, lack of transparency, widespread irregularities, and unavailability of sufficient procurement professionals. The recent initiatives to establish a consistent and transparent public procurement system have not yielded the desired results. The emergence of the practice of e-procurement as a vital tool in integrating the public service delivery and good governance, however, shows some forward movement towards a transparent, accountable, and competitive procurement regime. Although General Financial Rules (GFRs) and other procurement manuals are exhaustive in nature, these need to be backed by legislative power.

The prime objective of the paper is to construct a robust macroeconomic performance (MEP) index of India using Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) approach. Six major macro indicators, namely, economic growth, employment rate, terms of trade, inflation rate, fiscal deficit, and pollution are used to computeMEP and Eco-MEP index of the Indian economy from 1980-81 to 2015-16. Overall, both the MEP and Eco-MEP index scores have quite similar best performing years, worst performing years, and have also captured the major events that adversely affected the economy during the last 35 years. This shows that the trend in overall performance of Indian economy was better in the 1980s and the 1990s but has deteriorated after the 2000s. The ARDL Bounds Testing approaches to cointegration methods are used to test the robustness/utility of these indices. The estimated results find that MEP and Eco-MEP have a positive impact on private investment, negative effect on current account deficit (CAD), and positive impact on foreign investment inflows (FIIs) and foreign direct investment (FDI). Hence, the suggested composite MEP index is stable, robust and truly captures the economic performance of India.

The existing studies on trade misinvoicing have focussed on the discrepancy in reported trade statistics between developing and developed countries. The estimates based on such methods rely on the assumption that developed countries report their trade statistics correctly. In this paper, we provide evidence that trade misinvoicing between developed countries is in fact large and any estimate based on such method may not provide an accurate representation of the dimensions of trade misinvoicing in the world. Further, there is need to develop a methodology by which one can attribute the misinvoicing to one or the other trade partner. To address this problem, we offer an alternative methodology. Since the exports of a country are necessarily imports of another country we use domestic factors to predict the export and import misinvoicing for a sample of large misinvoicers for the period 1990 to 2014. Such estimates allow us to establish whether the discrepancy can be attributed to the export or the import side for all countries. We find that the domestic factors better explain the export side, therefore, allowing us to estimate illicit flows through trade misinvocing using the export misinvoicing by all countries.

The literature on regional growth suggests that divergences in infrastructure is a major factor behind the wide and persistent regional growth imbalances in India. Using a state infrastructure-expenditure function, the paper examines the possible factors that determine infrastructure expenditure and its implication for regional imbalance in infrastructure creation across 14 major Indian states. We, in the present study, find that factors such as resource mobilization, per capita income, and population density may result in unequal infrastructure expenditure across states. We also find that factors such as more spending by the infrastructure-deficit states, political stability, and positive spatial dependence in infrastructure expenditure among states have a balancing effect on infrastructure creation across regions. These results suggest the need for augmenting the financial capacity of the infrastructure-deficit states and strengthening the positive spatial dependence among states through creation of interstate infrastructure networks (railways, national highways etc.) and conducive investment climate, which could boost competition among states for better infrastructure creation.

Under the Constitution of India, for a bill to be enacted into a law, it has to be approved by both Houses of the Parliament - the Lower House (Lok Sabha) and the Upper House (Rajya Sabha). There is one exception to this general rule. A bill certified as a 'money bill' by the speaker of the Lower House can be enacted into a law by the Lower House alone, without any approval from the Upper House.

Budget 2017-18 was presented at the time when the global situation is inhospitable, marked with protectionism and domestic environment is constrained by the twin balance sheet crisis. The investment climate is further jeopardised by the note ban.  There was a great deal of expectations on the budget this year to create a policy environment to kick-start the virtuous investment cycle in the economy.  However, this budget has turned out to be a mere ‘business as usual’ budget.  While it does well to be prudent in containing the deficits, it fails to address the critical issue of accelerating investment and employment.  The capital expenditure as a ratio of GDP is static and the clean-up of tax preferences, as promised, to reduce the corporate tax rates is yet to be initiated.   The Finance Minister has lost the opportunity to prune the exemption list and align the excise duty rates in preparation to the GST implementation.  Finally, the measures to reduce cash donations and the introduction of bonds to political parties is cosmetic and is not likely to have any impact on cleaning up political funding as long as anonymity of donors is assured.

