The year 2015 was a big one for global development policy debates, marking the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the launch of the new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), also known as the “Global Goals.” But how much did major media pay attention?

Last September, Christine Zhang and I published a working paper that examined mentions of the MDGs across major English-language press and academic outlets from 2000 through 2014. We blogged highlights from the original paper here. 

More recently, we updated some of the results to account for last year’s major MDG-SDG debates and events. Figure 1 adds 2015 newspaper data on the MDGs and also includes SDG mentions over the entire time period.

Figure 1: MDG and SDG mentions across 12 major newspapers, 2000-2015

Note: The 12 newspapers included are the Los Angeles Times (USA), The New York Times (USA), USA Today, and The Washington Post (USA), the Financial Times (UK), The Guardian (UK), The Independent (UK), The Daily Telegraph (UK), The Economist (UK), The Globe and Mail (Canada), the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong SAR), and The Sydney Morning Herald (Australia). Source: LexisNexis, authors’ calculations.

Here are three key takeaways from the new graph:

• First, by measure of article counts, 2015 was the second most prominent year for media coverage of the interlinked MDG-SDG agendas. But it only saw 62 percent as much coverage as the MDGs received in 2005, the year of the U.N. Millennium Project’s final report (January), the Gleneagles G-8 summit (July), and the U.N. World Summit (September). 

• Second, global summits have consistently helped to ramp up media attention and debate. The years 2005, 2008, 2010, and 2015 all stand out as the top years for references—the same years in which the U.N. convened major summits linked to the MDGs and, in 2015, the SDGs. But U.N. summits do not guarantee attention. Notably, the 2012 Rio+20 summit that initially called for the SDGs did not cause a big splash in the media outlets examined.

• Third, recent years saw a discernible transition from MDG references to SDG references. By 2015, fully 41 percent of the relevant articles referenced only the SDGs, 30 percent mentioned both the SDGs and the MDGs, while only 29 percent mentioned the MDGs alone. 

To be clear, these results do not provide a complete assessment of MDG-SDG media references in recent years, especially because social media and other new digital technologies now account for such a large share of public debate. (Note that the graph also excludes developing country newspapers, some of which we examined in the original working paper and similarly updated with 2015 results, but those do not make much difference to the overall story.) Thus one should not consider Figure 1 a definitive analysis of whether SDG advocates were successful in their public outreach campaigns last year.  From a research perspective, the simple new-ness of “new media” renders long-term comparisons difficult. Restricting the data sample to print media offers one way to benchmark apples-to-apples coverage across the period of interest back to 2000.

That said, a seasoned media observer once suggested to me that traditional news outlets are inherently less connected to the bottom-up nature of emerging SDG conversations, and hence less likely to cover the SDGs accurately than new media channels in which user-generated content helps to drive the conversation. It’s an interesting hypothesis worth testing. 

At a minimum, 2015 was a significant year for public conversations about the MDGs and SDGs, even if it might not have matched the peak year of 2005. An interesting line of research could seek to explain why.  In any case, for analysts of the new SDGs, more sophisticated forms of global media benchmarking will undoubtedly be in order through to the new deadline of 2030. 

Click here to read the blog in English »

2016: une année décisive

Les décideurs politiques et les spécialistes du développement sont désormais confrontés à une nouvelle série d’enjeux suite à l’établissement, par consensus mondial, du triumvirat composé du Programme d’action d’Addis-Abeba, du Programme d’action 2030 et de l’Accord de Paris [1]  : mise en œuvre, suivi et passage en revue. Les professionnels des politiques de développement doivent aborder ces enjeux tout en y intégrant ces trois piliers du développement durable que sont le développement social, la croissance économique et la protection environnementale, sans oublier les trois volets intersectoriels du consensus mondial précités, tout cela en opérant au sein d’un contexte dans lequel la planification des politiques reste accomplie de façon cloisonnée. Ils doivent également incorporer le caractère universel de ces nouveaux accords en tenant compte des différentes circonstances nationales ; à savoir les divers besoins, réalités, capacités, niveaux de développement nationaux, de même que les diverses priorités et politiques nationales. Ils doivent aussi accroître considérablement l’allocation des ressources et les moyens de mise en œuvre (comme le financement, le renforcement des capacités et le transfert de technologies) pour changer les choses et améliorer les nouveaux partenariats réunissant plusieurs parties prenantes en vue de restreindre les mouvements mondiaux de toutes sortes (notamment la migration, le terrorisme, les maladies, la fiscalité, les phénomènes météorologiques extrêmes et la révolution numérique) dans un monde résolument interconnecté. Il va sans dire que la tâche est très ambitieuse !

