Document Type
Article
Abstract
Using the keyword frequencies in the headlines of press releases issued by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, this article quantifies the shifting focus of India's public policy communications. Our analysis suggests that in the aftermath of the 2008–09 Global Financial Crisis, India's public policy communications shifted from international trade to innovation and competitiveness, while the emphasis on large infrastructure development, employment, investment, and policy incentives remained. A similar analysis using newspaper headlines from India's three leading newspapers and Google search intensity using data from Google Trends indicates that the discussion about international trade and the institutions that promote it has broadly followed the trends of ministry communication, both in newspaper communication and in public discourse. However, there was a growing trend in media articles about innovations and competitiveness around three years before there was a similar trend in communications from the ministry. Comparatively, the public dialogue on innovations, as measured by Google Trends data, lagged ministry communications by almost two years. Therefore, this article suggests that ministry communications aimed at guiding economic agents' decisions towards certain specific developmental goals are in line with the flow of thoughts in the media and public in India.
Recommended Citation
Ranjan, Abhishek and Nath, Siddhartha
(2024)
"Changing Contours of Policy Communications in India,"
Bulletin of Monetary Economics and Banking: Vol. 27:
No.
3, Article 3.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.59091/2460-9196.2288
Available at:
https://bulletin.bmeb-bi.org/bmeb/vol27/iss3/3
First Page
435
Last Page
458
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Country
India
Affiliation
Reserve Bank of India
Included in
Economic Policy Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Public Policy Commons