(FE)
Micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) will be at the forefront of leading the consolidation of the economy after major structural changes like demonetisation and introduction of the Goods and Services Tax (GST), which were carried out in the last two years, finance minister Arun Jaitley said on Saturday.
He was speaking at the launch of “CriSidEx”, a sentiment index for micro and small enterprises, developed jointly by Crisil and government-controlled Small Industries Development Bank of India (Sidbi). The index is a composite index based on a diffusion index of eight parameters, and measures MSE business sentiment on a scale of 0 (extremely negative) to 200 (extremely positive).
This is expected to provide policymakers with crucial inputs regarding the sector, which are often hard to come by due to the sector’s largely informal nature. “The health of this sector is extremely vital to the economy and we are increasingly seeing that with a number of steps taken and increased integration of the sector into the formal economy itself,” Jaitley said. He added that the sentiment index will help the government in evaluating challenges.
