Raghuram Rajan — India’s Economy: How Did We Get Here and What Can be Done?

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ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Let me welcome you all to the 15th installment of the OP Jindal Distinguished Lectures. This is the eighth year and the 15th installment. I'm Ashutosh Varshney, director of the Center for Contemporary South Asia, and professor here at the Watson Institute in the Department of Political Science. Let me start with a word about the genesis of these lectures. Sajjan and Sangeeta Jindal, Brown parents 2012, have endowed these lectures in perpetuity in memory of OP Jindal, Sajjan's deceased father. The purpose of the endowment is to promote a discussion of the politics, economics, society and culture of modern India here at Brown. These lectures are held once every semester. The previous lecturers include Kaushik Basu, who among other things served as the chief economist of the World Bank, Ram Guha, a historian, Ashis Nandy, a political psychologist, William Dalrymple, a literary figure and founder of the [INAUDIBLE] Festival, Amitav Ghosh, a novelist, [INAUDIBLE],, an economic policymaker, and Pratap Mehta, a political philosopher and until recently the vice chancellor of Ashoka University, and several others. Today's agenda lecture is Raghuram Rajan, who is the Katherine Dusak Miller Distinguished Service Professor of Finance at the University of Chicago at the Booth School of Business. He was the 23rd governor of the Reserve Bank of India, which is India's fed, between September 2013 and September 2016 for three years. And before that he was also, among other things, for three years the chief economist of the International Monetary Fund in Washington. Raghu, as we call him, his research interests are in banking, corporate finance and economic development, especially the role that finance plays in development. His books include The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind, published earlier this year. I Do What I Do: On Reform, Rhetoric and Resolve published in 2017, and the very well known Fault Lines: How Hidden Fractures Still Threaten the World Economy, for which he was awarded the Financial Times Goldman Sachs prize for the best business book in 2010. Raghu was the president of American Finance Association in 2011, and in January 2003, the American Finance Association also awarded him the inaugural Fischer Black Prize for the best finance researcher under the age of 40. The other awards include the Infosys Prize in the Economic Sciences in 2012, the Deutsche Bank Prize for Financial Economics in 2013, and just I would note one more among others, the Euro Money Central Bank Governor of the Year Award in 2014 In this first of the two lectures Raghu will speak to us for 45, 50, 55 minutes on India's economy, how did we get here and what can be done. That's the title. I might add, it's an important addition, that this is Raghu's first full length public lecture on India's economic policy since leaving office in September 2016, first public full length lecture. He has given statements on economic policy, but this is the first lecture, and we are of course very proud that this lecture is being given at the [INAUDIBLE] Center at Watson Institute. I will introduce the discussion to Arvind Subramanian later after Raghu's lecture is over. So please welcome Raghuram Rajan. RAGHURAM RAJAN: Thank you. Thank you very much, and it's a great privilege to be asked to deliver this lecture, especially given the illustrious names who have preceded me here. And I thank the Jindals for endowing this lectureship. So what I want to talk about today is really where we are in the Indian economy. By the way, I've got you under false prextent. I'm only going to talk about how we got here. What we do about it is for the next lecture, which is on Friday. So let me talk a little bit about where we are, and let me start by saying we are in a very worrisome place in India today. Growth has slowed considerably. The fiscal deficit is large, leaving little room to do something about that growth. And there's rising debt levels in many areas in the Indian economy, some of that distress. So India is an economy which for 25 years has been growing at 7%, but what we see today is much slower growth. And if we are to believe Arvind Subramanian's work, I'll talk a little bit about it later, perhaps even lower than the headline numbers that we see. So what I want to talk about is how we got here. Why are we here? What are the things that we've done wrong along the way, both sins of commission as well as sins of omission, things we didn't do, that have brought us to this pass. So I want to focus on, the next few slides, talk a little bit about growth, talk a little bit about the fiscal, and talk a little bit about debt and distress just to give you a sense of where we are, and then spend a lot more time on trying to analyze the roots of the problem, which then will help us think a little bit about what can be done to rectify it. So the first is to show you that, in fact, we have been slowing. Again, this is not taking into account some of Arvind's concerns. We were growing really fast before the great recession, and then 2009 was a year of very poor growth. We started climbing a little bit after it, but since then, since about 2012, we have had a steady upward movement in growth going back to the pre-2000, pre-financial crisis growth rates. And then since about mid-2016, we have seen a steady deceleration. And now the latest numbers were 5% for the last quarter, but when you look at some of the investment bank projections for the next quarter, they're not very happy. It doesn't look like there's going to be a rebound in the very short run. Now, some of the reasons for this, the first two series are the fiscal year 2005 to 2011 sources of growth. 2005 [INAUDIBLE] was under new [INAUDIBLE] The one thing that [INAUDIBLE] you between these two steps [INAUDIBLE] But let's focus on the middle. So the first point that one has to make is investment has been falling steadily in the Indian economy ever since probably the global financial crisis, but it's been falling steadily actually from a few years after that. Consumption has been relatively strong and holding up across these two periods, but more recently, consumption has also been falling. Net exports were never a strong source of additional growth. So again, continuing on the same theme, what you see most recently is, consumption is falling rapidly. If you look at every element of the auto industry, look at cars, look at commercial vehicles, look at two wheelers, two wheelers are a good proxy for rural demand, commercial vehicles are a good proxy for industrial demand, and of course, cars are a good proxy for urban demand. And you see all of them tanking, tanking to the extent of 30%, 40% levels of negative growth, OK. Now, some of this is because of policy changes that came in, for example, changes in emission requirements. Some of it is because of uncertainty about whether the value added tax will be changed for these. So if I think the value added tax is going to come down from 28% for cars, I might say I'll wait and see before buying a car, because it does make a lot of difference in the price of cars. But a lot of it is because of a shortfall in credit availability to households as well as households themselves postponing consumption. And finally, when you look at the trade balance, what you see is that in the years of strong growth, India's exports were growing, in fact, growing faster than GDP so that exports rose as a share of GDP. Over the last so many years, they've been growing slower than GDP growth, and therefore falling as a fraction of GDP. And this is true when you even take out oil. The numbers on the right hand side are non-oil exports, and you see that that has been falling. So India's investments have been falling. India's consumption is falling. And India's exports are not doing as well as they did in the past when they were growing really strongly, especially in the years of strong growth when India became a much more open economy by the usual measures. Today, it's in some sense closing down relative to the past. Now, I said on the one hand, growth has been relatively slow, but the fiscal is also a source of concern. India's fiscal deficit to GDP is officially 7%. That's the sum of the state government's fiscal deficit and the central government's fiscal deficit, is about 7%. It has been right around that the last few years. But the reality is this fiscal deficit conceals a lot. The headline numbers, again, conceal a lot. If you look at the projections for the coming year, the revenue projections are very optimistic by most accounts. And we just had a corporate tax cut, which you know, estimates of its cost vary, but that's going to add the burden of the fiscal deficit. What is less noted, but something that the Auditor General has pointed out in India, is there's a lot of borrowing which is going off balance sheet and which is not being counted in the fiscal deficit. For example, the Food Cooperation of India is essentially a department of the government. The Food Corporation's borrowing should be thought of as part of the fiscal deficit, but is off balance sheet. And you can see that skyrocketing over the last couple of years from about 0.7% of GDP to 1.1%, bit 0.4 percentage points of GDP are buried in Food Corporation of India borrowing. And similarly, the National Highway Authority of India, that's the chart on the right hand side, you see borrowing there go up from 0.2% of GDP to 0.7% of GDP, another 0.5 percentage points GDP. In other words, add these two, you get 1 percentage point of GDP that is not counted in the fiscal deficit but is actually part of the fiscal deficit. Add to that a whole variety of normal shenanigans that the Finance Ministry does. I was in the Finance Ministry, so I know exactly what we do. We accelerate any revenues we can find and push any payments we have to make. Well, at some point, that catches up with you. And so put all this together. Add to them the fact that we have rising contingent liabilities in India. The rising non-performing assets means that banks need recapitalization. Some has been done, but going forward, there is a question of how much more is needed. You're seeing the non-bank financial companies, so I'll come to that in a little bit of time, they are in trouble. And they may need some state support. You've got rising health care commitments. We have a whole new health program, Ayushman Bharat, which is being rolled out. As it rolls out, it will require more resources. So these are all contingent liabilities. We don't account for them well in the budget, but they hit future budgets, and so contingent liabilities are rising, which leads respectable investment banks like JP Morgan to put the actual fiscal deficit at somewhere between 9% and 10% of GDP. That's a large number. It's especially large in India, because we brought inflation down. In the past when inflation was available as the inflation tax, you could inflate away your debt, and that helped make your finances look a lot healthier. Today, with inflation so low, it's much harder to do that. You actually cannot inflate away your debt that easily, and therefore that's a source of concern. Fiscal is tighter than similar numbers would be in the past. Now, let me go on to debt and distress. One of the worrying things about the recent environment is household savings are falling. So households are saving less. Now, Indian households are natural savers, and the fact that they're saving less should be one source of concern. Why aren't they saving more? Because after all, Asian economies grew on the basis of strong savings invested well. So savings are falling over the last few years, but increasingly, you're seeing that also reflected in higher debt levels. Household debt levels are increasing by 9 to 10 percentage points of GDP over the last four or five years. So households