The paper examines the medium-term fiscal policy (MTFP) and a more conventional medium-term expenditure framework (MTEF) adopted in India under the provisions of the fiscal rules. The MTFP and the MTEF, professed to improve fiscal discipline in the context of fiscal rules, did not promote a multi-year budget planning process. The abolition of the five-year development planning process and the subsequent decision to remove plan and non-plan distinction from budget classification created a void with regard to the budget planning. This has necessitated developing a revamped fiscal architecture in the form of a medium-term framework to widen the short horizon of the annual budgeting exercise. The paper makes a case for developing structured medium-term budgeting framework (MTBF) building on the existing institutional framework both at the Central and at the subnational level and subsequently incorporating performance indicators in sector strategies. 

Demonetisation of INR 500 and INR 1,000 notes in India on November 8, 2016 is different from many other countries’ scrapping of high value notes in two respects – the withdrawal of their legal tender status and continuation with INR 1,000 and INR 2,000 notes. It has resulted in a cash shortage. Non-cash medium of payments may be encouraged by this shortage, but, with supplies only from the domestic currency presses, the shortage is unlikely to disappear by the end of 2016. Import of currency printed abroad may provide a solution for ending it sooner. The impact of the shortage, if it continues, will be fully felt in the last quarter of 2016-17. Its growth impact in 2016-17 is 0.7-1.3 per cent depending on how much shortage continues and for how long. The big painful jolt of demonetisation creates the right psychological milieu for the war against black money to start. Only Time will tell whether steps such as the Income Declaration Scheme (IDS) in the Budget for 2016-17, the August 2016 amendment of the Benami Transactions (Prohibition) Act of 1988, and the Taxation Laws (Second Amendment) in November 2016, are parts of a concerted plan for tackling black money, and this time is different from 1946 and 1978. With the strides made in digitisation of tax returns and bank records together with PAN, Aadhar and KYC regulations, compared to 6 per cent in 1946 and 11 per cent in 1978, at least 15 per cent or INR 2.2 trillion of the demonetised notes not exchanged into deposits or cash will provide a preliminary positive feedback on the success of the current demonetisation.

Recent evidence on the impact of the recommendations of the Fourteenth Finance Commission (FFC) suggests that there has been an increase in Central transfers and social sector expenditures in a number of States in 2015-16, the first year of the FFC award period. We argue that the evidence on gains through Central transfers and increases in social sector expenditures is biased upwards because of two factors. First, much of the gains have been measured with respect to a low base year, and secondly, inferences have been drawn based on comparisons between Actuals and Revised Estimates or Revised Estimates and Budget Estimates. Comparing Revised Estimates for the same years for fifteen major States, we find that Central transfers and expenditures on Social Services as per cent of Gross State Domestic Product (GSDP) are likely to fall in a number of States. Besides, in most States, Social Services have received a lower priority than Economic Services in the first year of the FFC award period.

The argument posited in favour of demonetisation is that the cash that would be extinguished would be “black money” and hence, should be rightfully extinguished to set right the perverse incentive structure in the economy. While the facts are not available to anybody, it would be foolhardy to argue that this is the only possibility. Therefore, it is imperative to evaluate the short run and medium-term impacts that such a shock is expected to have on the economy. Further, the impact of such a move would vary depending on the extent to which the government decides to remonetise. This paper elucidates the impact of such a move on the availability of credit, spending, level of activity and government finances.

Conventional wisdom suggests that, to negate fiscal externalities imposed by provinces which spend too much and raise lower local resources, central authority should always be a first mover in the transfer game. In spite of such recommendations, central governments, in almost all countries, chooses to be the second mover from time to time. We explore the conditions, other than the familiar political economy arguments, under which the central government optimally chooses to be the second mover. Moreover, ex post transfer protocols may induce provinces to generate more local resources than otherwise. The results depend crucially upon the benefit received by each level of government from the project outcomes of other tier.