Ces difficultés sont à l’origine de nouveaux accords nationaux et internationaux visant à honorer les engagements pris pour répondre à ces enjeux sans précédent. Plusieurs États africains ont déjà commencé à créer des comités interministériels et des groupes de travail pour assurer l’alignement entre les objectifs mondiaux et les processus, les aspirations et les priorités actuels. 

L’Afrique prépare, en collaboration avec la communauté internationale, le premier Forum politique de haut niveau depuis l’adoption du programme d’action 2030 qui aura lieu en juillet 2016 et dont le thème sera « Veiller à ce que nul ne soit laissé pour compte ». Afin d’éclairer le leadership, l’orientation et les recommandations relatifs au Programme d’action 2030, six pays africains [2] parmi les 22 États membres de l’ONU se sont portés volontaires pour présenter des études nationales sur le travail accompli en vue d’atteindre les Objectifs de développement durable (ODD), soit une opportunité unique de fournir un examen objectif sans compromis et de mettre en avant les leviers d’exploitation et les limites à surmonter afin d’avoir un impact.

Les Nations Unies ont déployé de nombreux efforts de coordination parallèlement au travail de terrain réalisé par l’Afrique : en premier lieu, la création d’un groupe de travail interinstitutions chargé de préparer le forum sur le financement du développement de suivi synchronisé avec le Forum mondial pour l’infrastructure, qui consultera sur les investissements en infrastructures, un aspect crucial pour le continent ; un groupe composé de 10 représentants nommés dont la mission consiste à soutenir le Mécanisme de facilitation des technologies aux fins du développement, du transfert et de la diffusion de technologies pour les ODD, soit un autre aspect très important pour l’Afrique ; et enfin une équipe de conseillers indépendants dont la mission consiste à fournir des conseils sur le positionnement à plus long terme du système de développement de l’ONU dans le contexte du Programme 2030 communément appelé  « UN fit for purpose », parmi tant d’autres efforts.

Ces obligations bureaucratiques écrasantes pèseront à elles seules lourdement sur les capacités limitées de l’Afrique. C’est la raison pour laquelle le continent à tout intérêt à regrouper ses ressources en tirant parti de ses robustes réseaux régionaux pour atténuer cet obstacle de façon cohérente et coordonnée et en capitalisant sur la convergence entre les textes nouvellement adoptés et l’Agenda 2063, le programme de transformation mis en place par l’Union Africaine sur une durée de 50 ans, avec l’aide d’institutions panafricaines.

Outre les échelons nationaux et internationaux, il convient de tenir compte d’une troisième dimension : l’échelon régional. Ainsi, les trois principaux accords conclus en 2015 privilégiaient le soutien aux projets et aux cadres de coopération encourageant l’intégration régionale et sous-régionale, en particulier en Afrique. [3] C’est la raison pour laquelle des politiques industrielles communes et cohérentes relatives aux chaînes de valeur régionales formulées par des institutions régionales renforcées et portées par un leadership transformationnel volontariste s’imposent comme le meilleur moyen de favoriser l’insertion de l’Afrique au sein de l’économie mondiale.

L’Afrique considère depuis longtemps l’intégration économique régionale, partie intégrante de ses principaux « piliers », à savoir les huit Communautés économiques régionales (CER), comme étant une stratégie de développement de base.

