Finance Commission of India’s Assessments: A Political Economy Contention between Expectations and Outcomes

The objective of this study is to examine the structural basis on which Finance Commissions make their awards rather than examining the predictability of the forecasts. The story of Finance Commissions assessments reflects an interesting political economy theatre of contention between aspirations and outcomes. Our key findings are as follows: Firstly, source of errors for assessments of tax revenue, non-tax revenue, interest payments, defence revenue expenditure, plan revenue expenditure and fiscal deficit is principally due to random component. However the errors in the remaining economic parameters originate due to systemic components i.e. mean and slope errors. Secondly, the expenditure side predictability is lower than the revenue side predictability.