Tag: subsidies | Vivek Kaul

14 March, 2016

Cash Transfer of Subsidies is the Right Way Forward

In his book Naked Economics—Undressing the Dismal Science, the American author Charles Wheelan recounts a very interesting story about his visit to Cuba. Cuba, as you know, dear reader, has been under a communist regime for a very long time.

As Wheelan writes: “Because the visit was licensed by the U.S. government, each member of the delegation was allowed to bring back $100 worth of Cuban merchandise, including cigars. Having been raised in the era of discount stores, we all set out looking for the best price on Cohibas [a premium Cigar brand] so that we could get the most bang for our $100 allowance. After several fruitless hours, we discovered the whole point of communism: The price of cigar was the same everywhere. There is no competition between stores because there is no profit as we know it. Every store sells cigars—and everything else for that matter—at whatever price Fidel Castro (or his brother Raul) tells them to.”

Wheelan had basically experienced in Cuba what we in India call the public distribution system. Further, he had managed to find cigars everywhere he went though at the same price. What this tells us is that the public distribution system in Cuba did work, at least when it came to cigars. In India, it does not.

The government runs the public distribution system through around five lakh fair priced shops also known as ration shops. Unlike Cuba, these shops are very leaky. And food grains and kerosene that are sold through these shops do not reach the intended beneficiaries and find its way into the open market. The fair price shop owners benefit in this process.

As per the Economic Survey which was released last month, 54% of the wheat and 15% of the rice that is distributed through the public distribution system does not reach the intended beneficiaries. Along similar lines, 48% of sugar is siphoned off as well (as per last financial year’s Economic Survey). When it comes to kerosene, nearly 46% is siphoned off. 24% of domestic cooking gas and 40% of fertilizer is also siphoned off.

This means that the government of India loses a lot of money every year. As the economist Kaushik Das writes in An Economist in the Real World: “The problem arises from the fact that in India the food subsidy is handed to poor households via the ration shops. The government delivers subsidised grain to the store owner and the owner is then instructed to hand this over at the prescribed price to Below Poverty Line (BPL) households and to some other categories of vulnerable households.”

The assumption is that the shop owners will honestly pass on the grains and kerosene to those it’s meant for. As Basu writes: “If store owners were perfectly honest, this would work fine. But if they are not, then it is easy to see that many of them will give in to the temptation of making some easy money by selling off some of this subsidised grain in the open market where the price is higher, and turning away some of the deserving poor households or adulterating the grain that is to be sold to those households…A large share of the wheat meant to reach the poor never does because it is pilfered or sold on the open market en route.”

So what is the way out of this? One way is better policing. Nevertheless, as Basu writes: “It is easy to respond to this by asking for better policing. But we have to be realistic. Trying to police such a large system by creating another layer of police and bureaucracy will come with its own problems of corruption and bureaucracy.”

A better solution for this mess is to handover the subsidy directly to the poor households instead of going through the fair price shop owner. How can this be done? This can be carried out through the Aadhaar card linked to a savings bank account.

The penetration of Aadhaar cards has gone up at a very rapid pace all across India. As the Economic Survey points out: “The current government has built on the previous government’s support for the Aadhaar program: 210 million Aadhaar cards were created in 2015, at an astonishing rate of over 4 million cards per week. 975 million individuals now hold an Aadhaar card – over 75 percent of the population and nearly 95 per cent of the adult population…Aadhaar penetration is high across states. Nearly one-third of all states have coverage rates greater than 90 percent; and only in 4 states—Nagaland (48.9), Mizoram (38.0), Meghalaya (2.9) and Assam (2.4)—is penetration less than 50 per cent.”

These cards now need to be linked to savings bank accounts. This will ensure that instead of handing over subsidised grains to the intended beneficiary through the fair price shop route, the government can simply transfer money into his Aadhaar linked bank account. This money can then be used to buy the food grains from any shop instead of just the shops which come under the public distribution system.

This will create competition among shops and ensure that the poor get access to the food grains that they are entitled to. It will also ensure that the leakage of food grains will come down dramatically.

As the Economic Survey points out: “After identifying beneficiaries, the government must transfer money to them. Every beneficiary needs a bank account and the government needs their account numbers. This constraint has been significantly eased by the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana, under whose auspices nearly 120 million accounts were created in the last year alone—at a blistering, record-setting pace of over 3 lakh accounts per day.”

