This work has three major aims. The first aim is of a technical kind, and the second and third aims are broader, historical ones. The technical objective was to place the analysis of Indian public expenditure on a sounder and more informative statistical base than that on which it has hitherto rested. For a number of reasons which are explained in some detail in Chapter 3 the national accounts classification of public expenditure is, when its advantages and disadvantages are balanced out, more useful for macroeconomic analysis than any existing scheme for ordering public expenditure data.
