New Delhi, January 31: The Economic Survey posits that India’s aspiration to become a $5 trillion economy depends critically on strengthening the invisible hand of markets together with the hand of trust that can support markets.

The invisible hand needs to be strengthened by promoting pro-business policies to (i) provide equal opportunities for new entrants, enable fair competition and ease doing business, (ii) eliminate policies that undermine markets through government intervention even where it is not necessary, (iii) enable trade for job creation, and (iv) efficiently scale up the banking sector to be proportionate to the size of the Indian economy.

Introducing the idea of “trust as a public good that gets enhanced with greater use”, the Survey suggests that policies must empower transparency and effective enforcement using data and technology to enhance this public good.

As wealth creation happens by design, the overarching theme of Economic survey 2019-20 is wealth creation and the policy choices that enable the same.

The Survey stated that at its core, policies seek to maximise social welfare under a set of resource constraints. Resource constraints force policymakers to focus on efficiency, which more output to be produced from given resources such as land, human resources and capital or, the same output for less resource use.

It said the ease of doing business has increased substantially in the last five years from reforms that provided greater economic freedom. India made a substantial leap forward in The World Bank’s Doing Business rankings from 142 in 2014 to 63 in 2019. The Doing Business 2020 report has recognized India as one of the ten economies that have improved the most.

Yet the pace reforms in enabling ease of doing business need to be enhanced so that India can be ranked within the top 50 economies on this metric. India continues to trail in parameters such as ease of starting business, registering property, paying taxes, and enforcing contracts. The surveys identifies the most crucial issues plaguing India’s performance beyond the approach taken by the World Bank’s survey.