The trouble is that despite this blistering pace, the savings account penetration continues to remain low across large parts of the country. As the Economic Survey points out: “Despite Jan Dhan’s record-breaking feats, basic savings account penetration in most states is still relatively low – 46 per cent on average and above 75 per cent in only 2 states (Madhya Pradesh and Chattisgarh).”

The sooner this is corrected, the faster the government can move to putting cash directly in the accounts of people instead of trying to distribute food grains through a leaky public distribution system.

To conclude, on March 11, 2016, the government moved one step closer to cash transfer of subsidies. The Lok Sabha passed the Aadhaar Bill. Given that the Bill was introduced as a money bill, the government doesn’t have to get the Bill passed through Rajya Sabha.

The column originally appeared on Vivek Kaul’s Diary on March 14, 2016

20 July, 2015

How UPA govt subsidies helped generate black money and contributed to the real estate bubble

One of the points that I have made over and over again in the columns that I have written on black money is that theNarendra Modi government needs to concentrate on domestic black money as well.

Since coming to power in May last year, the Modi government has made a lot of noise and come up with legislation on trying to curb the black money leaving the shores of this country. Black money is essentially money which has been earned but on which tax has not been paid.

Nevertheless, it is important to realise that ultimately almost all the black money is domestic i.e. it is generated within the country when people earn money (through legal or illegal means) and do not pay any tax on it.

Given this, it is more important to concentrate on trying to bring down the total amount of black money being generated instead of trying to get back the black money that has already left India. One way to do this is to get more people under the income tax net. Efforts are being made on this front.

A PTI report points out that: “The income tax department has launched an ambitious drive to bring under its net 10 million new taxpayers, after the government recently asked the official to achieve the target within the current financial year.”

Region wise targets have been set. Pune leads the list with a target of more than 10 lakh new assesses. This is an interesting move and if it is successful this will lead to more people paying income tax and hence, the total amount of black money within the system will come down.

When the total amount of black money comes down, lesser black money will go into real estate. And this will help in ensuring that only those who really want homes to live in,will buy. This will help in controlling real estate prices.

Other than getting more people to pay income tax, the government also needs to concentrate on blocking leakages on the subsidy front. In 2004-2005, the total subsidies offered by the government stood at Rs 47,432 crore. By 2013-2014, this number had ballooned to Rs 2,54,632 crore. The total subsidies of the government had jumped by 5.4 times during the period. In comparison, the total expenditure of the government had jumped by only 3.15 times.

Only if the subsidies were reaching those for whom they were intended for, it would not have been a problem. In October 2009, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, the then deputy chairman of the Planning Commission had said: “a Plan panel study on PDS [public distribution system] found that only 16 paise out of a rupee was reaching the targeted poor.”

So where did the remaining 84 paise go? It was stolen in between. Obviously people who stole the subsidies would neither be declaring this money as income and nor be paying any income tax on it.

As Saurabh Mukherjea and Sumit Shekhar of Ambit write in a recent research titled Real Estate: The unwind and its side effects: “Subsidies under the UPA regime grew at a staggeringCAGR[compounded annual growth rate] of 19% per annum…A substantial portion of these subsidies(30-50%) was pilfered by the political class and used by them to fund investment in gold and real estate.”

In comparison to Ahluwalia’s estimate, Mukherjee and Shekhar are being extremely conservative. Nevertheless, the point being made is the same—that government subsidies are terribly leaky. The politicians who stole this money obviously did not declare this as income. This black money then found its way into real estate and drove up real estate prices.

As a FICCI report on black money published in February 2015 points out: “The Real Estate sector in India constitutes for about 11 % of the GDP of Indian Economy, as these transactions involve high transaction value. In the year 2012-13, Real Estate sector has been considered as the highest parking space for black money.”

So what has happened since the UPA was voted out of power? In 2015-2016, the total amount of subsidies have been budgeted at Rs2,43,811 crore, which is lower than the Rs 2,54,632 crore that had been spent in 2013-2014. One reason for this is obviously a fall in oil prices. The number in 2014-2015 had stood at Rs 2,66,692 crore.