are borrowing much more, saving less. That's not a good combination. They did not have a whole lot of debt earlier, so they started from a low base, but they're borrowing quite rapidly, and that has to be an additional source of concern. And you can see emerging signs of distress. For example on the corporate side, what we see is if you look at credit rating companies, credit rating companies will give you ratios of the number of credit upgrades to credit downgrades. And so the lower this number is, the more stress your corporate sector has. And this level of stress is at a six year high. In other words, the upgrades to downgrades ratio is at a six year low. We're as bad as we were at that point where we were starting to grow again. So stress is piling up in the system, probably as a result of low demand, slow earnings growth and difficulties in serving the servicing debt. So I've talked to you about what we see today and why we should be worried. Let me talk a little bit about what the roots of the problem are. And I want to argue broadly that we've really had no significant continued reforms in India to propel economic growth since 2004. Now, what is that year? That is the year of the last BJP government. The NDA won. Under Atal Bihari Vajpayee, that's when it lost the election. We had first , a reforming Congress government in the early '90s followed by a number of coalitions followed by the BJP government. That 14 year period from the early 1990s to 2004 was a period of significant reforms, where we cut down our tariffs, became a more open economy, and even did some privatizations under the Vajpayee government. That was also a period where growth was not that strong, but it created the environment for really strong growth. The problem with the Vajpayee government was that even by the end of its term, we still hadn't got to the spectacular growth we saw in the next three or four years afterwards. At least the experience of growth amongst the broader people was not that strong, and so the Vajpayee government's campaign for re-election in 2004, which was based on India rising, simply didn't catch hold. And they lost narrowly the Congress. Congress came in with a coalition government, which had the communists in it and really could not continue the reforms that the NDA had started, because simply there wasn't that much consensus within the coalition partners. Nevertheless, there was an explosion in investment, and what you can see here is the rise in new projects announced as we go into three, four, five. Just before the financial crisis, you have a substantial explosion in projects announced, strong growth, and many of these projects were completed on time. Power plants, many power plants completed, road building projects completed. The Golden Quadrilateral in India was done during the Vajpayee regime. So there was strong infrastructure investment, strong growth. Now, the collateral effect of that strong growth was it put a lot of pressure on resource allocation, including the institutions who allocate dollars, to lot more need for land, lot more need for iron ore, a lot more need for coal, a lot more need for spectrum. All these pressures rising at the same time as demand for these across the world is rising, iron ore for example, strong demand in China, the prices of these things are going through the roof. But we don't have strong systems for allocation, because they were never that valuable. And so iron ore, we really had no system to allocate it. First come, first serve. Take it. But as they grew more valuable, the old systems of allocation simply didn't work anymore, and we needed more formal structure. But we didn't put those formal structures in place. We still had the old informal arrangements, and that became the source of tremendous amounts of corruption. So one of the consequences of the strong growth was a series of corruption scandals which came to light in UPA 2, the second term of the UPA government. Now, UPA, the Congress led United Progressive Alliance, got what it thought was a boost at the end of its first term to a massive farm loan waiver. My suspicion, as well as of some analysis, is that really the boost came from the strong growth they experienced through much of that [INAUDIBLE],, but the belief was these populist measures were an important factor in their re-election, and so when UPA 2 came into power, further reforms were stymied despite their ability to do further reforms by the fact that they really believed it was not from growth but from these populist policies that they had gotten reelected. And the emphasis was much more on populist policies in UPA 2. The net effect was right through UPA 1 and UPA 2, there were relatively few of the growth enhancing, liberalizing reforms, especially because in UPA 2, even the reforms they wanted to do, like the goods and services tax, was stymied by the opposition protests which grew louder and louder as some of these corruption scandals came to light. So UPA 2 was essentially a period where we didn't have significant growth enhancing reforms. We had a lot more spending, especially on distribution of stuff such as the-- the Food Security Bill, and inflation started going through the roof. Inflation started going through the roof in part because of strong demand, but in part also because we saw increasing supply bottlenecks being created in the economy, for example because land acquisition got much harder. Many of the bureaucrats, because of these corruption scandals, became much less willing to put out for fear that they would be sort of held up by investigative authorities. The bankers, who were really quite willing to lend in the phase before the financial crisis when projects were doing really well, now became a little more risk averse, also for fear that if a loan went bad, they'd get hauled up by the investigative authorities. So essentially, the economy started slowing down considerably post-financial crisis, but also, it had high levels of inflation. So macro stability was a great concern at this time, and India had basically all the [? bats, ?] high levels of inflation, high fiscal deficits, and not so strong growth, at which point there was a course correction in the Congress government. It started the process of fiscal consolidation. [INAUDIBLE] came back to the finance ministry to focus on that, and we had done little bit when we were faced with the taper tantrum. Those of you who remember that time, essentially, Ben Bernanke said that he was going to end the process of quantitative easing in the US, and that immediately set off a real bout of volatility in financial markets. Capital started flowing out of a number of emerging markets, and emerging markets that didn't have good macro numbers, amongst which there was India, were thought of as prime candidates for money to leave. India was one of the fragile five at that time, and we lost capital very quickly. So that was a wake up call. And the government listened at that time and transformed to focus much more on macro stability. Bring the fiscal deficit down, try and enhance growth, try and do whatever reforms were possible. And at that time, I think the RBI also joined in in trying to bring down inflation and to making that a focus. Move forward from the UPA 2 to Modi 1. I'll call it Modi 1 just to distinguish it from NDA. It came in on the basis that the old government was relatively corrupt. It was going to be much cleaner. It was going to create jobs. It was going to create and run a transparent government, and of course, there were the traditional BJP elements like Kashmir Uniform Civil Code, and [INAUDIBLE] that they wanted to make. But that was all on the side. The central issues were jobs and lower corruption. And as it came in, it started implementing some important reforms on the macro side, on the sectoral side, and to some extent on the household and populist side. I want to show you this as the fact that during UPA 2, investments started plummeting and has stayed low really since then. This is the other platform, the other attempt at macro stability, which was bring inflation down. That has been a success. We have brought inflation down in India from the double digit levels that were there. But what I want to emphasize is that in this period, we had the advent of Prime Minster Modi's government, and it started going about macro, sectoral, and household focused reforms. Unfortunately, it has been a mixed bag. It has been a mixed bag because on the one hand, as I just showed, we haven't been able to revive investment. We haven't brought investment back. A lot of the promoters who started projects in the past are now highly stressed with high levels of debt. They simply cannot start new projects. And banks say, India? We're not interested in lending to them. Even old projects, if you look at the projects that are stalled, they have also been increasing and haven't been brought down significantly. The reason they are stalled is because promoters have lost interest. Now, one of the successes of both the old UPA government as well as the NDA government was essentially giving the RBI a free hand to bring down inflation. That has been a success. Inflation is low and has stayed low for a considerable period of time. The RBI also undertook a series of reforms, for example, opening up branching, licensing, improving retail electronic payments. We now have a state of the art payment system for retail payments called the Universal Payment Interface which actually is better than many places in the world. These were all small level reforms. But one of the big concerns there was there was that as projects sort of [? initiated, ?] fell, there were also a whole lot of all projects which were stalled and getting into distress. Bad loans started building up in bank balance sheets. And that's what you see here, that is, the NPAs of public sector banks started rising. Now, the problem with banks when they start seeing bad loans is there's a temptation to hide them, to push them under the carpet, especially if the bank's CEO has a short horizon. I'm going to be gone in two years. Why do I have to recognize all the bad loans now? They're going to hit my profitability. Why not bury them for the next two years. Next guy can deal with them, right. So evergreening is a constant feature in banking systems across the world, and you really have to force the banks to recognize the bad stuff, because until they recognize it, they don't do anything about it. And so good money gets thrown after bad in keeping these projects afloat, even though they simply need to be restructured if they have to have any hope. So what happened here in [INAUDIBLE].. The RBI undertook an exercise to clean up the banks and essentially forced them to start recognizing their bad loans. And what happened as a result, this was the asset quality review undertaken by the RBI, is the NPAs of the banks shot up, because there's a lot of stuff they'd been burying which came to light at that point. Now the classic way of dealing with this is force them to recognize, force them to start dealing with these loans and working them out with the promoter so that they can be put on track. In the meantime, recapitalize the banks so that they have enough cash to make new loans where lending is necessary. Now, bank recapitalization has been halting. The government has done some but typically been a little behind the curve. What the government did, which was very important, was pass the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Act. And one of the problems in India in the past, as some of you in India know, is that it's very hard for a lender to recover money from a borrower, because there's no way of essentially forcing the borrower to pay up. We had a bunch of acts pass, but every time we had an act pass, it worked initially. For example, what was called [INAUDIBLE],, an attempt to give lenders the right to seize collateral. But after a little while, the promoters figured out how to stymie the lenders once