Articles by Atul Sarma

Generally, the fiscal implications of social protection programmes are evaluated, but not so much on the economic impacts these schemes have on macro aggregates such as output, employment, income and revenue. This motivated us to evaluate the economic impact of three major social protection programmes, namely, the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, Indira Awaas Yojana, and the National Social Assistance Programme in 2011-12 using a social accounting matrix. It is found that these programmes have significant impacts on output across different sectors of the economy, on income generation and distribution of different household classes in urban and rural areas, on employment across different sectors of the economy, and even on government revenue generation.

We the undersigned economists do not consider the official national poverty lines set by the Planning Commission, at Rs 32 and Rs 26 per capita per day for urban and rural areas, respectively, to be acceptable benchmarks to measure the extent of poverty in India.

This paper examines the performance of Gujarat's revenue and expenditure systems. It attempts to identify the basic weaknesses of the existing revenue sources and indicates a broad direction of future reforms. Its major thrust, however, is on identifying the sources of inefficiencies of budgetary and expenditure policy and management, and preparing reform proposals for enhancing expenditure effectiveness.

Atul Sarma While the 1989-90 budget claims to further the objectives of growth and modernisation, the same can hardly be said about the goals of self reliance and social justice. There is nothing in the budget to even slow down the growing dependence on external borrowing. Similarly, the budget does no more than pay lip service to dealing with the two basic problems of the economy, viz, skewed income and asset distribution and mass poverty.