Over the last decade, there have been vast improvements in surveillance technology and the availability, storage, and mining of personal information online, supported by developments in big data analytics. This has created a public policy conundrum over balancing the benefits of big data with the threat to the right to privacy. In an environment of pervasive surveillance and intrusive technology, there is a need for improved protection of privacy rights through a mixture of legislation and regulation, and building public awareness and demand for safeguards. This paper makes a case for the need for privacy from both the State and the private sector, examines the jurisprudential development of the right to privacy in India, and lays down privacy principles, that will underlie any proposed privacy law. It then evaluates the Indian IT Act, and the recently legislated Aadhaar Act, against the proposed privacy principles.

The Public Debt Management Agency (PDMA) is a body that issues public debt with the objective of keeping long term costs of government borrowing low. In India, the existing legal framework obliges the government to give the task of managing its debt to the RBI. Pursuant to its role as debt manager, RBI set up market infrastructure such as an exchange and a depository. Carve-outs were made in the regulation of securities, to allow the RBI to regulate the bond market. Over the last 20 years, the proposal to establish an independent PDMA has been repeatedly put forward. In this paper, we work out the legal strategy to set up a PDMA. We show the transition path for the roll out and for the movement of the functions, accounts, records and systems to the new agency in a phased manner.

The objectives of monetary policy have always been a topic of intensive debate. This debate has resurfaced during the past few years. In India too monetary policy-making appears to have undergone significant change during the last two decades and has also been responding to changing macroeconomic environment. Against this backdrop an attempt has been made in this paper to model the monetary policy response function for India, for the period April 1996 to July 2015. Using 91-day Treasury bill rate as the policy rate, we find that the monetary policy has been responsive to inflation rate, output gap and exchange rate changes during this period. We find substantial time-varying behavior in the reaction function. The regime shift tests show that the transition is driven by inflation gap as well as exchange rate changes. Highly complex nature of dynamics of interest rate does not allow us to estimate many models, but the models estimated show that the monetary policy responds to inflation gap as well as exchange rate changes. Another important finding is that there is a high degree of inertia in the policy rates.

This paper presents a chronology of Indian business cycle in the post-reform period. The period before reforms primarily saw monsoon cycles. We find three episodes of recession in the post-reform period: 1999Q4 to 2003Q1, 2007Q2 to 2009Q3, and 2011Q2 to 2012Q4. We find that the average duration of expansion is 12 quarters and the average duration of recession is 9 quarters. The diversity in duration of expansion is seen to be 0.34 while the diversity in duration of recession is 0.31. We find that the amplitude of recession is relatively more diverse at 0.45 while the diversity in amplitude of expansion is 0.38.

We use an audit methodology where auditors ask for tax-saving instruments from banks and document the disclosures made on product features at the time of sale. In private sector banks with high sales incentives, the high commission product is recommended. In public sector banks, where there are deposit mobilisation targets, fixed deposits are recommended. Banks rarely make voluntary disclosures on product features. When specifically requested, information provided is inaccurate or incomplete. Our results demonstrate the challenges of mandating disclosures when buyers have little understanding of the relevance of product characteristics, and distributors are themselves ignorant or influenced by incentives.

How does supply chain distortion affect food inflation in India? During the recent episode of persistently high food inflation in India, the role of rent seeking activities of food suppliers emerged as the centre of debate in the country. The rent seeking activities of agents in both wholesale and retail marketing of food, catered by the lack of a competitive food market and required infrastructure, often causes large positive shocks to mark ups. This paper estimates the contribution of these mark-up shocks at both wholesale and retail level, in food inflation, an issue unexplored in the literature till date. The study finds moderate but significant pass through of mark-up shocks in food inflation after controlling for other factors. The duration of the transmission effect depends on the origin of the shock in wholesale market, while the effect seems to last for five months in retail food inflation. In the backdrop of advocated competitive national market for food commodities to promote greater competition and stabilise large shocks to mark ups, this paper contributes towards understanding the extent to which stabilisation of mark-up shocks can lower wholesale and retail food inflation in the country.

