Arindam Das-Gupta

The Thirteenth Finance Commission does not seem to have chosen the best possible path to meet its mandate of recommending ways to make public expenditure less wasteful and inefficient, in other words, of making the spending of public money more outcome-oriented. However, its report has a number of important suggestions that should help achieve output-oriented outlays, though these do not add up to a comprehensive reform package for result-oriented expenditure reform. Though it has done admirably well given the constraints it faced, two major problems with its approach are not noting the importance of unit costs of public outputs and inadequately treating the distinction between outputs and outcomes.