Le continent s’est manifestement engagé dans cette voie : l’été dernier, trois CER, le Marché commun pour l’Afrique de l’Est et de l’Afrique australe (COMESA), la Communauté d’Afrique de l’Est (CAE) et la Communauté de développement de l’Afrique de l’Est (SADC) ont créé le Traité de libre-échange tripartite (TFTA) regroupant 26 pays, avec plus de 600 millions d’habitants et un PIB global de mille milliards de dollars US. Cet accord tripartite ouvre la voie à l’accord « méga-régional » de l’Afrique, la Zone de libre échange continentale (CFTA) et à l’instauration d’une vaste communauté économique africaine. Si la régionalisation permet la libre circulation des personnes, des capitaux, des biens et des services, c’est la connectivité intra-africaine accrue en découlant qui stimulera les échanges commerciaux au sein de l’Afrique, favorisera la croissance, créera des emplois et attira des investissements. Il devrait enfin faire démarrer l’industrialisation, l’innovation et la compétitivité. À ces fins, les institutions panafricaines, soucieuses d’exploiter les récentes performances favorables enregistrés par le continent, redoublent d’efforts pour créer un environnement propice à l’harmonisation des politiques et des réglementations et aux économies d’échelle.

L’infrastructure, sans laquelle toute connectivité est impossible, constitue indéniablement le fondement de tout futur plan de régionalisation. Outre l’intégration du marché et le développement industriel, le développement des infrastructures est l’un des trois piliers de la stratégie du TFTA. De la même manière, l’agence pour le Nouveau partenariat économique pour le développement en Afrique (NEPAD), l’organe technique de l’Union africaine (UA) chargé de planifier et coordonner la mise en œuvre des priorités continentales et des programmes régionaux, a adopté l’intégration régionale en tant que méthode stratégique pour l’infrastructure. Le NEPAD a d’ailleurs organisé, en juin 2014, le Sommet de Dakar sur le financement des infrastructures ayant abouti à l’adoption du Programme d’action de Dakar qui présente des options en matière de mobilisation d’investissements dans des projets de développement des infrastructures, en commençant par 16 projets bancables clés issus du programme de développement des infrastructures en Afrique (PIDA). Il est intéressant de noter que ces « mégaprojets du NEPAD visant à transformer l’Afrique » ont tous une portée régionale.

En complémentant les efforts du NEPAD et du TFTA, le Réseau d’affaires continental a été formé pour promouvoir le dialogue entre les secteurs public et privé sur la thématique de l’investissement en infrastructures régionales. Le Fond Africa50 pour l’infrastructure a été constitué en guise de nouvelle plateforme de prestation gérée commercialement en vue de combler l’énorme vide au niveau du financement des infrastructures en Afrique, un trou évaluée à 50 milliards de dollars US par an.

L’élaboration de propositions propres et les progrès institutionnels récemment observés témoignent de la détermination de l’Afrique à accélérer le développement des infrastructures, et donc la régionalisation. Lors du dernier sommet de l’UA, le Comité d’orientation des chefs d’État et de gouvernement a approuvé l’institutionnalisation d’une Semaine PIDA organisée par la Banque africaine de développement (BAD) en vue d’assurer le suivi des progrès accomplis.

L’élan des projets énergétiques régionaux en Afrique

Les partenariats énergétiques indiqués ci-dessous illustrent les avantages potentiels des méthodes de mise en œuvre et de suivi transfrontalières : l’Africa Power Vision (APV) réalisée avec Power Africa, le modèle du Centre pour les énergies renouvelables et l’efficacité énergétique(ECREEE) de la CEDEAO accompagnant l’initiative Énergie Durable pour Tous (SE4LL), une initiative mise en œuvre par la plateforme Africaine et la solution Africa GreenCo basée sur le PIDA.

