Fiscal Yin, monetary Yang

Monetary policy attempts to rein in governments so that the bond markets can bloom, at the cost of the voter

Earlier this week I wrote an article saying the next government’s biggest problem is going to be money. In that context, here’s a question that India’s economists need to answer: How is it that in an era of utter fiscal dominance, India has more monetary policy experts than fiscal policy ones? Why has public finance been relegated to the backbench?

One answer, of course, is that monetary policy is more “sexy”. Another is that a really thorough analysis of public finances of the Indian union, of the sort the Finance Commissions do, requires more work. A third is that our US-trained