again. [INAUDIBLE] got clogged up in the courts. The debt recovery tribunals got clogged up in the courts. And so the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Act was yet another attempt to try and force the borrower to repay their lenders and not have the lenders go from pillar to post in trying to look for their money. And initially, it has worked. Initially, it worked in putting the fear of God in borrowers and forcing them to repay. More recently, however, it seems as if it's going the way of the old acts. The promoters have figured out how to end run the banks, and the judiciary has also intervened in a way as to make it longer and longer and costlier and costlier. And so unless we do something about the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, it will go the same way as the older reforms. It will be essentially gamed to ineffectiveness. What also has happened in India in the financial sector is that we've had the public sector banks getting into trouble. Because they got into trouble, their lending started slowing down significantly. So what you see is that the public sector banks, that's the blue line, were lending a lot. And then as the loans started getting in trouble, [INAUDIBLE]. So in recent years, the public sector banks have started lending much less. The private banks and non-bank financial companies have lent much more. Now, the private banks have been relatively careful about their loans. A lot of the loans are retail loans. The non-bank financial companies were also generally careful about retail loans, but one source of lending has been a lot more problematic for them, which is they lend to developers who built out some of these projects. And those developers have gotten into trouble because of the slowdown in the retail sector, and as a result, the non-bank financial companies also had incipient loan losses on their balance sheet. But this came to a head when a big non-bank financial company, ILFS, essentially imploded in September 2018, and as a result of that, non-bank financial companies found it hard to get credit. A lot of them have gotten into deep trouble since, because not only do they have little access to credit, but they have loans building up on their asset side which are going from bad to worse. So this is broadly legacy problems piling up. We're not able to clean up the projects that are stuck. We're not able to clean up the banks fully, but that process is under way. Non-bank financial companies have filled the breach, but are also starting to get in a little bit of trouble. Now, two big actions also happen over this time which create significantly more problems for the [? system. ?] The first is, out of the blue, India demonetized 87.5% of the currency. Now, essentially what happened was the government said, 500 rupee note and 1,000 rupee note are no longer current. Now, what happens when you demonetize 87.5% of the currency? Basically, people don't have currency to do transactions with. Some of it was replaced, but it was replaced slowly. It took three, four months to replace it entirely. In that period, the informal sector basically didn't have money to do its transactions with. These are people who don't use credit cards, don't have checks. And essentially, a whole lot of them got into trouble. It's hard to measure the damage that was done to the informal sector because we really don't collect statistics on them, but the anecdotal evidence is a lot of people went out of business, and there's some actual studies which show it now, that especially in rural areas, there's a lot more fall in transactions done as a result of the demonetizing. But in addition, there are sectors which deal primarily in cash for a large part of the transaction, or some significant part of the transaction. Real estate is one sector that is especially focused on cash, and this sector was already, as I said, weakening, but with demonetization, it got into further and further trouble. And that also then spilled over to the developers who had built this real estate, and then further to the non-bank finance company. So that was blow number one. And measures of how much the setback wrote varied from 2% to 3% of GDP for a couple of quarters to 2%, 3% of GDP on an annual basis. Now, this is all using stuff we can measure. What is harder is to think about the stuff we can't measure. Certainly, if you look at employment numbers, for example, put out by the CMIE, unemployment went up significantly post-demonetization. The second big blow was the goods and services tax. Now, democratization was introduced without substantial preparation. I say substantial because we know there wasn't enough currency printed to replace the currency that was taken out. You had to print at full speed for the next four months. Typically, you don't do such things. You typically when you democratize have the money ready to roll out on the day you demonetize. That was not done, suggesting the timing was chosen for other reasons than everybody was fully prepared. That leads to the next issue, which is we had the roll out of the goods and services tax. This is a wonderful concept. Demonetization was misguided in concept. It was not a thing which either effected its aims, which was to bring down black money, or effected what became a later aim, which was to substantially increase the level of electronic payments or substantially formalize the economy. What it did was create a lot of pain in a very short period of time, especially for the poorer informal segments of the economy. It was brilliant politically, though, because the government won the UP election soon after demonetization. So it was sold politically very well, but it was not an economically well thought out idea. The goods and services tax was the next big reform, and it is something that the UPA government has been pushing. It hadn't gone through because the BJP had opposed it. Then the BJP took it on, and to its credit, managed to push it through as a constitutional amendment. It was a sound concept, but again, initiated without enough preparation. The computers weren't ready for the volume of transactions, which means right off the bat, you had to say don't do this, don't do that. OK, we're going to simplify the forms. There's a lot of back and forth which essentially undercut compliance. And the constant fiddling with the rates, I would presume, also created uncertainty. One could argue that some of the recent fall in demand for cars, for example, is because people are still trying to figure out, are they going to reduce the tax, the goods and services tax on this from 28% in order to enhance demand. If so, I don't want to buy now. I want to wait until they reduce it. So this fiddling back and forth creates uncertainty, which eventually has effects on growth. And so ideally, you would want everything to be planned out, everything to be rolled out. Nothing in life actually happens that way. You have to roll it out to see some of the problems. But arguably, the goods and services tax had thought less about what would happen than one would want in such a big reform. One could even argue with the benefit of hindsight that one should have run a parallel experiment to see if it worked before really running it out on such a massive scale across India. You could say that you never experience the full volume that you would experience running it out all over India. Nevertheless it was an experiment that should have been better planned. In hindsight, it has been costly. So let me quickly walk through some of the sectoral reforms. Agriculture-- there has been again some reform. Crop insurance has been broadened. There's been a significant increase in the roll out of direct benefits for fertilizers rather than subsidizing them, etc. But the reality is despite some of these changes, agriculture is still a big problem for India. Too much of the population still depends on it. And productivity has been abysmally low, even though India has had some successes in food and agriculture. For example, we're the largest milk producing country in the world. Nobody knows this. I mean, few people know this. But we are. And we have done it on the back of a substantial revolution in milk production. And similarly, yields in a variety of crops have been increasing, but not to the extent desirable. And this has been compounded in recent years by the fall in the agricultural terms of trade. That is, the prices that are obtained by farmers have, in fact, not kept up. And have fallen relative, for example, to the cost of their inputs. And so there is deep agricultural stress. And the way governments across India deal with this is periodically waiving off agricultural loans. The problem there is that the poorest farmers don't get loans. They go to the moneylender. So the beneficiary of loan waivers typically are the richer farmers, and it does create problems in terms of the inequality and who benefits, as well as creating massive fiscal issues for the state. What we really need is much more careful investment in agriculture, especially in agricultural extension, seed provision, and technology upgradation. India needs to reduce the fragmentation of agricultural holding. The reason people don't have high productivity is they don't have good holdings. So they can't use technology-- they're averse to using some of that. Fragmentation would get reduced if some of these people could lease their land out and go work off the farm. But leasing is also something we haven't made easy. And that holds back some of the increase in size. But the most important problem in Indian farming is the price the farmer gets is often very low compared to the price at your table. And that's because there's a whole range of middlemen in between who absorb some of the rents. Every politician comes to power saying I'm going to make the farmer get more. But they come up against strong vested interests, many of whom have political connections, amongst the middlemen. And so we've found it hard to remove that middlemen. There's been initiators on creating electronic markets, on creating warehouses-- we need to do far more of that in order to give the farmer a good deal. In the meantime, India's old habits-- you saw an example of that just a few days ago. When the price of any agricultural commodity gets particularly high, they ban exports of that commodity. Immediately the price falls. But the poor farmer, who for once was getting some benefit from price rising, gets hurt at that point. So farmers are protesting in Maharashtra today because of these bans. But this is a problem. We don't have a systematic policy of supporting the farmer with either insurance or procurement at reasonable prices across India. Instead we do it haphazardly. But often when it comes to a choice between the farmer and the customer, we choose the customer because the customer-- votes matter a lot. Onion prices are an important political issue in India. And with elections coming up, the price of onions is extremely poor. Other places where we've had mixed success-- power. India is in a position to generate tremendous amounts of power today-- enough for the most part in going towards 24/7, or in many parts of the country. The problem in India is that we have distribution companies sitting between the consumer and the producer who simply are-- for want of a better word-- incapable of running themselves efficiently. So these distribution companies essentially make enormous losses. They're state owned distribution companies. So in situations where there's plenty of power available, they simply don't buy it and sell it to the final consumer because they don't have the finances to buy it. So distribution companies actually are standing in the way. We do need to restructure these distribution companies. Put them on a sound financial footing. We've done that three times. And every time we put them back on a sound financial footing because we haven't changed either the fact that they're not charging adequately for power on the revenue side, and