This cut in subsidies along with the fact that some subsidies are now directly being paid into bank accounts is likely to help bring down both black money as well as real estate prices. As Mukherjea and Shekhar write: “The NDA has cut subsidies sharply (down 9% in 2015-2016) and is shifting subsidies to Direct Benefit Transfer (DBT); at least 10% of the overall subsidies have already been moved to the DBT. As a result, the ability ofthe politician-and-builder to pilfer subsidies to fund real estate construction has been checked.”

While cutting down on subsidies further may not be politically possible, if more and more of subsidies are paid directly into the bank account of the beneficiaries, the total amount of black money within the system is likely to come down.

Taking these steps rather than chasing black money that has left the shores of this country makes more sense and will have a greater impact on bringing down real estate prices in India. This will go a long way in making homes affordable for those who want to buy homes to live in rather than to invest.

As Mukherjea and Shekhar put it: “the NDA Government is engineering a clamp down on black money in India. The 2015-2016 Union Budget explicitly aimed to disincentivise the black economy and curb the demand for physical assets. With the new Black Money Bill (which was passed by the Parliament on May 26) and with the Cabinet approving the Benami Transactions Bill in May this year, the crackdown on blackmoney will continue further.”

These steps need to continue.

(VivekKaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on July 20, 2015

10 November, 2014

Why Indian politicians need to read Charles Dickens and Anand Bakshi

The writing of very few writers survives across generations. Charles Dickens is one of them. In his book David Copperfield one of the characters Mr Micawber says: “Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
This is something that Indian politicians should be reading and imbibing. If reading Dickens is something that they don’t like, they can try listening to the song aamdani atthani kharcha rupaiya o bhaiyya na poocho na poocho haal natija than than gopal. This song is from the 1968 movie Teen Bahuraniyan. Given that most of the Indian politicians are “old,” they will definitely relate better to this song from the time when they were young, than to Dickens.
The moral in both what Dickens and Anand Bakshi (who was the lyricist for the aamdani atthani kharcha rupaiya song) wrote is that when you spend more than you earn there is trouble ahead. This basic lesson is something that the Indian government (and most other governments around the world) has not understood over the last ten years.
The government has constantly spent more than it has earned and run a fiscal deficit. Indeed, the situation continues to remain worrying on this front, even during the course of this financial year. Data released by the Comptroller General of Accounts(CGA) shows that during the first six months of 2014-2015(i.e. the period between April 1, 2014 and March 31, 2015), the government ran a fiscal deficit of Rs 4,38,826 crore or around 83% of the targeted fiscal deficit of Rs 5,31,177 crore, set at the time of the budget. The number was at 76% during the course of the last financial year.
One reason for this is the fact that the expenditure of the government is front loaded whereas its income is not. Hence, six months into the financial year, the fiscal deficit is not equal to 50% of the annual target.
Between April and September 2014 the total income of the government has risen by only 6.6% in comparison to the same period last financial year. The targeted growth in income in the budget is at 12.6%.So, the income has not grown as fast as it is supposed to grow. On the expenditure front things look a tad better. Between April and September 2014, the total expenditure has risen by 6.6%. The targeted growth in expenditure is at 7.8%.
In fact, with oil prices coming down the oil under-recoveries suffered by the oil marketing companies will come down. For a very long period of time oil marketing companies were selling diesel at a price at which they did not recover their cost of producing it. Cooking gas and kerosene continue to be sold at a price below their cost of production.
The government compensates these companies for their under-recoveries. This pushes up the expenditure of the government and hence, its fiscal deficit.
