External exposure

Foreign flows will demand strong fiscal management

The White Paper, recently presented by the Union government, emphasised how economic conditions had improved over the past 10 years under the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government, compared to the two terms of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) regime (2004-14). As this newspaper has argued in this context, there is little debate that conditions have indeed improved significantly over the past 10 years, but public debt and the general government deficit remain elevated. In fact, the headline fiscal deficit, expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP), for the Union government in 2023-24, according to the Revised Estimate, was