In this paper, we discuss some of the methodological issues involved in the computation of value addition in the manufacturing sector. We deal with (i) problems of blow-up of estimates (ii) choice of indicators in measuring output, and (iii) a possible misclassification of companies in the MCA21 database that can distort the GVA estimates. A sample based blow-up exercise shows that Paid-Up Capital and GVA contribution of firms have no one-to-one correspondence and the method can lead to overestimation of value addition. We construct an alternate method of blow-up by using representative industry GVA growth rates to scale up previous GVA estimates to account for data of unavailable companies. We show that a potential misclassification of companies in the MCA21 can also lead to significant distortion in GVA estimates.

This paper examines the link between quality of governance, public expenditure and human development outcomes in the state of Madhya Pradesh. The role of Governance is measured in dimensions: Political, Legal & Judicial, Administrative, Economic and Social. A total of 22 indicators have been used to measure the Governance Index (GI) of Madhya Pradesh at district level.  The results in this paper suggest that, at district level, development expenditure alone is not sufficient in achieving human development outcomes. However, the effectiveness of public expenditures improves with better governance indicators. In addition, GI is found to be significant and positive in improving development outcomes. Among the governance dimensions, weak administrative index appears to be the main constraint in improving the human development outcomes in less developed districts. Disaggregated analysis suggests that the districts with lower human development achievements need to prioritize only in one or two dimensions of governance, in particular administrative governance. Prioritization of various or specific dimensions of governance should help in reducing the divergences in development outcomes across the districts. The findings of this paper are very important as they suggest that public expenditure efficiency depends on the quality of governance. Hence, there is a need to equally focus, both, on improving governance as well as on increasing development expenditures.  In the context of achieving SDGs and with the lessons learnt from MDGs, the findings of the paper suggest that we should focus on policy both at the sub-national and sub-state level.

The paper presents a model for tax compliance based on prospect theory wherein an individual makes the decision whether to file, and declare a certain amount of income, or to not file based on a set of policy parameters as well as his/her preferences. The paper poses the question - at what incomes would individuals choose to file a return and answers the same using a model based on prospect theory. Further, simulations are presented to illustrate the impact of changes in tax rates, penalty and audit probability on the individual’s preference to file. The results from the simulation show that for different values of policy parameters there exists crossover income at which individuals would choose to file a return. Given all else, at the exemption threshold of 0.1 million, individuals would choose to file a return at incomes greater than or equal to 0.6 million. 

We assess the motivations for changing capital controls and their effectiveness in India, a country where there is a comprehensive capital control system covering all cross-border transactions. We focus on foreign borrowing by firms, where systemic risk concerns could potentially play a role. A novel fine-grained data set of capital control actions is constructed. We find that capital control actions are potentially motivated by exchange rate considerations, but not by systemic risk issues. A quasi-experimental design reveals that the actions appear to have no impact either on the exchange rate or on variables connected with systemic risk.

The Sustainable Development Goals - SDGs with 17 goals and 169 targets were adopted by world leaders in September, 2015. This paper argues that if the world had problems monitoring the MDGs - with 8 goals and 21 targets, it will find it impossible to track the SDGs. It recommends focusing on 60 highest priority targets. It also highlights the synergies and trade-offs among the various goals - especially between growth, inequality and sustainability which countries and the world will have to navigate. The Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA), ostensibly, the financing plan for the SDGs widens the scope of development financing to include private and domestic financing - moving from billions to trillions. But such an approach also dilutes global responsibility for development and climate financing. The paper suggests an evaluation framework for assessing the AAAA and ensuring that the synergies among the SDGs are exploited and the trade-offs confronted. The paper suggests a pathways approach with concurrent evaluation every five years to assess and adjust programmes and policies. 

Government of India proposes to reduce the number of tax incentives built into the corporate tax regime and alongside reduce the statutory tax rate on corporate tax to 25 percent. Beneficiaries of the incentive regime tend to argue that these regimes provide tangible benefits which induce higher level of activity within the economy and hence, phasing these out can be detrimental for the Indian economy. An attempt is made in this paper to briefly assess what can be inferred from available evidence on the effectiveness of the incentive regimes. The focus is on three such schemes, incentives provided for investment in backward areas, incentives for special economic zones and incentives provided for expenditure on research and development. 

