<b>Shankar Acharya:</b> Fiscal deficits - a short history

India's fiscal deficit trends are a bit like an alcoholic trying, unsuccessfully, to reform

Thirty years ago very few people in India had heard of “fiscal deficits”. The phrase made its debut appearance in an official government document in the 1989/90 Economic Survey of the Ministry of Finance, where it was defined as the excess of government expenditure and net lending over current revenues. It can also be thought of as “net borrowing” by the government. Within a year or two, the term had become ubiquitous in official documents, the press and political discourse, aided by the debates over International Monetary Fund programmes and economic stabilisation following the 1991 crisis. Of course, our governments