Articles by S P Gupta

Any study of the growth of India 's external debt cannot be undertaken in isc tion from the growth of domestic public debt.
The question is whether the present economic reform will succeed in reversing the rising trends in debt service ratio and percentage of public and external debt to GNP in a sustainable fashion. An at pt is made here to answer the question with the help of a simple macro-economic model THE present economic reform in India has been triggered primarily by an external debt crisis, mainly an outcome of her domestic fiscal imbalance, i e, overspending by the government. Three years of this reform have already passed. The impact of some of the policies under this reform is now perceptible. There is a general feeling from the experience of other countries that for accessing the full impact of such policies, the three-year period is 'too short'. At the same time, it is felt that as far as mid-course corrections in the policy packages are required, it will be too late if their results are not detected in time.

Planning and Liberalisation S P Gupta Given the changes in the government's economic policy directions towards more indicative and financial planning, the time has come for the finance ministry and the Planning Commission to devise closer working arrangements under a joint policy regime. The comparative advantage of the Planning Commission with a large technical team should be exploited for initiating in-depth analysis of the causes of the recent macro-economic imbalances. Attempting to deal with them solely via a macro-frame baied almost exclusively on the central budget without detailed consideration of the many micro/sectoral economic activities covering technical, institutional and other factors will be highly risky.

S P Gupta T G Srinivasan By adopting a concept of standard person-years in the Sixth Plan for measuring employment, the earlier neglect of the productivity aspect of employment was partly removed and the concept of gainful employment was emphasised In this sense in the Sixth Plan for the first time the goal of employment and the goal of poverty eradica tion were reconciled and the apparent trade-off between employment generation and growth largely rationalised.

Poverty Calculation in the Sixth Plan S P Gupta K L Datta The estimates of people crossing the poverty line given in the Mid-term Appraisal of the Sixth Plan (MTA) have aroused an interesting debate regarding the effect of aggregate income growth in reducing poverty and ah. the effectiveness of some of the redistributive measures adopted by the Government in ultimately benefiting the poor. Many of these issues are directly related to the methodology used in estimating poverty. This paper concentrates mainly on some of the methodological issues related to estimation of poverty.