Author Description

"Studies in Public Finance is a book on the nature and effect of public spending and its financing in India taking into account the advances in theory and best practice approaches. It brings together several disparate pieces of scholarship on Indian Public Finance. Public finance begins with reasons for government spending - the failure of the markets to provide public goods, goods with externalities and bring about desired state of distribution. In Indian context, public expenditure policies are dominated by political economy considerations with interest payments, subsidies and transfers pre-empting resources leaving inadequate allocation to physical and social infrastructure. The ability to provide essential public services are constrained by the low revenue productivity of the tax system. Inability to finance the required level of expenditures through taxes results in large deficits and debt threatening solvency, stability, and sustainability from time to time. Rule based fiscal policy evolved to follow a disciplined has not met with much success. The book also analyses the complexity of calibrating public finance policies in a large country with multilevel fiscal system. It also evaluates the effectiveness of intergovernmental transfers in a country marked with wide inter-regional disparities in taxable capacity and standards of public services provided. Finally, the book brings out the devastating effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on Indian public finances. The book will be useful to students of economics, scholars working on the subject and the policy makers"--