Reform within status quo

The finance minister has worked hard to present a Budget that has boosted sentiment

If you cut to the chase, little has changed in the Budget per se, as will be seen in a moment. What has changed is the government’s fiscal conservatism and therefore spending strategy, plus a positive willingness to push the reform button on several fronts. These include a sharp turn in the approach to the role of the public sector, opening up to more foreign ownership of insurance companies, churning the ownership of government-created assets, selling public sector banks, and trying out earlier-discarded ideas on financial sector reform like a fresh asset reconstruction company (in effect a “bad bank”) and