Outdated Discourse

ECONOMIC reforms, says the government's Economic Survey 1997-98 released this week promisingly, "play a vital role not only by directly stimulating higher productivity and efficiency, but also by keeping confidence high and boosting investment intentions of entrepreneurs*'. Unfortunately, in the actual discussion in the document of developments in different sectors of the economy, changes, for better or worse, in productivity and efficiency receive very little attention, if any at all. What come tumbling out instead are the usual aggregative numbers and the annual percentage movements in them which throw little light on the detailed but vital changes the emergence and rise and the decline and fall that, one expects, must be taking place in different parts of an economy which for some seven Or eight years now is thought to be making the transition from a tightly regulated and closed regime to a liberalised and relatively open one. Of matters difficult to capture statistically such as entrepreneurial confidence and investment intentions one gets not even a whiff.