There is a core concept of good governance, the combination of authority and responsibility to pursue the common good that goes back over millennia in different geographies around the world. Based on a contemporary interpretation of this concept, the paper develops a measure of the quality of governance as service delivery. This measure is applied to rate and rank the governance performance of major states in India in 2001-02 and 2011-12. The governance measure has been derived from the three main pillars of the government, i.e., the legislature, the judiciary and, especially, the executive. These pillars are represented by five dimensions: infrastructure services; social services; fiscal performance; justice, law & order; and quality of the legislature. Performance on each dimension of governance has been measured using indicators that are based exclusively on official factual data, not perceptions or opinions drawn from unrepresentative samples. The results show considerable stability of the cluster of high performing and low performing governments at the top and the bottom of governance rankings over the period analysed, though there are also some interesting dynamics of change. The paper also presents a second set of results that correct for the strong correlation between governance quality and the level of development. When we correct for the effect of development on the quality of governance, it turns out that some of the poorer states significantly improve their rank, implying their governance performance is much better than would be expected at their level of development.

Using the method of optimal control, when an incumbent politician derives utility from voting support and dis-utility from budgetary deficit, the equilibrium time paths of both voting support and budgetary deficit are characterized in a finite time horizon under complete information. The incumbent politician may be an opportunist, in that she/ he is interested in garnering votes for herself/ himself, and manipulates budgetary deficit to achieve this, or else she/ he may be partisan, that is, characterized by heterogeneous preferences, reflecting preferences for specific economic policies. The citizen-voters vote for the opportunist as well as the partisan incumbent. However, they reject the same when there is a sufficiently strong anti-incumbency in the opportunist case. The level of voting support obtained in case of both opportunist and partisan is found to be positive and rising over time, but running the budgetary deficit will be costlier for the economy in the former case than the latter. That is, per unit votes garnered by raising the budgetary deficit as compared to the benchmark deficit are lower when the incumbent is an opportunist than when she/ he is partisan.

Against the backdrop of the recent Mines and Minerals Development and Regulation (MMDR) Amendment Bill 2015, this paper examines the political economy of State-business relations in mining sector, in the two newly-formed States in India, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. It is important to note that the two States have low income despite being resource-rich.. Analyzing the legal fiats (State Reorganisation Acts and Fiscal Responsibility Acts), it was revealed that the formation of new States has not created any distinct fiscal agency in the extractive sector. The States – both parent and the new States – have adjusted their deficits to conform to the fiscal rules (FRBM Act) stipulated by the Centre; and these States have revenue surplus – not deficits - ex-post to the enactment of fiscal rules. The new States have insignificant share of mining proceeds in their State exchequer, around 10 per cent of the revenue receipts. Though nebulous estimates from fresh mining e-auction proceeds are on board, ambiguity remains how the newly-generated fiscal space would resolve resource curse. The use of fiscal proceeds from mining is difficult to map as it is not yet earmarked for redressing socio-economic inequalities of mining districts. However, the new MMDR Bill 2015 stipulates that District Mineral Fund (DMF) would be created in mining districts to link the proceeds to human development. Despite the data paucity, based on our analysis we caution that the road map of forthcoming DMF to plough back a portion of royalty and fresh e-auction mining proceeds exclusively to the mining districts may exacerbate spatial inequalities.

Macroeconomic analysis benefits from seasonal adjustment. Month- on-month changes of economic time series yield faster information about developments in the economy, but the values have exaggerated variance when annual seasonality is present. In this paper, we show the full process for seasonal adjustment for four important Indian time-series. We find that significant reductions of variance are obtained by using black box seasonal adjustment, at the risk of failure for some time series. Thorough knowledge about seasonal adjustment yields more reliable answers, and a roughly 15% improvement in the volatility of month-on-month changes.

Growth in India declined in the post financial crisis years both due to external and domestic factors. While the slowdown appears to be largely cyclical, it is possible that trend growth may also have been affected especially by negative shocks from the domestic policy environment. In this paper, we analyze the sources of output growth in the past three decades and discuss the outlook going forward. We make projections for the growth of factors of production and the growth of trend GDP per worker for the period 2013-2030. In general, the outlook for factors appears strong. As long as policy reforms support the broad environment for investment in infrastructure and in education and eliminate frictions in the efficient use of labor and capital, all of which can also boost productivity, it does not appear that trend growth is likely to decline in the future.