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The presence of high inflation coupled with a persistent and ever-increasing fiscal deficit is the key problem being faced by the developing economies. The fiscal dominance hypothesis suggests that a developing economy is prone to high persistent inflation when government authorities run huge persistent budget deficits and get them financed through money creation. The primary objective of the current study is to test and examine the presence of the fiscal dominance situation over the period 1971–2020. The current study has modelled inflation as a fiscally driven monetary phenomenon by combining monetary and fiscal variables. The study has used the autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) technique to analyse the long-run and short-run dynamics in a unified framework. The empirical results point to strong and statistically significant long-term relationships between budget deficits and money growth and between money creation and inflation. The study validates the presence of the fiscal dominance hypothesis in the case of a developing economy. The results imply that fiscal dominance handling through a realistic and continuous process of fiscal adjustments on the back of supported monetary policy is necessary for attaining and sustaining price stability in developing countries like Pakistan. In the context of public finance, a broad and wide-ranging tax reforms (increasing the tax base, designing an inflation-proof tax system, and improving tax administration and collection), rationalized government expenditures and privatization of loss-making state enterprises are crucial in establishing the trustworthy fiscal policy.

The study examines the sustainability of public and external debt burden of Pakistan and India for the period 1971–2017. The debt dynamics equation for public debt uses two components for the analysis of public debt sustainability, namely, interest rate–growth rate differential and differential of primary budget balance-to-GDP and change of reserve money-to-GDP ratio. The equation for external debt dynamics also uses two components for the assessment of external debt sustainability, namely, current account balance-to-exports ratio and differential of exports growth and interest rate. The significance of the approach used in the current study lies in the fact that in case of evaluation of countries' debt sustainability, it is quite necessary to monitor debt trends along with emerging domestic and external vulnerabilities and systemic risks that threaten debt sustainability. This phenomenon has been captured through debt dynamics approach, which is used in the current study. The results are based on the estimation of two equations, namely, debt dynamics equation for overall public debt sustainability and debt dynamics equation for external debt sustainability. The results of the study indicate that primary budget deficit and current account deficit have played a significant role in the accumulation of public debt and external debt, respectively in Pakistan and India. The study concludes that public debt and external debt of Pakistan and India are sustainable but in a weak form.