that they see a lot of theft happening of power, which they cannot essentially claim. These companies start making big losses once again. So we have restructured them three times. We will have to do it once again. But we don't seem to learn the lesson that after restructuring, we need to make sure that they are also reasonably profitable. So India now has the paradox of having huge unutilized generation capacity but even though the customer wants 24/7 power and can and benefit from that, we are not able to provide it to them. So interestingly, power is a success story even despite all this in the sense that we have been growing power consumption about 6.5% a year. But much of this is not in the industrial states where power consumption has been relatively flat, but because we are bringing new states into electrification. And we are growing in that way. Ideally what we'd want to do is create enough power across the country so that we can benefit from electric power. And finally, two other sectors that I'll quickly talk about-- we've had an attempted banking sector reforms. Remember I told you the public sector banks got in trouble by making bad loans. It is generally recognized that we need to improve governance in the public sector banks. And there have been some efforts on this under the Modi government. We have created something called the Bank Board Bureau to recommend some of these public sector appointments. But the real problem is that Bank Board Bureau doesn't have much power. The recommendations it makes goes up to the ministry and then to the prime minister's office in the same way as it's always happened. So it's not an independent agency which can make independent appointments. Similarly, the public sector bank boards have little power of their own to appoint the chief executive or to take significant decisions. And as in the past, they have been politicized. Of course one of the problems with public sector firms is all public sector firms typically overpay at the bottom, because that's part of their social function. And they underpay at the top. But this is a bad way to run a firm because you don't get much talent to run the firm, because you're underpaying at the top. And this is a problem with the public sector banks also. And I think this has to be fixed because increasingly in the financial system, there is a need for really capable people to run these banks. But you simply cannot attract them with the kinds of salaries you pay, even if you're willing to recruit from the private sector, which historically hasn't happened except for two instances-- again, to give credit to the Modi government-- under that government. What has happened most recently is something that I think was unnecessary. And we'll see how it plays out. Recently what's happened is in an attempt to improve the public sector banks, we've consolidated them. We've picked-- you three get together, those three get together, the other three get together-- largely, I think, on the basis of the kind of information technology they use, so that they have the common information technology, and also the areas they service. The problem, as everybody associated with banking knows is, mergers take a lot of time. And they're a big headache. Who occupies which position? How do we merge departments together, etc? These bank mergers are coming at a time the banks are already dealing with high levels of NPA's-- non-performing assets. They are coming at a time that the economy is slowing. It's probably not the right time. It may be the right move, but it's not the right time. And public sector banks are going to be engulfed in managing the mergers over the next few years instead of actually focusing on making better loans. And finally, one of the problems with public sector banks is that they have government mandates imposed on them. Thou shalt do this. And those mandates are generally uncompensated. The latest mandate comes from the Modi government's emphasis on lending to small and medium companies. There is a whole scheme called the mudra scheme which got them to lend. Unfortunately that experience hasn't been turning out particularly well. But what do we do when that experience doesn't turn out well? Do we clean up the system? I think what we've seen now is an attempt to try and not recognize the problem, which is we're going to have forbearance on the MSME loans that go bad. In other words, they will not be recognized. And in fact, we're going the other way. In order to revive credit because credit is not flowing, we now have the concept of loan mela. There was a few-- anybody know what a mela is? It's a fare, right? And a loan mela is a loan fare. Come one, come all, get your loan, right? Now, you wonder how much credit, you know, careful credit assessment goes in when you're supposed to give loans in a loan mela. I think the early signs are the banks are trying to do credit analysis. We will see going forward what kind of pressure they are subject to in order to make these loans. So the broader problem is, the public sector banks are in difficulty. The reality is they need significant governance reform. Much of what is being done is-- initially, there was some appetite to do it. Unfortunately, now we're doing stuff which probably takes away from governance, takes away from cleaning up the balance sheet rather than necessarily improving the quality of the balance sheet. One example of this that I pointed to was the pressure on public sector banks to make some of these MSME loans. And finally, let me come to the issue of trade and investment. That has been a focus of the Modi government, a good and necessary focus. However, what trade and investment needs really is an increase in the ease of doing business. Because, ultimately, you get more trade if you have more efficient firms, who are able to produce both for the domestic economy and international. Now, here again, what one would want for is a slashing in some of the old regulations that hold back firms and focusing on improving the ease of doing business. Now, there's been some attention, but largely focused on the World Bank indicators of the ease of doing business rather than the actual conditions in India on what prevents businesses from working easily. So as a result, we haven't got that significant boost so far in business opening. Because, in fact, it may not have become that much easier for businesses to operate in India. One of the recent concerns has been on tariffs and taxes. If you want more trade, you should bring down your tariffs. Because today, the way trade happens is through global supply chains, moving goods back and forth. In order to move goods back and forth across borders, you need lower and stable tariffs. Instead, what we have is high and fluctuating tariffs in certain areas-- not all areas, but certain areas. And that becomes a concern for business. What will the tariff be next month if, in fact, I open a business? India is not part of any significant global supply chains. And that makes it a problem if India wants to increase its exports. Similarly, taxes, the recent cut in corporate taxes is beneficial in attracting firms to India. But what firm's worry about is not just the level but the changes. Is this going to change? Am I assured that when I put my investment in India, it will spend 15% to 17%? And unfortunately in India, we have a history of going back and forth, some of which was reflected in the recent budget in taxes on foreign investment. So we need to have a process by which we stabilize rules and regulations and taxes and tariffs if we want to attract new companies into India. That's one reason why if you look at the level of foreign direct investment in India, despite the emphasis on Make in India, you see in the last four years, the level of foreign direct investment hasn't changed very much. We get about $40 billion. In comparison, Brazil gets $90 billion in the FDI. I'm not even talking about China. China is a different-- occupies a different space. We have had some successes. We have had some successes. For example, in India, we-- actually, let me start with the success, cell phones. Cell phones, we are starting to assemble more cell phones in India. And this has gone up. If you look at the cell phone imports, they have come down significantly. And that's not because we're buying fewer cell phone. It's because we're importing them. And if you look at exports, that is the black bar there. That has gone up. So India is starting to export cell phones that it assembles in India. That's good. The problem, however, is it's largely just assembly. Because one of the counterparts to the increasing cell phones is the fact that you look at electronic components, we are importing far more. If you look here, here importing far more electronics as cell phone production is increasing. In other words, we are doing assembly. Now, that's not to be sneezed at. We didn't do assembly before. And doing assembly today is a good thing. But it's not value-added assembly. It's basically importing the components and putting them together. In places which are more value-added-- and this is why I want you to look at textiles. China is moving out of textiles, right? Who's taking its place? India has moved up from about 3% of world exports in textiles to 3.3%. Now, that might seem like a reasonable number, but it's over a period of nearly 20 years. On the other hand, if you look at Bangladesh, it's gone from 2.6% to 6.4%. If you look at Vietnam, it's gone from 0.9% to 6.2%. So Vietnam and Bangladesh are absorbing the textile market, while we have plenty of people to work and we're not getting any of the textile market. That suggests we are still not seen as an export-friendly place, OK? Our businesses are not doing as well as they should. And what's holding us back, we don't have appropriate logistics power, land, office space, and qualified manpower relative to some of these other countries, even a competitor that we think is very similar to us, such as Bangladesh. And so that's something to worry about. Let me end this talk about the sectoral issues and then I'll come to what's going wrong. One place where the Modi government has had a fair amount of success is in people-oriented [INAUDIBLE]. For example, what-- I think you coined the term JAM-- what Arvind calls JAM. [? Jantung, ?] which is a bank account for everybody, Aadhaar, which is the unique ID, and mobile phones. You combine these two, you can do direct benefit runs. And what the government has been doing increasingly is do more direct benefit transfers for things like pensions, subsidies, scholarships, et cetera. That's been a great improvement in the lives of people. Because instead of going, petitioning a government officer to release their pension, they now get it directly in the bank account. That's something really important. Similarly, Clean India, Swachh Bharat, the signature program of Prime Minister Modi, in building toilets for all. Now there's a lot of complaint that these toilets are built, don't have connections to the sewerage system and essentially are non-functional. But nevertheless, a large number has been built. And there is a change to some extent in how these are viewed. So that is a benefit. India needed to end open defecation. And if we have made some progress, if not actually achieved that goal, it is an important step forward. Similarly, you know, attempts to reduce the burdens on the poor, cooking gas, for example, for the very poor, that's very beneficial because they don't have to burn wood, which can be tremendously harmful for the housewife as she breathes that wood. So cooking gas connections for the poor, another positive with the subsidies for that cooking gas being paid these direct benefit transfers. And finally, Ayushman Bharat, the attempt for health care for all, at least for the very poor, I think is an important step forward. Now all these are good steps. But, clearly, there is more need for rigorous evaluation of how they are working and to make sure they