Two big themes emerged from this year’s Economic Survey and Budget — one explicit and the other more implicit. The Survey explicitly batted for re-stoking investment-led growth. This is foundational. As the contrasting experiences of Latin America and East Asia — as well as India’s own experience in the mid-2000s — have revealed, strong growth can only be sustained when underpinned by private investment. Bursts of consumption-driven growth are unsustainable because they inevitably spawn imbalances, either domestic (higher inflation) or external (wider current account deficits). An investment-led strategy therefore has to be the lynchpin for sustained 8 per cent growth.
Meanwhile,
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