India’s annual budgets are followed with as much curiosity and trepidation as those of multi-starrer Bollywood movies. While pining for potential blockbusters makes sense given their high entertainment quotient, the same yearning is difficult to explain for budgets that are hardly more than annual financial statements of the exchequer.

The nervous anticipation would have still made sense if India were still an overtly closed and controlled economy. Fiddling around with customs and excise duty rates for such economies creates major differences in short-term prospects for industries, producers, exporters and importers. But one would have expected India to come a long way from such inward-looking postures. In a considerably globalised economy like that of today’s India’s, a couple of percentage point variations in duty rates should not have much for whetting the appetites of economic actors and stock markets. This is because tax rates are hardly the instruments for deciding competitiveness in a world where flow of goods and services take place in a far unhindered fashion.