work as well as they can. For example, there was investigation of accounts. And while a lot of accounts had been opened, some hadn't been used, simply because when you give bureaucrats a number to achieve, they achieve it without necessarily thinking about the larger goal, which is accounts need to be opened, but also used. Similarly, toilets need to be built, but also used. We have to work on this to make it much more effective. But it's an important step forward. And finally, there are, as with everything in India, accusations of fraud. For example, with the health care program now there is talk of some of the private hospitals having billed the government and billed it for things that are not actually happening. Let me spend three minutes-- and then I'll give it over to you-- what's going on and why is India slowing despite all these reforms. And I would argue that, you know, there's an attempt to say this is because of the outside, the world is slowing. Well, the world actually was growing more slowly in the earlier period. Sometimes we want to pin it on oil. Well, oil is actually cheaper now than it was in the earlier period when we were growing strongly. And, of course, sometimes we want to pin it on trade. But trade has been relatively weak in both periods. I think looking to the outside, to blame the outside for what's going on is probably wrong. What is probably a better explanation is really this is a consequence of not having invested for nearly 15 years or, I should say, probably since the global financial crisis not having picked up the pace of investment. That's one. And the second is the lack of reform, of significant reform over the same period. And both those have combined with-- these are acts of omission, in some sense-- with acts of commission. The sequence of demonetization and the Goods and Services Tax essentially was a straw that seems to have broken the Indian economy's back. Because it came at a point when the economy was already relatively weak. So if you look at one investment we have slowed down relative to our peers, that's one big source of concern. But if you look at why things have slowed down, you see that post-demonetization, we had a substantial fall in growth. Then we had the goods and services tax. I think that just about that time, the economy was rebounding from the demonetization. But that-- the effects of the goods and services tax plus the NBFC crisis, all those compounded, once again, to bring these things down. The bottom line is we need to, essentially, enhance growth. Last point I will say is all this is before we even come to Arvind Subramanian's critique. Arvind argues that even this low level of growth-- he's not talking about the most recent, but he's talking up to 2016-- even that growth may be somewhat mismeasured. And essentially, this is a slide that he wants us to look at, which is in the previous period, pre-2011 growth, we had substantial investment credit, exports, imports. And Since then, what we've seen is that everything has tanked except the GDP number. Even though investment has come down, rent has come down, exports have come down, GDP has not down. That's one version of what he's trying to say. The other version of what he's trying to say-- I think this I found very interesting-- is when you look at the central government's direct tax collections, even that has fallen considerably. When a country grows richer, actually taxes go up. Because people move into higher tax brackets and can pay more. And especially with all the reforms this government has done, we should see higher taxes. Instead, real taxes have actually fallen as have nominal taxes over this period. So that's something of concern. Let me end. So basically, signs of deep malaise, growth is significantly lower, the fiscal space is narrowing, debt and [INAUDIBLE] India is losing its economic way. I will argue next time that perhaps the reason is because we are centralizing power without a persuasive economic vision. And if we do this, we risk wasting the demographic dividend. We talk a lot more about this in the next talk. Let me stop there. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Thank you, Raghu. Our commentator is Arvind Subramanian. He is currently a visiting lecturer in public policy at Harvard Kennedy School and nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics in Washington. He was the chief economic advisor to the government of India between October 2014 and July 2018, almost four years. And as chief economic advisor, he oversaw the publication of the annual economic survey of India, which became a very widely-read document. And here is a piece of statistics that you would find very interesting. The 2018 survey had 20 million views from over 190 countries in its first year of publication. So I don't think, I mean, novels are read that widely and pop books are read that widely, but the idea that an economic survey document, an annual economic survey document had 20 million views over 190 countries, we've all given Arvind credit for that. His latest best-selling book is a reflection on his time spent as the chief economic advisor, Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi-Jaitley Economy, published last year, December 2018. And while at the Peterson Institute, he wrote the award-winning book that many of us read, Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China's Economic Dominance. That was 2011, 130,000 copies sold worldwide. So let's welcome Arvind to Brown. And he'll speak for 15 minutes or so and comment on Raghu's lecture. [APPLAUSE] ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Thanks. Can the PowerPoint be-- yeah-- replaced? OK, while that's being done, let me thank Ashu, Brown, and the Watson center for inviting me to provide comments on Raghu's first lecture. It's a real pleasure to be discussing it because, I mean, as you saw, very thoughtful-- I [INAUDIBLE] and they said [INAUDIBLE].. Yeah, while this is being uploaded-- yeah? So, as you saw, it's a very, very thoughtful and comprehensive lecture. And it's a pleasure to comment on it because, you know, there's a lot to agree with. There's some amount to disagree with. And I think there's also lots to collectively think through going forward. So let me summarize Raghu's-- yeah, thanks. Let me summarize Raghu's lecture, really powerful lecture, by saying, you know, the diagnosis is that there is a deep malaise, both fiscal debt and distress. And the explanation he unfortunately didn't spend enough time on and maybe I'll kind of take issue with it even though he didn't elaborate on that, which I think is actually quite an interesting and insightful and kind of a nice way of looking at it-- I mean, I disagree with it. But I still think it's worth thinking about. The explanation is that, you know, India is losing its economic way, in part because it's centralizing power without necessarily having a concomitant economic vision, as it were. So let me take each of these-- just in the interest of time, I won't do the overview of the overview. But let me start with the diagnosis. I think Raghu and I think probably are on the same page. And I think he emphasized this quite a lot. I just want to emphasize, again, that the malaise is not recent. I think there's a much longer period of malaise afflicting the economy. My own view and I think, again, echoing very much what Raghu says, that essentially India never recovered from the global financial crisis. And if you look at-- you know, if you look at economic growth around developing countries, what motors it, the main engine, are investment and exports. Those things drive growth in India. They drove growth in East Asia. Essentially, those two engines have basically collapsed. You know, investment collapses around 2010, and you can see the difference between this period and the credit thing also collapses along with investment. And trade collapsed as well. And where I disagree with all the analysts, for reasons I will say, is that actually consumer consumption, the other engine of growth, also actually collapses and only picks up very briefly in 2016-17 and '17-'18 because of this credit bubble that the NBFCs fueled. So consumption also-- so basically everything really declines. And so the economy is a very different economy post-global financial crisis. Unfortunately, it doesn't get reflected in GDP growth. Raghu mentioned that. I don't want to talk about this. But I will come back to that later in a while. So think about the two engines of growth, I think, collapsing. And I'm not going to talk about the export collapse because I think it's much more complicated. I've been doing some recent work with a colleague. If there's Q&A, I'll talk about this. I think the export story I understand, actually, a little bit less. I think it's the investment and credit story that I want to focus on a little bit more. And, as you can see, essentially, if you look at what I call the twin balance sheet challenge-- this is what I thought afflicted the Indian economy, which is firm are overindebted because of the boom, they overinvested, things went bad, they're saddled with all these huge amount of debt. The counterpart, bad loans are with the banks, so bank balance sheets are stressed, corporate balance sheets are stressed, corporate profits are down. And, therefore, we have what Keynes might have called a magneto problem, which is essentially the financial system is jammed and firms are also heavily reluctant to invest. So I think this is, in some ways-- and this has been with us, as kind of Raghu also said, since the global financial crisis. I think I'll come to what it's morphed into in just a second. But I think this is at the heart of what has been India's challenge over the last 10 years. I think what the government and the RBI and somewhat Raghu says is that-- would say is that, look, it's one of many problems. And in any case, we've done a lot of things, including, as Raghu said, the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code. And so, I mean, we're acting. It's one among many problems, we're acting. And so what's the problem? And I'm going to argue that this kind of neither captures how critical the problem is and nor how insufficient the response has been. And I think this has been a key, I think, problem, challenge holding back the inadequacy of the response, and maybe an under-recognition of how serious the problem is. So, you know, at the risk of wading into, you know, what is Raghu's natural territory, I'm not a banking expert. But I do want to dwell on this for some time because I think that there are things which speak very deeply about the Indian economy. And I would like-- you know, there's no one better than Raghu to kind of help us think through this. But I think there are things which I think I disagree a little bit with him and maybe things which he also maybe didn't emphasize enough. And I want to go through that. So when you want to solve this problem of, you know, balance sheets on both sides being stressed, I think you want to do what I would call the five Rs. You want to do recognition. You want to recognize what the magnitude of the problem. You don't want to hide it under the carpet. Resolution, all the, you know, the bad loans with the companies, you want to kind of extract whatever value there is or liquidate it otherwise, you know, they can't clean up the balance sheet, they can't invest. And then, you know, banks have to take a hit. You have to recapitalize. Of course, the regulator has to regulate. And all of this has to be done along with changing the way banks operate in order to prevent a recurrence of the problem. Especially with the public sector banks in India, I think we've had a big problem. So how have we fared on these five Rs over the last five or six years? And I would say that on recognition, I think Raghu being modest, I think glossed over the fact that I think the asset quality review that he started in 2015 and 2016 I think did quite a lot to actually-- for the banking system