• Africa Power Vision : Les ministres Africains de l’énergie et des finances réunis à l’occasion du Forum économique mondial (FEM) de Davos en 2014 ont décidé de créer l’APV. La vision fournit un modèle stratégique de mobilisation de ressources afin de permettre aux entreprises, aux industries et aux foyers africains d’avoir un accès plus rapide à l’énergie moderne. Elle dresse une liste de projets énergétiques basés sur des priorités régionales établies par l’Afrique et extraites en grande partie du Programme d’action prioritaire du PIDA, à savoir l’éventail de projets à court terme devant être achevés à l’horizon 2020. Le projet hydroélectrique Inga III qui changera les règles du jeu, l’emblématique projet solaire DESERTEC Sahara et la gigantesque ligne de transport d’électricité nord-sud couvrant la quasi-totalité du TFTA sont parmi les 13 projets sélectionnés. La note conceptuelle et le plan de mise en œuvre intitulés « De la vision à l’action » élaborés par le NEPAD, en collaboration avec l’initiative Power Africa dirigée par le gouvernement américain ont été approuvés lors du Sommet de l’UA de janvier 2015. Le paquet présente des mesures permettant de surmonter les impasses afin d’atteindre des objectifs quantifiables, la « méthode d’accélération » basée sur l’Outil de classement de projets par ordre de priorité (PPCT en anglais), l’atténuation des risques et le financement de projets d’électricité. Une conception innovante a été élaborée pour éviter les doublons, économiser des ressources, améliorer la coordination et encourager des actions transformatrices en établissant des Conseillers transactionnels Power Africa – APV portant deux casquettes, qui supervisent les plans d’investissement jusqu’à la clôture financière si et quand des projets énergétiques d’intérêt commun viennent à se chevaucher. Globalement, comme il est basé sur le PIDA, le partenariat APV permet de mutualiser les expertises tout en promouvant l’intégration économique régionale au niveau de l’électrification.

• Centre pour les énergies renouvelables et l’efficience énergétique de la CEDEAO : Le secrétaire général des Nations Unies, Ban Ki-moon a lancé l’initiative Énergie durable pour tous dans le monde entier dès 2011, dans le triple objectif de garantir l’accès universel à des services énergétiques modernes, doubler le taux mondial d’amélioration de l’efficacité énergétique et doubler la proportion d'énergies renouvelables dans le bouquet énergétique mondial à l’horizon 2030. Depuis sa création, SE4ALL a suscité un fort enthousiasme sur le continent et compte désormais 44 pays africains participants. Par conséquent, la plateforme africaine SE4ALL a été la première plateforme lancée en 2013. Organisée par la BAD en partenariat avec la Commission de l’UA, le NEPAD et le Programme des Nations Unies pour le développement (PNUD), son rôle consiste à faciliter la mise en œuvre de SE4ALL sur le continent. Le troisième atelier annuel de la plateforme africaine de SE4ALL tenu à Abidjan en février dernier a révélé le potentiel de cette « coalition créative » (Yumkella 2014) pour produire des résultats tant au niveau des plans d’action nationaux et des approches régionales concertées conformes à la vision continentale qu’à celui de l’ODD7 pour l’énergie et aux Contributions prévues déterminées au niveau national (CPDN) créés pour l’Accord de Paris. Avant tout, l’atelier a prouvé que la plateforme est capable de commencer efficacement à harmoniser les processus pour obtenir un résultat dans les différents pays. En dépit du fait que les États membres de la CEDEAO participent à SE4ALL, les ministres ouest-africains ont chargé leur centre énergétique régional, le CEREEC, de coordonner la mise en œuvre des Programmes d’action de SE4ALL (PA), qui sont des documents décrivant les mesures que doivent prendre les pays pour satisfaire les objectifs en matière d’énergies renouvelables et de là les Prospectus d’investissement (PI), les documents présentant les critères d’investissement relatifs aux PA. Par conséquent, la Politique relative aux énergies renouvelables (PER) et la Politique relative à l’efficacité énergétique (PEE) de la CEDEAO ont été formulées et adoptées. Un cadre de surveillance régional visant à enrichir un Cadre de suivi mondial, le système de mesure et de préparation de rapports SE4ALL, est en cours de conception. L’efficace modèle du CEREEC, en créant un pont entre les inventaires nationaux et les acteurs mondiaux, est sur le point d’être reproduit dans deux autres régions d’Afrique, la CAE et la SADC, avec l’appui de l’Organisation des Nations Unies pour le développement industriel (ONUDI).

