Lesons Government Failure: Public Goods Provision and Quality of Public Investment

This paper focuses on government investment and expenditure policies. Going beyond the growth experience, the author also tries to relate the policy experience to the issues of aggregate poverty, income distribution and hunger at an aggregate level. The broad theme that emerges from the analysis is that the failures on this front, apart from the indirect effects of growth, are linked directly to the failure of governance. This failure has many dimensions; the misallocation of government resources, the failure to follow norms of social benefit-cost analysis that were the reason-de-tar for the introduction of national planning, the neglect of public and quasi-public goods that are the most fundamental justification for the existence of government and a gradual (over decades) but progressive deterioration in the quality of governance. [Planning commission Working Paper 2/2006]