Articles by Pronab Sen

Virtually, the entire literature on public debt is on determining “how much is too much,” beyond which it becomes a systemic threat to the economy. On this basis, about 80 countries, including India, have fiscal rules designed to steadily reduce public debt. This article argues that there is a minimum stock of public debt, below which it is also a systemic threat, and outlines some of the considerations which should be taken into account. It further argues that the composition of public debt is equally important, but has been totally neglected. Both the level and composition of public debt, therefore, should be taken into account while framing fiscal rules.

In India, unlike other countries, migration started to decelerate when the urban population was well below a quarter of the total population. This principal puzzle contains within it other intriguing issues, including, for instance, why more Indians do not migrate voluntarily in response to the growing divergence in economic opportunities between rural and urban areas. There may be better explanations for our low migration rates than wage differentials.

There are two main criticisms of the poverty line, which are in some ways interrelated. The first is that even though the poverty line ensured the consumption of the normative calorie intake in 1973-74, it no longer does so. The second questions the very use of calorie intake as a measure of nutritional adequacy, arguing that such a unidimensional measure may do more harm than good in the measurement of poverty and design of poverty alleviation instruments. This paper seeks to address these criticisms of the extant methodology of deriving the poverty line from an economist's perspective and attempts to bring out some issues which call for further research.

A Note Pronab Sen In recent years a number of studies have questioned the orthodox proposition that a devaluation is always expansionary. The implication of a non-expansionarydevaluation is that in such cases not only are complementary contractionary monetary and fiscal policies unnecessary for making the devaluation 'stick', they may actually prove to be undesirable in the sense that investments even in the traded goods sector may get retarded and thus delay the process of moving to a new and more export- oriented economic structure. Unfortunately, these studies have had virtually no effect on the 'conditionalities' imposed by the Fund-Bank establishment and contractionary policies continue to he routinely prescribed along with somewhat less controversial 'exchange rate adjustments'.

Pronab Sen Until 1991-92 there was virtually no policy support for the software sector Since then the government has taken a number of positive steps, hut hesitantly. The general perception about the software industry however continues to be that it will rapidly attain international stature without any policy support.