Research Topics

Gender budgeting is a public financial management (PFM) tool, used to ensure accountability mechanisms. The analysis of “process” indicators of gender-responsive PFM (GRPFM) reveals that India has been successful in integrating a gender lens within the budget cycle, including in the financial planning and allocation, and in effective implementation. However, a legally mandated GRPFM would be crucial for the sustained impact of gender budgeting on gender equality outcomes. The empirical analysis of the link between GRPFM and gender equality outcomes showed that flexibility of finances is crucial for a government to implement GRPFM. The unconditional fiscal transfers have relatively more impact on gender equality outcomes than conditional transfers. The plausible mechanism through which unconditional tax transfers impact gender equality outcomes lies in the flexibility of use of tax transfers by the subnational governments in prioritizing their gender-related commitments. This inference has policy implications for the 16th Finance Commission.

In this paper, we discuss the balance sheet mechanics of the Swedish government. We examine spending, government bond purchases, and tax payments. As long as the Swedish central bank, which is created through Swedish laws, supports the Swedish central government, it cannot run out of money. The Swedish government therefore plays a large role in the Swedish economy. It can and should target full employment and price stability, bringing to bear its fiscal power.

The policy evaluation is a crucial component in analyzing the efficacy of public spending in translating the money spent into desired outcomes. Using OECD evaluation criteria, we analyzed the child protection schemes of Odisha to understand whether legal commitments on child protection are translated into fiscal commitments. The intergovernmental fiscal transfers and state-targeted programs for children in need of care and protection (CNCP) and children in conflict of law (CCL) are evaluated using the OECD criteria of relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, and sustainability. Using the theory of change, various fiscal interventions for child protection are analyzed with activities, outputs, intended outcomes, and impacts. The analysis revealed that, in the post-pandemic fiscal strategy of Odisha, various programs have been designed by the government to tackle the capability deprivation, hardships, and vulnerabilities faced by children within the budgetary frameworks, and that these programs are made fiscally sustainable through public expenditure convergence within the classification of budgetary transactions. However, the low utilization ratios of the funds and the institutional constraints are identified as challenges in the effective implementation of child protection programs in Odisha. 

Modern Money Theory (MMT) has generated considerable scrutiny and discussions over the past decade. While it has gained some acceptance in the financial sector and among some politicians, it has come under strong criticisms from all sides of the academic spectrum and from conservative political circles. MMT has been argued to be both fascist and communist, orthodox and heterodox, dangerous and benign, unworkable and obvious, and unrealistic and clearly nothing new. The contradictory aspects of the range of criticisms suggest that there is at best a superficial understanding of the MMT framework. MMT relies on a well-established theoretical framework and is not inherently about changing the economic system; it is about changing the policymaking praxis to implement a given public purpose. That public purpose can be small or large and can be conservative or progressive; it ought not to be narrowly determined but rather should be set as democratically as possible. While MMT proponents tend to favor a public purpose that deals with what they see as major drawbacks of capitalist economies (persistent nonfrictional unemployment, unfair inequalities, and financial instability), their policy proposals do not lead to a major shift of domestic resources to the public purpose. If a major increase in government spending is implemented, MMT provides some guidance on how to do that in the least disruptive manner by drawing on past economic experiences. The point is to implement the public purpose at a pace that recognizes the potential constraint that comes from domestic resource availability and potential inflationary pressures from bottlenecks, rising import prices, and exchange rate depreciation, among others. In most cases, economies have more flexibility than what is admitted. In all cases, when monetary sovereignty prevails, the fiscal position and the public debt are poor metrics for judging the viability of a public purpose and its pace of implementation.

As such, applying MMT to policymaking does not mean that a government ought to be encouraged to record fiscal deficits or that the relation between the central bank and the treasury ought to be radically changed to allow direct financing. The fiscal balance is not a proper policy goal because it leads to irrelevant or incorrect policymaking and because it is largely outside the control of policymakers. The financial praxis of monetarily sovereign governments already conforms to MMT. Central banks and treasuries routinely coordinate their financial operations. Some governments have allowed direct financing of the treasury by the central bank; others have not but have developed equivalent ways to coordinate their fiscal and monetary operations that work around existing political constraints. Such routine coordination ensures an elastic financing of government operations that at least deals with domestic resources and is not intrinsically inflationary.

The Market Creating and Shaping Roles of State Investment Banks

Recent decades witnessed a trend whereby private markets retreated from financing the real economy, while, simultaneously, the real economy itself became increasingly financialized. This trend resulted in public finance becoming more important for investments in capital development, technical change, and innovation. Within this context, this paper focuses on the roles played by a particular source of public finance: state investment banks (SIBs). It develops a conceptual typology of the different roles that SIBs play in the economy, which together show the market creation/shaping process of SIBs rather than their mere “market fixing” roles. This paper discusses four types of investments, both theoretically and empirically: countercyclical, developmental, venture capitalist, and challenge led. To develop the typology, we first discuss how standard market failure theory justifies the roles of SIBs, the diagnostics and evaluation toolbox associated with it, and resulting criticisms centered on notions of “government failures.” We then show the limitations of this approach based on insights from Keynes, Schumpeter, Minsky, and Polanyi, as well as other authors from the evolutionary economics tradition, which help us move toward a framework for public investments that is more about market creating/shaping than market fixing. As frameworks lead to evaluation tools, we use this new lens to discuss the increasingly targeted investments that SIBs are making, and to shed new light on the usual criticisms that are made about such directed activity (e.g., crowding out and picking winners). The paper ends with a proposal of directions for future research.