India slips into a pre-Keynesian world

We must improve our statistical systems or be condemned to make policy in the smoky haze of inadequate and politically filtered data

John Maynard Keynes is generally acknowledged as the founder of macroeconomics, with his “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1936) seen as the seminal volume for this discipline. Some of the key concepts he deployed in that book include: Aggregate demand (and supply), consumption, investment and their relation to production, employment and economic activity. Stimulating output and jobs were the key policy goals for Keynes and his generation in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1930s. His path-breaking contributions to the theory of macroeconomics stimulated the budding field of national income accounting, led by stalwarts such