Evaluating Quality of Budgets with a Composite Index

How are budgets to be judged? Judgments are often made from specific viewpoints. However, focusing on a single criterion such as the fiscal or the revenue deficit is unsatisfactory, as it does not tell us the manner in which the fiscal imbalance is sought to be corrected. We propose a composite index of quality of the budget that takes into account composition of revenue and of revenue and capital expenditure and degree of fiscal prudence.