to come clean. But I would argue still that, you know, this is something I have to point out, Raghu, is that, you know, for so many years, RBI the real [? stress ?] estimate of what the bank loans were were much below what they actually turned out to be and much below what many [INAUDIBLE].. So I think Raghu came along and I think [INAUDIBLE] but I think we were behind [INAUDIBLE] for very long. So recognition achieved, Raghu gets a lot of credit for that. But delay, and now, this is the problem, we are back to uncertainty because of all the things [INAUDIBLE]. We don't know now how much is the problem with the non-bank financial companies and the rebound, I mean, the consequence of those back to the public sector banks. So I would argue that, you know, the asset quality review that Raghu initiated, I think we're sorely overdue or another one, both for the NBFCs and the banks. Because, once again, there's too much uncertainty. And, sure, I think it's where I'd be most critical of, you know, the RBI and government. I think when you think about a financial system, I think it has to be regulated. I think we've had so many kind of big kind of problems in standards that, frankly, you know, we even didn't even recognize that these were problems for a very, very long time. I mean, what is happening now is that the [INAUDIBLE] blue line [INAUDIBLE].. And Raghu alluded to the fact that, you know, quality is now becoming concerned with these NBFCs. But even before that, ILFS, Raghu, 90,000 crore company escaped-- you know, it's not that people, you know, it's one thing, I think, to say, look, we knew what the problem was, but we are limited in what we can do because of all kinds of political [INAUDIBLE].. And I think that's a very valid argument. And I think there are many cases here where I think the RBI could invoke that, I think. But there are some things we just completely-- everybody missed. ILFS came out of left field, completely unrecognized, unidentified. And so we've had a series of scandals-- I mean, really major problems. And so the quality of regulation, I think, has been seriously inadequate both by the RBI and, of course, by the government. So I think regulation has been a big problem. I think on the resolution, see, remember why is resolution so important? I think if you were to ask me, describe what happened-- describe Indian development over the last 50 years in one sentence, I would say India went from socialism without entry to capitalism without exit. So basically, there's no exit in India. So why the IBC is so important, why resolution is so important is because, you know, I mean, capitalism is as much about getting out as it's about coming in. That's what Schumpeter taught us, the destruction part of creative destruction. I think we've not been successful for the reasons that Raghu mentioned. And I think this IBC is a very good initiative. But after initial successes, the magnitudes, the recoveries, the timing have all slipped. And so now, you know, we're kind of having to reassess once again. I think on the reform, very limited reform, the PSBs still thrive. Many banks which ought not to be lending, which were under some kind of close supervision had been brought back to life. But I think some good actions have been taken on the private sector banks. So that's kind of-- so my overall assessment of this is that, you know, after five hours, there's been financing. The financial system has been kept alive basically through recapitalization. I mean, the government has, in fact, pumped, you know, about 3.1 billion-- trillion rupees into the banking system. And it's been capitalized, recapitalization and through weakening of the regulatory standards. You saw the NBFCs' lending, basically a form of a weakening of regulatory standards. So, in a sense what's happened is that now they, as a consequence of limited action, limited reform, the fact that growth has been slow, we've really gone from a twin balance sheet challenge, which was the banks and the infrastructure companies, to what I would call a twin plus twin balance sheet challenge, where on the financial side, the non-bank financial companies have been added to the stress. And on the borrowing side, it's not just big infrastructure companies, but certainly real estate companies have also come into the [INAUDIBLE]. So we have a twin balance sheet-- a twin plus twin balance sheet challenge. We have rising NPAs once again and intensification of corporate stress. And this is a chart from Ashish Gupta of Credit Suisse where NPA is rising, we are coming down, but now they've jumped once again. And we are back at, you know, very high levels. And remember, this is something that I don't know whether-- I'm going to call it the Subramanian law of non-recognition, maybe Raghu would agree with that-- at any point in time in any financial system, distressed assets are 25%, 30%, 40% more than what the regulator wants you to believe or what they claim it is at any point in time. So this is almost, you know, we can't-- I mean, this [INAUDIBLE] officially, but we don't really know. So in a sense, investment and growth cannot totally revive unless we address the this twin plus twin challenge. And that's why I think it kind of echoes what Raghu said once again, that if we don't crack this financial system thing in some reasonable way, we will be in this kind of eternal cycle of, you know, bad lending or, you know, problematic lending, financing, very little reform and the cycle just continues again and again. And I don't think, frankly, we've been able to crack it. We've tried. But it really hasn't happened. And I think this is one of the big bottlenecks that the Indian system faces going forward. Now let me come to, I think, what Raghu didn't talk about. And maybe if I'm putting words in Raghu's mouth, I think he should challenge me. I think Raghu's point is that there's kind of lack of a [? persuasive ?] vision and there's a kind of centralization of power. Yeah, five minutes. What I would argue is that I think more broadly, I don't think there is a lack of vision. I think you may want to dispute the vision. But I think that there is a lot of vision and a kind of thing-- what went on. I'll give you an example, I actually think that what Raghu called the household stuff is actually a grand vision, which I would call the new welfarism, which is it's very, very kind of carefully thought out. It's the public provision of essential private goods and services to the poor. And it's, you know, bank accounts, cooking gas, toilets, housing, power, medical insurance, and now water. It's a vision. It's backed up with zealous implementation. And it's backed up with really far-sighted political thinking. So you may agree, disagree. But I think you have to accept that this is really the animating vision of the Modi government. Similarly, on GST, I think that, you know, there is a little bit of a trap-- while I agree with what Raghu said-- there's a bit of a trap when you assess all these things. I mean, it's like when the economist's wife turns to the economist and says, "Honey, do you love me?" And he says "Relative to what?" You know? So I think you have to say relative to what at the GST? Relative to what happened when before, I think it's a vast improvement. Relative to what it could have been, Raghu is absolutely right. I think, you know, implementation could have been, could have been much, much better. But I think the process is by and large, you know, it's learning, they're making mistakes, but they're learning. And so I think I'm still quite hopeful on the GST. Similarly, the IBC, it's a very reasonable response to the twin balance sheet challenge. It's just proving insufficient. So we need to correct. But you can't accuse the government of a lack of vision or not doing the right thing. Similarly, demonetization you cannot accuse it of lack of vision or whatever else you may want to accuse it of. I think it's part of some very-- and similarly, there's recently been some bold and welcome corporate tax reform. So if UPA-2 was paralysis, I think Modi 1 was hyperactivity with vision. So I think that can be the criticism. Now, I'm kind of going to cheat a little bit and anticipate what Raghu is going to say and criticize that to some extent. Because you say, Raghu, there's no vision, instead we should have an alternative vision. And the alternative vision is, do land reform, labor reform, reduce ease of doing business, improve state capacity, you know, the same litany. And my response to that list is, one, if this were so blindingly obvious and good, why haven't we been able to do it for 40 years? So even as you recommend this, you must have the, you know, some sense of how you're going to articulate the politics in a way that's going to be different from the past which would allow that to be implemented. Similarly, I think it's very important when you allocate this thing. Analytically, if these were such important binding constraints, how come we enjoyed a decade of gangbuster growth without any of this stuff? You know, between about 2002 and 2010-11, India grew gangbusters. Exports grew gangbusters. None of these things were a problem. How come suddenly they're a problem? So we have to think more carefully about this. Similarly, when you talk about, you know, a state capacity or whatever, I think you must remember in India, the intelligent question is not why is state capacity poor? I don't think it's a good question. The good question is, why is it that state capacity is so good? GST, Aadhaar, MNREGA, we can roll things out on scale-- I mean, whatever warts and all-- but it's we can't do other things on scale. So I think that's the interesting question, not that state capacity is uniformly weak, et cetera, et cetera. Similarly, when we talk about agriculture, I think Raghu was absolutely spot-on in saying agriculture is a huge problem in India. But even as you say that and even as we kind of recognize something needs to be done, we have to confront the fact that in India, almost every subject now going forward cannot be done by the center or by the states. Those days are gone. It has to be done cooperatively. Agriculture, some policies are controlled by the center, some policies are controlled by the state. Power, some aspects are controlled by the center, some aspects controlled by the state. So the question is, it's not a centralization, decentralization, but how do we do cooperative federalism? And we did it so well on the GST, why can't we do it on the other? And so that, I think, those are the kind of questions we need to be asking and thinking why. So let me end with a couple of kind of deeper thoughts, two, three minutes and I end. I said, see, while, I mean, I kind of little bit disagree with Raghu that the problem is a lack of vision, et cetera, but what then is the problem? To me, I think certainly there was a problem of underdiagnosis. If almost every major indicator is tanking and, yet, your GDP is saying numbers are pretty good, you go to a policymaker and say, look, all this is happening, but he says, no, we're doing well, GDP growth is 7%, what's the problem? So I think that this data issue that Raghu highlighted has had deeper implications than just a question of, you know, credibility and things. It has influenced the incentive for reform, the urgency for reform in a way that I think-- that applies to the GDP data, the employment data, the fiscal data, and of course, once again, the quality of assets in the banking system. If, for example, today in asset quality delivered like the Raghu asset quality review and, you know, the numbers are kind of stuck and shocking, I think the impetus for action will be, I think, quite different. I, on the financial sector, having been critical of both government and RBI, I actually am really skeptical about, can we really crack the problem? Because the problems are much deeper. Raghu, you know, governance reform of the public sector banks [? isn't ?] going to happen. I mean, it's like Einstein's definition