Budgetonomics Review

Deepak Shenoy and Dheeraj Singh have teamed up to write a short ebook on the recent budget called Budgetonomics: Demystifying Budget 2013, and the result is great!

It is short at 40 pages, and it took me less than ten minutes to breeze through the ebook yesterday.

It costs Rs. 99 or $2 and was well worth it as far as I am concerned. At this point, I should note that I’m not a typical reader, and while I appreciate having a PDF in my Google Drive that I can use to look up how the composition of government revenues changed in the last few years, I’m not sure how many others are interested in this information. (Here is a chart from the book)

Composition of Government Revenues

I bring up this point because the macro level statistics and graphs were the most valuable part of this book as far as I’m concerned, and not all regular readers will be interested in that kind of detail.

All the charts in the ebook:

  • Government revenue composition
  • Tax collection under major heads
  • Expenditure growth and their composition
  • Fiscal deficit over the years
  • Effective tax rate and share in total taxes
  • Number of companies by effective tax rate

After dealing with numbers and charts, the book takes a look at the highlights of the budget and then deals with the more specific matters that affects individuals.

I would say that the utility of this book is to have a small PDF that has most key features and statistics from the budget in one place that’s easily accessible and not looking to learn new things about the budget itself.

There has been such wide media coverage of the budget that I would argue that everything pertinent about it has been written already, and you will be disappointed if you are looking for something new.

However, if you look at stats about deficits, spending etc. from time to time and would like to have them all at one place, then this little book is very handy.

You can purchase it here. Budgetonomics: Demystifying Budget 2013

Disclosure: I am in no way related to this book, and don’t stand to gain financially or otherwise from its sales. 

2 thoughts on “Budgetonomics Review”

  1. Thanks Manshu! We will be adding a lot more in the way of macro charts and information over the next few days (the first update went in today, let me know if you didnt get it). I like the concept of a “budget handbook” of sorts! Glad you liked it!

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