Kaushik Das and Taumir Baig economists at Deutsche Bank Research expect the under-recoveries for this financial year to be at Rs 85,300 crore against around Rs 1,40,000 crore, during the last financial year. This calculation was made in early October and oil prices have fallen further since then. As seems likely oil prices will continue to remain low in the short run and this will help the government contain its expenditure towards oil under-recoveries.
Nevertheless, before you uncork that bubbly, there are some other points that need to be considered. Around Rs 50,000 crore of food subsidies remain unpaid. In case of fertilizer subsidies pending bills amount to Rs 38,000 crore. This should largely neutralize the gains on account of oil prices falling. The previous finance minister P Chidambaram had pushed the payment of more than Rs 1,00,000 crore of subsidies into the current financial year, in order to ensure that he met his budget targets.
Also, there are other long term concerns on the fiscal front. The public sector banks are in a mess. They will need regular infusions of capital from the government, if they need to continue to function. This is a ticking time bomb which no one seems to be talking about. In fact, the Report of The Committee to Review Governance of Boards of Banks in India (better known as the PJ Nayak committee) released in May 2014, goes into the substantial detail regarding this issue. It estimates that between January 2014 and March 2018 “public sector banks would need Rs. 5.87 lakh crores of tier-I capital.”
The report further points out that “assuming that the Government puts in 60 per cent (though it will be challenging to raise the remaining 40 per cent from the capital markets), the Government would need to invest over Rs. 3.50 lakh crores.”
Where is this money going to come from? In fact, there has been very little activity on this front from the government during this financial year. As and when the government allocates money towards this, its expenditure will go up again. The other option is to let the private sector take over some of these banks. But that is a political minefield and also the money required for the capital infusion is not small change exactly.
Another long term issue on the fiscal front are the recommendations of the seventh finance commission which will come into force in 2016. As happened in the case of the sixth finance commission, the salaries of government employees will go up again. This will lead to a greater expenditure for the government and in turn, a higher fiscal deficit.
Immediately after the seventh finance commission recommendations are implemented, state government employees all across the country will ask for hikes as well. The state governments, as has been the case in the past, will be happy to oblige, even though they don’t have the money for it. This will mean that the total government borrowing (states + centre) will shoot up and crowd out the private sector borrowing and push up interest rates, which have only recently started to fall. These are issues that the government needs to tackle if it hopes that interest rates continue to fall.
In fact, during the course of the last financial year, the fiscal deficit crossed its annual target in January 2014. Something similar will happen this year. Nevertheless, by the time March 2015 comes, the government would have managed to bring back the fiscal deficit to the targeted level. This is because tax collections shoot up during the last three months of the year. Further, the government will go in for disinvestment of its holdings in public sector companies at that point of time. This year the government has targeted an income of Rs 58,400 crore through the disinvestment of shares. This seems to have become standard practice over the years. But the danger here is that shares once sold cannot be resold. But the expenditure they are financing is more or less permanent.
To conclude, it is important that the government looks at increasing its income, if it hopes to finance its ever burgeoning expenditure efficiently. In other words, it has to follow the advise of both Charles Dickens and Anand Bakshi.
In order to that the government has to look at increasing the number of income tax payers for one. Currently, only 3.5 crore individuals out of a population of 120 crore pay the income tax. A quick implementation of goods and services tax regime will also help. Hence, the government needs to tackle the black money economy in India seriously. The question is will get around to doing that?