of insanity. You know, we do the same thing over and over again, but really nothing changes, right? [? RAGHURAM RAJAN: ?] But in the past-- ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: No, no, even bank board, governance. See, because I think that's a much deeper problem is, you know, we have the stigmatized capitalism problem. I think there are skeletons all over the place, right? And regulator and government, do they really have the incentives, the ability to crack through this? And there's what I call the 4 C problem. In India, what the 4 C problem is, the investigative institutions are hyperactive, CBI, courts, CVC, CAG. So there is kind of decision-making paralysis in all public sector agencies, including the banks. So the question is, you know, can we crack this? I don't know. Because if we don't crack that, I'm not sure how we can do, you know, private investment, coming back again. I've spoken about center and states. I'll end with this two last points. I think that more and more I think about this and more and more I see what the reactions to, you know, some of the GDP work that I've done is, I think countries carry these narratives about, you know, including about growth. So, for example, India, I think there is now cognitive benchmark that because we did so well for 10 years, that we're kind of entitled to this going forward. And so it's almost as if, you know, you were lulled into believing that, you know, you do nothing and you're owed 7%, 8% growth, instead of saying, you know, no. So I think one critical understanding that India collectively needs to come to is whether 2000s were the aberration or were they normal? I think you could make the case that the 2000s were the aberration. And let me give you one piece of evidence which I'm working on. If you look at export performance of India, India in the post-global financial crisis [INAUDIBLE] has actually done better than the world. What happened in the 2000s was we did exceptionally better than the world. I mean, we did-- I think we were the fastest-growing exporting economy between 2002-- faster than China, by the way-- between 2002 and 2011, '10-'11. So, was that the normal or going back to being a normal export economy? And I don't have a very good answer for that. But I think it's very important. Because if we think that, you know, the exceptional performance was the norm, then I think we might be in for disappointments and, you know, especially if you think we can do that without all the hard work. Last point I think is that, I think in all of this when we assess governments, what is the model we have for how governments behave? And I think that's something that, you know, we need to think about much more deeply. I mean, it's possible that the model is, you know, we deliver low inflation and Raghu, his onion example was spot on. I think there's a big premium on delivering low inflation, even if there are costs elsewhere the system. I mean, if, for example, the model is you deliver low inflation and you deliver the new welfarism and you think that that's going to be good politics, then, you, know that's a very different approach to policymaking than someone who says, you know, I want to reform, I want to get growth, et cetera, et cetera. So I think our understanding of how politics and political models work I think needs to be much more sharpened, especially in the context of all that's happened in India in the last five, 10 years. Sorry I've kept you too long. Thank you very much. [APPLAUSE] ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Yes, over there. You first. About 18 minutes left, 17. Would you-- Raghu, would you like to respond to him or shall we collect responses from the audience? What would you like? RAGHURAM RAJAN: Well, I mean, since this is fresh in people's mind, let me quickly talk about a couple of things. First, Arvind, problems in the financial system are a symptom of problems elsewhere. If you don't have profitability, you get more bad loans. If you don't have reforms which allow you to put in the infrastructure, you get more bad infrastructure loans. So to think of this as exhaustion and the real problem is cleaning up in the banking system is really missing, you know, a lot. And so the question you should be asking is, why don't we have the conditions for growth that we had in the two-- before pre-financial crisis period? And blaming it all on the outside is, I think, too easy. Blaming it all on slow growth elsewhere, India is poor. It has a lot of potential for growth on its own without relying on the outside. Yes, exports helped tremendously then. They help less now. But why aren't we growing-- maybe not at 10%, 9%, 10%, but at 7%, 8%? Why are we growing so slowly? So to put financial sector problems before, I think, is probably missing the cart for the horse. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Trade over GDP should be 40%, right, or it's not there? RAGHURAM RAJAN: It's come down. It's come down. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: It's come down. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: It's come down everywhere in the world. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Everywhere in the world, so it's what? It's now 32%, 33%, something like that? yeah. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: In India, it's something like-- no, it's 45%, goods and non-factory services, but 45%. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: [INAUDIBLE] ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: [? 40%, ?] 45%. RAGHURAM RAJAN: The second, which I didn't get to and which I'll talk a little, lot more about, which is the broader vision of the Modi government, I mean, I find it strange to call demonetization something with vision. I mean, there, of course, everything has a vision behind it. The question is, is it a coherent vision? Is it a vision that takes us forward? And, unfortunately, I disagree with you on that particular act whether it signifies-- it's a vision worth having, especially if it's so poorly, if its effects are so bad. On GST, this has been in the Indian DNA for a long time. What the BJP did was it didn't have it opposing the GST and managed to get it through the parliament, which was a [? coup, ?] absolutely. But the problem was after getting it through, it wasn't properly executed. And, yes, I agree with you, cup half full, cup half empty. But this is a government which is known for implementation. Why wasn't more thought given to implementation there? Apart from that, the bankruptcy code has been talked about for a long time, as you know, both in UP and India. And Finally India did it, which is good. But, again, these are not-- these are things that are in the pipeline, so to speak, of ideas. Question is, how do you put all this together into a coherent set of ideas? And that's where I think there is incoherence. You say you want to export more. At the same time, you keep increasing tariffs, keep [? changing ?] taxes. You're not creating an environment to get an export-led economy. That's the sense in which I think we need far more coherence. You want bureaucrats to go out there and actually make decisions. You're empowering them. At the same time, you file cases against the previous government's bureaucrats for taking decisions which seemed like in the ordinary course of business. So what is your vision if you're not thinking through all this? That's the question I have. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Arvind, one question for you, what is your estimate of the negative effect of demonetization on growth? ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Look, I have not done any independent assessment. But let me say one or two things on that. One, as Raghu rightly said, I think on the informal sector, we don't know. We've had some studies which say they could be sizable. That's 0.1, 0.2. But if you see this latest study-- ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Gita Gopinath. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: --Gita [INAUDIBLE] study, I think what is surprising about that is how small and brief the impact is on GDP. To me, kind of the puzzle is why we don't see much bigger impacts on the big numbers of demonetization than I think the studies are suggesting. And I have one plausible explanation, but I know, I am not-- but so both that the impact on the informal sector was sizable, but we haven't measured it enough. But the studies on the formal things seem to suggest that they were actually, well, you know, I mean, surprisingly small. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: If an estimated 90% of the workforce or 85% of the workforce or 93%, whatever the actual number is, was in the informal sector and was hit by the monetization, then isn't it logically speaking going to cause a lot of dislocation and, therefore, a reduction in growth? RAGHURAM RAJAN: I mean, you just look at the broad GDP numbers, right? You see from that quarter of demonetization, a steep fall, steep fall for the next two or three quarters, I mean, we have the picture up there. What do you attribute that to? Because the world economy wasn't tanking at that point? ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: So Raghu, you know, I was looking at these numbers a little bit more carefully last night. If you look at, actually, the Indian annual GDP growth rate, look, first, I mean, I am not trying to defend demonetization or say-- I do think that the impact was substantially adverse in the informal sector. I'm just surprised you're not picking it up in the GDP numbers. I think the Gita Gopinath study is probably the most, you know, rigorous that we have. And Ragh, what I was surprised by looking last night is if you look at the annual numbers, all your numbers actually pick up. Say, '15-'16 is the low point, growth, you know, picks up in '16-'17 and '17-'18 according to all the-- so whatever the quarterly fluctuations, the trend after '15-'16 is up-- RAGHURAM RAJAN: Growth peaks in summer of '16-'17, in that summer. That's the first quarter by Indian calendar. And then demonetization occurs just after the second quarter. And since then, the numbers-- I mean, since the second quarter, it's been plunging. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, see, I think what is what confounds everything is that remember that the NBFC credit surge happens from about-- if you look at the numbers, '16-'17 it surges. So that, I think, masks the impact-- ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: So demonetization has an adverse impact, but non-bank finance sector is beginning to give a lot of loans. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: And maybe that's confounding-- ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: And so it makes up-- it makes up to a substantial extent. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Exactly. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: And that's why Gita Gopinath, one reason would be that's why she's not getting-- ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: No, no, she controls for all that. [INAUDIBLE] have an identification strategy one could debate here. RAGHURAM RAJAN: OK, but that's not the point. The broader point is-- ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: I mean, but-- RAGHURAM RAJAN: The point here is-- my broader point was, which I didn't come to, which I'll come to in the next talk, that one of the problems with the way economic policy is carried out in India, there are these legacy programs-- GST, et cetera-- which are normal, reasonable things to do. And then there are certain brainwaves, the corporate tax cut for example or demonetization, which essentially haven't been part of a larger sort of discussion. If one was to cut taxes today, would one cut it on corporations or would one cut it on the broader public? I mean, now there's a lot of talk about cutting it for the broader public. I mean, these are questions that need to be debated and thought through more carefully. One of the worries is, these decisions are happening without that broader discussion and how it fits into the broader reform process. