GUEST LECTURE Dr. Rathin Roy

Topic: Fiscal Space Speaker: Dr. Rathin Roy, Director, National Institute of Public Finance and Policies, New Delhi

All our MSc students and our faculties got this golden opportunity to hear Dr. Rathin Roy Director , National Institute of Public Finance and Policies, New Delhi. (NIPFP) on 27th of August 2013. His talk was on ‘Fiscal Space’, fiscal space for what? A Human Development Perspective.

Fiscal space is relatively a new concept in Public Finance and at present we have got only two definitions of it, one is given by the IMF and the other one is by Dr. Rathin Roy. He says that “Fiscal space is the financing that is available to a government as a result of concrete policy actions for enhancing resource mobilization, and the reforms necessary to secure the enabling governance, institutional and economic environment for these policy actions to be effective, for a specified set of development objectives.”

He then discussed at length the analytical framework and policy instruments to secure fiscal space for financing a national development strategy. Fruitful discussions happened on ‘fiscal space diamond’ which Dr. Roy has developed and which is being used extensively by many developing and emerging countries. Two hours of guest lecture got over as if just a few minutes have passed and we all were eager to hear more from him. He promised us to visit our institute again in the near future to guide our students to develop their research interest in Public Economics.

On the whole, it was a wonderful interaction and knowledge gaining guest lecture that happened for the MSc I and II students.