The article originally appeared on www.equitymaster.com on Nov 7, 2014

14 September, 2014

Trump’s wrong: How the Big Mac burger tells us Mumbai real estate ain’t cheap

Vivek Kaul

In a recent interview to the Forbes India magazine, Donald Trump the billionaire American investor and business tycoon said “Your real estate is unbelievably cheap…Mumbai is a great city and yet it is not priced like other comparable cities. It is priced lower than cities that are less important. That gives investors a tremendous amount of growth potential.” He made similar statements in interviews to several other publications.
This statement needs closer examination. Let’s do that by comparing prices in Mumbai and New York, the largest city in the United States. A July 2014 report in The Times of India quotes Pankaj Kapoor of property research firm Liases Foras as saying “In Mumbai, the average cost of a flat is Rs 1.2 crore.”
In comparison, the price of a median home in New York in July 2014 stood at $524,500. For most of July 2014, one dollar was worth Rs 60. Hence, in rupee terms the price of a median home in New York stood at around Rs 3.15 crore ($524,500 multiplied by Rs 60). While Trump did not go into these details, this is the logic he must have used to say that the real estate prices in Mumbai are cheap, in comparison to other big cities around the world.
The trouble with this calculation is that it has been carried out at the market exchange rate. It doesn’t take the purchasing power of the currencies into account. Purchasing power is essentially a concept which takes into account the fact that how many “units of a country’s currency [are] required to buy the same amount of goods and services in the domestic market[in this case India and the rupee] as a U.S. dollar would buy in the United States.” This is necessary because foreign exchange market determined exchange rates do not always take this into account.
There are several ways of taking purchasing power into account. A quick and dirty way is to consider The Economist’s Big Mac Index. This index compares the price of McDonald’s Big Mac hamburger in various countries around the world. In July 2014, the Big Mac had an average price of $4.80 in the United States. In India it was sold at an average price of $1.75.
Hence, what could be bought at $1.75 in India would need $4.8 in the United States. This means Rs 105 (Rs 60 multiplied by 1.75) is worth $4.8. Or in other words one dollar is worth Rs 21.9 (Rs 105/$4.8), in purchasing power terms.
If one dollar is worth Rs 21.9, then the price of a New York city median home in rupee terms works out to Rs 1.15 crore ($524,500 multiplied by Rs 21.9). In comparison the average cost of a flat in Mumbai is Rs 1.2 crore. Hence, the real estate prices in New York are slightly cheaper than Mumbai once we take the purchasing power into account.
As mentioned earlier, using the Big Mac index was a quick and dirty way of taking purchasing power into account. Data from the World Bank can be used to carry out a more reliable calculation. In case of the Big Mac index we are just taking the price of one particular brand of burger for taking purchasing power into account. As per World Bank data one dollar is worth Rs 16.8, once we take purchasing power into account.
This means that the price of a New York median home in rupee terms is around Rs 88.1 lakh ($524,500 multiplied by Rs 16.8). This is almost 32% cheaper than the price of an average home in Mumbai.
These calculations clearly tell us that real estate in Mumbai is not cheap by any stretch of imagination, irrespective of what Trump would like us to believe. In a recent report brought out by UBS Investment Research analyst Ashish Jagnani estimated that Mumbai had 50 months of unsold inventory of homes. This is the highest among all major cities in India. Gurgaon comes in next with 30 months of unsold inventory.
Another recent research report titled India Real Estate Outlook brought out by real estate consultants Knight Frank points out that the unsold inventory of residential apartments in Mumbai stands at 2,13,742 units. In June 2014, the quarters-to-sell ratio stood at 12.
“Quarters-to-sell(QTS) can be explained as the number of quarters required to exhaust the existing unsold inventory in the market. The existing unsold inventory is divided by the average sales velocity of the preceding eight quarters in order to arrive at the QTS number for that particular quarter,” the report points out.
Further, the “inventory level in the South Mumbai market will take the maximum time of 18 quarters (4.5 years) to sell,” the report points out. Donald Trump had come to India for the launch of the Trump Tower, located in Worli, South Mumbai.
The enormous level of inventory in Mumbai is because people are not buying homes. This has led to an inventory of unsold homes which is at a seven year high across different cities., the UBS report points out. People are not buying homes, because homes have become too expensive. As Jagnani of UBS mildly puts it, there are “affordability concerns amid property prices” going “up 13-30% in key cities over last 2-years.”
The article originally appeared on www.firstbiz.com on Sep 14, 2014
(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

