HE purpose of this paper is to present a T short-term planning model for the Indian economy. It involves (a) the formulation and implementation of an input-output model for India, closed with respect to all household consumption except that originating from government employees, and (b) an endogenous determination of the distribution of consumption expenditure among several groups of households, each group having a specific consumption pattern. The paper is divided into three sections. An attempt is made in section I to classify the economy into several sectors. In section II, we calculate the intersectoral transfers of intermediate products as well as final goods and services. Section III presents the planning model and considers the possibilities of using it for planning purposes.

The recent growth in Soviet borrowing from the West, resulting in the rise of net Soviet debt to $16 billion by 1977, has raised the analytical question of considerable economic and political significance: how much are such credits worth to the Soviet Union? Several alternative approaches to answering this question are possible. Broadly speaking, they may be grouped into two categories: partial equilibrium and general equilibrium. In the partial equilibrium analyses, we may include (i) the econometric investigation of whether foreign capital goods have greater productivity in Soviet industry and branches than domestic capital goods, the relevance of this to the problem at hand being established by the argument that foreign credits may be jointly supplied with the capital goods embodying advanced technology; and (ii) the noneconometric examinations of the role that foreign credits and technology can or do play in specific sectors (for example, automobiles and oil). On the other hand, a partial equilibrium approach is not a satisfactory way to approach the question at hand. The productivity of foreign credits can be defined meaningfully only in the context of the use of resources generally, requiring a general equilibrium approach. In turn, a general equilibrium approach may be based on the incorporation of foreign credits into one of the models, either of the computable planning type or of the econometric variety as represented by the SOVMOD exercise of Donald Green and Christopher Higgins, the productivity of -foreign credits being estimated by the required variation in the levels of foreign borrowing therein. However, these large models tend to be rather cumbersome and the total effects of parametric variations are therefore extremely difficult to disentangle. Small models, by contrast, often have the advantage of both elegance and ease of interpretation, while not burying the essence of the economic system within a complex structure. In this paper, I have chosen the small, simple decision model approach and elaborated a general-equilibrium model of the Solow-Swan variety, using a CES production function. I have estimated the functional relationships postulated and calculated the productivity of foreign resource inflow (of which foreign credits are a component) within it. In Section I, the model is set out, its structure is justified, and the analytical methods to be used to calculate the productivity of foreign resource inflow in it are spelled out. In Section II, I present the estimates of the model and the productivity of foreign resource inflow that emerges from them. Section III offers some concluding observations, in light of the estimates.

The factors that led to the collapse of the ruble are analyzed. It is argued that it resulted from exogenous factors (closely related to the unanticipated Asian financial crisis) interacting with inherited weaknesses in fundamentals (of fiscal policy) that made the Russian economy, while progressively being brought to macroeconomic stability, nonetheless vulnerable to a large external shock. It is contended that, instead of the policy mistake of August 1998 requiring a default of domestic debt and moratorium on payment of foreign commercial debt, a decision by Russian authorities to offer temporary exchange controls, sanctioned by the IMF and the U.S. Treasury as an emergency measure, would have been a better alternative, obviating the de facto partial and unilateral resort to controls that the moratorium and default implied.