The government’s new policies will come into force from the next <u>fiscal</u> year.
- (a)calendar
- (b)academic
- (c)financial
- (d)leap
Correct — C, 'financial'. 'Fiscal' relates to government revenue and public money, so the fiscal year is the financial year — the twelve-month period a government uses for its accounts and budgets. In India that year runs from 1 April to 31 March.
- (a)calendar — The calendar year runs from 1 January to 31 December, which is not the year meant when a budget or a policy is dated.
- (b)academic — The academic year is the school or university session and has nothing to do with public finance.
- (d)leap — A leap year is any year of 366 days, a matter of the calendar's arithmetic rather than of money.
'Fiscal' means relating to public revenue and government finance, so the fiscal year is the accounting year used for budgets, taxes and public accounts.
All three distractors are real kinds of year, which is the whole design of the item — you are being asked which kind of year the adjective names. Anchoring the word to its root, the Latin fiscus or public treasury, keeps 'fiscal' tied to money rather than to time. India's financial year ran from 1 April to 31 March long before this 2018 paper, and it still does.
- India's financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March and is written as, for example, 2018-19.
- Fiscal policy is the government's taxing and spending, while monetary policy, run by the central bank, works through interest rates and the money supply.
- 'Fiscal' comes from the Latin fiscus, the public treasury.
- Choosing 'calendar' because it is the most familiar kind of year.
- Treating 'fiscal' as a general word about time rather than about money.
Asked as a synonym item — choose the word closest in meaning to the underlined word.
No directly related past PYQ was found.
- practice — not a real PYQ
The fiscal deficit is best described as
- (a)the gap between a government's total expenditure and its total receipts other than borrowings
- (b)the gap between a country's exports and its imports
- (c)the fall in the value of a currency against the dollar
- (d)the rise in prices over a year
Answer(a) the gap between a government's total expenditure and its total receipts other than borrowings — that gap is exactly what the government has to borrow.
- practice — not a real PYQ
Choose the word closest in meaning to 'fiscal' in 'fiscal measures'.
- (a)physical
- (b)financial
- (c)formal
- (d)final
Answer(b) financial — fiscal measures are measures about public money.