Performance of Public Sector Enterprises in India: A Macro-Level Analysis

The poor performance of Public Sector Enterprises (PSEs) in the 1980s made reform increasingly urgent in the context of the broader strategy of liberalization of the economy to deal with the perceived weaknesses of India’s development strategy in general and PSEs in particular. In this context, this paper tries to analyze the performance of Central Public Sector Enterprises (CPSE) against the backdrop of liberalization measures introduced in the 1990s and afterward. The paper makes an assessment on the basis of some selected indicators for the period of 1980-81 to 2008-09. The findings suggest that the PSEs’ performance was better in all the indicators in the post-liberalization regime compared to the pre-reform period.