Budget 2024: Five interventions we need to speed up formal and non-farm jobs

livemint.com:

₹45 trillion (if fiscal deficits could make countries rich, then no country would be poor), reversing the shift from revenue spending to capital expenditure (improving productivity requires allocating even more than last year’s high of ₹10 trillion), or crowding out defence and police spending (about ₹8 trillion) with welfarism. The next budget should pray to the one god of formal non-farm jobs with five non-fiscal interventions that will raise the productivity of formal, non-farm employers.

The budget must ignore unhelpful, dated and self-serving notions—curiously peddled by offshore economists who chose exit over voice—that a large country like India must choose between manufacturing or services, exports or domestic consumption, and rising tax collections or improving ease of doing business. More importantly, most thoughtful economists now acknowledge their tribe has oversold monetary and fiscal policy as tools for sustainable mass prosperity.

The damage is done; it’s unclear that global public debt, deficit financing and central bank balance sheets will return to levels that make our generation good ancestors. India has avoided this economic narcissism and targeted our challenge of employed poverty by raising the population of productive non-farm jobs while ensuring a targeted welfare state and macroeconomic stability.

The next budget should accelerate this mission by putting its weight behind five changes: Jan Vishwas 2.0: The Jan Vishwas bill kicked off removing the excessive jail provisions in employer compliances last year by boldly recognizing that criminalization of civil offences hurts small employers, enables corruption and rewards informality (a sense of humour with the rule of law). It was a small start