Central Government Domestic Debt in India: Modeling Sustainability and Impact

This work emanates from the Doctoral research on Central government domestic debt and its impact on private consumption and investment in India. This is done with a long-term perspective from 1960-61 to till 1999-00 and finds its immediate relevance in the context of rising central government domestic debt in India. Although there are some respite due to curbs on revenue and fiscal deficits with the implementation of Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act of the government of India(2003), but the general trends of economic aggregates continues almost in the same direction, with few exceptions. The experience of a persistent escalation of government debt as a legacy of past accumulated deficit is something universal to all major emerging economies and has thrown open acrimonious and insistent debates. It involves a wide range of issues and questions. The present exercise takes cognizance of those debates and takes off itself by addressing some crucial issues in the deliberations; that of the sustainability of public debt/fiscal policy. It moves on then to empirically examine the economic impact of debt in the Indian context.