Capital, Credit and Commerce: Global Development Finance and India’s Role in the New Economic Order

Developing economies must finance structural transformation while preserving macroeconomic stability under conditions that make conventional fiscal prescriptions difficult to apply. Revenue is often narrow and volatile, public investment needs are large, domestic financial markets are shallow, external borrowing is exposed to currency and refinancing risk, and climate or commodity shocks can rapidly invalidate baseline plans. This critical narrative review examines how fiscal discipline, sovereign debt architecture and capital allocation can be combined into a pragmatic financial-planning framework. Literature published from 1990 to 2 June 2026 was identified through open scholarly indexes, institutional repositories, DOI-linked metadata, and backward and forward citation searching. Evidence was appraised for identification quality, institutional relevance, cross-country comparability and the extent to which findings were transferable to low- and middle-income settings. The synthesis shows that fiscal discipline is best understood as the capacity to maintain a credible intertemporal budget constraint while allowing countercyclical action and protecting high-value expenditure, rather than as mechanical annual deficit compression. Numerical fiscal rules are associated with better outcomes only when design, enforcement, transparency and political institutions are sufficiently strong; rigid rules may shift adjustment towards public investment or off-budget liabilities. Debt sustainability depends not only on the debt ratio but also on currency, maturity, interest-rate, creditor and contingent-liability structures. Domestic-currency debt can reduce external currency mismatch yet intensify inflation, rollover and sovereign-bank risks. Public investment supports growth most reliably where project appraisal, selection, procurement, implementation and maintenance are competent; scaling expenditure without these capabilities can raise sovereign risk rather than productive capacity. A pragmatic framework therefore requires a solvency anchor, a risk-based debt strategy, a protected but performance-tested capital portfolio, explicit treatment of fiscal risks, and scenario-contingent adjustment triggers. The evidence supports institutional sequencing and portfolio discipline over universal numerical thresholds. Major uncertainties remain around climate-contingent instruments, state-owned enterprise risks, political feasibility and the distributional effects of adjustment.