10 July, 2014

Budget 2014: When it comes to the fiscal deficit, Jaitley has done a Chidambaram

Vivek Kaul

Alfred Hitchcock, the British director, who taught Hollywood how to make thrillers, once famously said: “The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” On a lighter note, this rule should apply to the speeches that politicians make, as well.
Arun Jaitley in his maiden budget speech as the finance minister of India, junked Hitchcock’s bladder test and went on and on and on. Early on in his budget speech Jaitley said : “My predecessor has set up a very difficult task of reducing fiscal deficit to 4.1 per cent of the GDP in the current year. Considering that we had two years of low GDP growth, an almost static industrial growth, a moderate increase in indirect taxes, a large subsidy burden and not so encouraging tax buoyancy, the target of 4.1 per cent fiscal deficit is indeed daunting. Difficult, as it may appear, I have decided to accept this target as a challenge. One fails only when one stops trying.” Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.
So, the question is how does Jaitley plan to meet the fiscal deficit target of Rs 5,31,177 crore or 4.1% of the GDP? Jaitley has assumed that tax receipts will go up by 16.9% to Rs 9,77,258 crore during the course of this financial year (April 2014 to March 2015). In the economic survey released yesterday, the economic growth for the current financial year has been projected to be at 5.4-5.9%. Governments projections typically tend out to be more optimistic than they actually turn out to be.
In this scenario how feasible is an assumption of 16.9% growth in tax receipts? Jaitley’s predecessor P Chidambaram had assumed a growth of 19.2% in tax receipts for the last financial year. The actual growth turned out to be much lower at 12.7%. In a scenario of low growth and high inflation an assumption of 16.9% growth in tax receipts is highly optimistic and is unlikely to be achieved.
Chidambaram had gone about achieving a fiscal deficit of 4.6% of the GDP for the last financial year(April 2013 to March 2014) by largely doing two things. Subsidies on petroleum, food and fertilizer which should have been paid up by the government during the course of the last financial year, were postponed to this financial year. Estimates suggest that this amount was greater than Rs 1,00,000 crore.
Jaitley doesn’t seem to have taken this into account while working out the numbers. The total cost of subsidies for this financial year has been budgeted to be at Rs 2,55,707.62 crore. This is more or less similar to the last year’s number. Hence, unless subsidies are brought down majorly, which remains a politically unpopular move and inflationary in the short-term, this amount is unlikely to be sufficient to meet the subsidy commitments of the government. And if subsidises are not brought down, Jaitley will either have to let the fiscal deficit go up or like Chidambaram push their accounting to the next financial year.
The second thing Chidambaram did in order to achieve a fiscal deficit of 4.6% of GDP was to cut down on plan expenditure. The government expenditure is categorised into two kinds—planned and non planned. Planned expenditure is essentially money that goes towards creation of productive assets through schemes and programmes sponsored by the central government. Non-plan expenditure is an outcome of planned expenditure. For example, the government constructs a highway using money categorised as a planned expenditure. But the money that goes towards the maintenance of that highway is non-planned expenditure. Interest payments on debt, pensions, salaries, subsidies and maintenance expenditure are all non-plan expenditure.
As is obvious a lot of non-plan expenditure is largely regular expenditure that cannot be done away with. The government needs to keep paying salaries, pensions and interest on debt, on time. These expenses cannot be postponed. The only thing it can do is to postpone making the subsidy payments. Hence, when expenditure needs to be cut, it is the asset creating planned expenditure which typically faces the axe and that is not good for the overall economy. If one looks at the numbers Jaitley has assumed that is the direction we seem to be headed.
The planned expenditure target of the government during the last financial year was at Rs 5,55,322 crore. The actual planned expenditure came in at Rs 4,75,532 crore, which was close to Rs 80,000 crore or 14.4% lower. This is how the fiscal deficit of 4.6% of GDP was achieved.
Jaitley has set the total planned expenditure for the year at Rs 5,75,000 crore. It is highly likely that during the last few months of this financial year (i.e. the period between January and March 2015) Jaitley might like Chidambaram have to put a freeze on this expenditure, if he hopes to achieve the fiscal deficit target that he has set. And this can’t possibly be good for the Indian economy.
Another area where Jaitley could have been aggressive is the money that can be raised through the disinvestment of public sector companies. During the course of this financial year the government hopes to earn Rs 58,425 crore through disinvestment. Chidambaram had set a target for Rs 54,000 crore but managed to earn only around Rs 19,000 crore. The advantage that Jaitley has is that the stock market has been rallying for a while. Given this, the government could have been aggressive and set a disinvestment target of close to Rs 1,00,000 crore.
What makes the fiscal deficit target of 4.1% of GDP further unrealistic is the legacy that the Congress led United Progressive Alliance has left for the Narendra Modi led National Democratic Alliance. The fiscal deficit number for the first two months of this financial year(April-May 2014) does not look good at all. Numbers released by the Controller General of Accounts suggest that for April-May 2014, the fiscal deficit of the government has already touched Rs 2.41 lakh crore.
This works out at around 45% of the fiscal deficit target of Rs 5,31,177 crore that Jaitley has set. Hence, he has only around Rs 2,90,000 crore to play around with between June 2014 to March 2015. This, of course is not Jaitley’s fault.
To conclude, this was Jaitley’s chance of presenting the true financial situation of the Indian government. He seems to have lost that chance by projecting a higher revenue than the government is likely to earn and a lower expenditure than the government is likely to spend.
The article also appeared on www.firstbiz.com on July 10, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)