Economic Policy in India: Managing Change by Y Venugopal Reddy; UBSPD, New Delhi, 2003;
GEETA GOURI Policy analysis studies largely focus on a specific policy or a set of policy decisions of the government. By and large the genre of policy studies scholarship in India falls within this mould. Bureaucrats offer a variant of the standard policy analysis studies. Their writing provides an analysis but with a personal flavour. The book under review cannot be classified into either of these two categories. It is a collection of speeches, which ran concurrently with every new policy instrument introduced in the course of economic liberalisation in the financial sector in India. Redefining the role of the government and the market in the financial sector constitutes the central theme of the book that attempts to develop a conceptual framework of policy for market development and regulatory intervention. This sets the book apart. The book contains speeches delivered by Y Venugopal Reddy, the current governor of the Reserve Bank between 1997-2002, which are thematically divided into four sections. The first section covers the broad macroeconomic policies of liberalisation where the reader is exposed to perspectives on liberalisation and on the role of state and market. The remaining three sections take the reader through the process of liberalisation in Central Banking (Part II), Financial Sector (Part III) and External Sector (Part IV).
