Service standards in the provision of health and education in the states in India are low on average and also characterized by large inter-state disparities. These disparities are due to differences in fiscal capacity, differences in revenue effort and differences in priority accorded to the...

Two central problems in a fiscal transfer systemrelate to resolving vertical and horizontal imbalances. In the context of the setting of the 13th Finance Commission, this paper looks at the methodological background of fiscal transfers followed by recent Finance Commissions in India,...

We examine the contrasting evolution of government debt-GDP ratio for Germany and Japan. While Germany contained the growth of its debt-GDP ratio close to its sustainability level over a long period, Japan has slipped away towards non-sustainability. This is due to the behaviour of primary...

In this paper, we have reviewed the COVID induced shock to the debt and deficit profiles of 10 of the largest economies by size of GDP in 2019 referred to in this paper as the Big-10 economies. There is a sharp upsurge in their government debt-GDP ratios because their policy responses to the...

In this paper, an issue of major policy significance pertaining to assessing the impact of COVID-19 beyond the short-term on India’s macroeconomy has been addressed by developing two restricted vector autoregression (VAR) models. These models enable an assessment of the detrimental impact of...

In this paper, we argue that in a supply deficient situation, a vaccination strategy that makes use of an analysis of the different stages of the Covid waves and the pattern of their geographical spread can prove to be far more effective than the current non-transparent mechanism of interstate...