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Let's go to the audience. We have 10 more minutes so let's see hands first. Rajeev hasn't had-- Rajeev [INAUDIBLE].. So I'm not sure Raghu is the right person to answer that. This is for political scientists. This is for political scientists. RAGHURAM RAJAN: Go ahead, Ashu. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: You-- Rajeev's assumption is that economics drives elections. [INAUDIBLE] ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Religious nationalism is a rather serious force-- ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: No, no-- ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: --in determining-- on one axis, you have to demonetizing, the pain inflicted by that, on another, the expectation of, you know, the benefits that religious nationalism will bring to the Hindu majority, you compare that to, you calculate which one is better. RAGHURAM RAJAN: But let me just attempt an answer. As an economist, I don't know anything about politics, right? I mean, I think the narrative was, look, those fat cats who cheated on their taxes are standing in line with you and they've lost a lot of this money. That's why the details on how much money came back were not released. Because it gave the impression that a lot of these people had lost money and they were standing in line along with you. Well, of course, they didn't. They paid 10%. That was the going rate for converting black to white. And, of course, instead of their black money sitting in their basement earning no interest, it now was earning interest in the public sector banks. But that's a different issue. The issue is, it was popular because finally somebody-- and this was how it was sold-- we're taking on the vested interests. And I'm not in any way defending the tax evaders. We need to get them. It just seemed that if you look at all that happened, the tax evaders managed to get their money back in the banks. None of them have actually been prosecuted in a significant way. This was what [INAUDIBLE] said would happen and we're seeing it happen. On the other hand, the broader public, including the very poor, suffered a lot during this period, both in terms of the harassment of standing in those lines, but also in seeing their businesses collapse because they couldn't get credit for the few days. So that is a concern, that this was not thought through on who it would impact and whether it would have any positive effect at all. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: But there is no regret on the part of the ruling regime, but they've won, kept winning elections despite all this. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: I'm not a politician either, but I have a-- a chapter in my book is devoted to this. I almost-- I don't completely buy or believe what I argued completely, but I think there is a strong [? shelling-like ?] case to be made that the economic cost and the severity were intrinsic to the political success, i.e. that that's a feature, not a bug of that. And we can go into it over dinner. I'll explain why that's the case. But I think, you know, for me, what was also-- you know, when we talk about the GST, I think the other problem with the GST was it was burdened by the fact that demonetization preceded it. And so the GST had and demonetization, as Raghu said, the GST was, I think, in concept and design, I think everyone agreed with it. But it in the short run affected the same people that demonetization affected. So GST had to carry the burden of its implementing GST, but also the burden of demonetization. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Other questions? Yes, sir. Yeah. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, so, so I think [INAUDIBLE] of the vision that I think [INAUDIBLE] would raise is this new welfarism, low inflation, [INAUDIBLE] the political model is, I mean, I'm not-- [INAUDIBLE] that's what, you know, sustains [INAUDIBLE].. Then I think even for sustaining [INAUDIBLE] I mean, part of the coherence, I don't know. But I think that, you know, it may not manifest itself in, you know, a concerted effort to kind of get growth going. [INAUDIBLE] doing enough today to keep this welfarist thing [INAUDIBLE] work or not and how long [? it will. ?] ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: So let me understand, is the argument that this new welfarism can be sustained without a significant upward accrual of-- a significant increase in tax revenue? That's not the argument, right? ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: No, I don't-- as an economist, I feel it cannot be sustained. There's no question. It can't be sustained because, as Raghu showed, the kind of, you know, debt levels are rising [INAUDIBLE].. But, I mean, the point is that you can sustain it for some period of time, especially if you can influence the narrative, you know, if you can, you know, do other kinds of things to keep it going. I think in the long run, it's not sustainable. But I think how long is long? I just don't know. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: One election cycle or two election cycles, it can work, you're saying? ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Exactly, yeah. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: It's possible. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, it's possible. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: You've got an election cycle, it is [? worth ?] [INAUDIBLE]. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Exactly. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: A second also it can work-- ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Exactly. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: --without tax revenues going, revenues going up significantly. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Exactly, you know, because you can do, you know, the off balance sheet stuff, you know, you have the narrative that, you know, India is booming and the poor are getting a thing. So, certainly, one cycle, yes. But in the long run, it's not sustainable. And I think that is it. Do we have that? Do the people have that coherence? Let's see. We'll wait and see. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: Other questions? Andrew, Andrew Foster? ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: This would also explain why IT boomed. It was a new sector-- ANDREW FOSTER: Yes, IT boomed [INAUDIBLE].. RAGHURAM RAJAN: Well, I mean, there is something to what you're saying, which is, for example, land reform, making it easier to map land, digitize it, but also acquire it, which would be beneficial to all concerned, but has the worry that the poor will be exploited by the developer and, as a result, there will be problems. So we have to have protections, absolutely. But we don't have to have an act which makes it virtually impossible to acquire land, which is what we've got now. So the government, the Modi government, again to its credit early on, tried to reform or was talking about reforming the Land Acquisition Act. And then it was accused of being suit-boot ki sarkar. The government of people were suited and booted, and it backed off. Now that's an example of a place where the sort of the political ramifications-- so while social security is the third rail here, land acquisition is the third rail in India. Because it's very easy for people to protest not just that the land was sold at a price, but they didn't get the absolute highest price that could possibly be obtained taking into account-- so there are ways of dealing with this. For example, sharing the land revenues down the line, developing land and giving people back a piece of the developed land. I mean, there are ways of doing it. But we haven't approached those. And if we don't get land acquisition right, we're not going to get the infrastructure built. And, of course, many stalled projects are stalled because they haven't got land, including, as I understand, the government's signature project, the Mumbai-Ahmedabad high speed rail is being held up because land acquisition has been difficult. So the point here is, you need to invest political capital here. But that means you have to have a sense of how it all fits together. And that goes back to my complaint, what is the overall vision of how it fits together? What are the key points on which you've go to spend capital? Because we are spending capital, but maybe not in the right places. [INTERPOSING VOICES] ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: I think very fair point, I think that most of the things that you see are kind of de novo rather, you know, but we know that taking away entitlements everywhere is difficult. But the one exception is the GST reform because it's come, you know, it's kind of hard to revamp the existing tax administration at the sector and the states. And there was a lot of pushback against that. So broadly, I think your point is right. See, I think Raghu's-- let me give you one other example why, you know, I feel I am less competent to make these judgments about vision and coherence. I think broad points is well taken. Let me give one example-- two examples. Agriculture, you know, the lack of policy stability, big problem, right? And in my time, I've been through three cycles of onion prices going up, export taxes coming down, tariffs when it comes down. And you say, I mean, this hurts farmers, I mean, your uncertainty, but if your political model is that I, you know, am willing to sacrifice farmers because I care about price inflation for the middle class, it's not such a crazy thing to do politically. Similarly, I think, Raghu, one thing I'll talk-- RAGHURAM RAJAN: No, no, but Arvind, you can't at the same time intervene wherever you want whenever you want and at the same time say I want to improve the ease of doing business, I want to make-- I mean, I understand there are some trade-offs you make, but if you are, in a sense, impulsive-- or not impulsive, but you don't have a process by which you change tariffs, by which you change exports, imports, by which you-- then you're not incentivizing the other effect. All I'm saying is the things don't hang together. ARVIND SUBRAMANIAN: Yeah, but sir, one last, just one-- see, Raghu referred to the corporate tax reform. It's come out of the blue recently. It's a major corporate tax reform and partly driven by the fact that the backs are against the wall. So it was like a kind of we have to do something to-- so I think this was an idea that was actually actively considered four or five years ago and rejected. I don't want to go into all the personal angles here. But looking back, I realize that the taunt of suit-boot ki sarkar, that the government was vulnerable to also made it difficult to undertake the corporate tax reform. It's this new welfarism that burnishes the, you know, pro-poor credentials that then you acquire political capital to do the more difficult reforms like the corporate tax reform. So I'm not saying that-- so I'm saying it's not all-- there is kind of some deeper kind of thing going on here, which we just can't dismiss so easily. And the corporate tax reform is an example of that. ASHUTOSH VARSHNEY: We are coming to the close of-- to the end of this meeting.
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Channel: Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs
Views: 266,441
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Keywords: Watson Institute, Watson International Institute, Brown University, Brown u, Brown, Public Affairs, Raghuram Rajan, India, economy, finance, economic development, banking
Id: 06uhetn_P5M
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Length: 118min 35sec (7115 seconds)
Published: Wed Oct 16 2019
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