• Africa GreenCo : Enfin, des initiatives comme Africa GreenCo sont en cours d’incubation. Ce véhicule prometteur, actuellement financé au moyen d’une subvention accordée par la Fondation Rockefeller, se veut à la fois un négociant et un courtier en électricité indépendamment géré dont la fonction consiste à déplacer de l’électricité là où elle est nécessaire. Ainsi, Africa GreenCo cherche à capitaliser sur les projets énergétiques du PIDA : en sa qualité d’acheteur intermédiaire solvable, elle prévoit d’utiliser à l’avenir son statut régional en guise de valeur ajoutée au niveau de la garantie contre les risques. À ce jour, Africa GreenCo continue à peaufiner les aspects juridiques, réglementaires, techniques et financiers de sa future structure et forge des liens avec des parties prenantes clés du secteur (États membres, banques de développement multilatérales, services publics africains de génération et d’interconnexion appelés pools énergétiques) avant l’achèvement de son étude de faisabilité en juin 2016.

Les partenariats précités indiquent des tendances encourageantes en direction d’une coopération plus symbiotique entre les différentes parties prenantes. Comme ils relèvent d’initiatives « faites maison », il est important de ne pas perdre de vue la dimension continentale. D’une part, les plans élaborés par l’Afrique ont plus de chances de réussir que des solutions importées uniformes et d’autre part, des efforts cohérents et combinés allant dans la même direction renforcent la confiance et l’émulation et attirent des soutiens. Ceci implique que pour remplir les accords intergouvernementaux, il est nécessaire avant tout de les adapter aux réalités locales à travers un processus d’intégration respectueux de l’espace politique. Cette intégration peut ensuite faire l’objet d’ajustements en fonction d’expériences fondées sur des données et des preuves concrètes. Entre ces engagements mondiaux et les procédures nationales, la dimension nationale demeure le lien indispensable : permettre aux pays de contourner le caractère artificiel de leurs frontières héritées de l’époque coloniale et leur offrir des choix concrets pour éradiquer la pauvreté dans l’unité. L’intégration régionale est donc le préambule à l’opérationnalisation du développement durable au sein de l’Afrique et une étape clé de son parcours en direction d’une participation active sur la scène mondiale. La régionalisation peut également faire évoluer les relations internationales, à condition qu’elle aille de pair avec un multilatéralisme équitable et une gestion durable des connaissances globales. C’est pourquoi l’ouverture qui en découle et la complexité rencontrée sont autant de paramètres utiles pour enrichir la conception de réponses locales pertinentes.

Ces réussites ouvrent de grandes perspectives en termes de nouvelles expériences et synergies. Elles représentent pour moi la promesse d’un monde meilleur. Celle que je me plais à imaginer est empreinte d’écosystèmes mutuellement bénéfiques pour les personnes et la planète. Elle encourage les liens inversés où tout le monde est gagnant, c’est-à-dire un monde où les économies en développement ont des retombées plus positives sur les pays industriels. C’est un monde où, par exemple, une région d’Afrique pourrait tirer des leçons de la crise grecque et vice-versa : un monde où la Chine pourrait tirer des enseignements du Corridor de développement de Maputo pour sa ceinture économique de la route de la soie. Un monde dans lequel des instituts jumelés effectuant des travaux de recherche conjoints dans les différents centres de connaissances régionaux prospéreraient, où des « fab labs » innovateurs pourraient ambitionner une aventure spatiale basée sur des déchets électroniques recyclés en imprimantes 3D. Dans un tel monde, des collaborations innovantes dans les domaines des sciences, des technologies, de l’ingénierie et des mathématiques (STEM) seraient encouragées. Celles-ci encourageraient la participation des femmes, et aussi celle de la diaspora en vue de développer des avancées techniques solides du point de vue écologique. Des efforts proportionnels, une volonté sans faille, une ingénuité autochtone et une créativité sans limites mettent cet avenir plus souriant à notre portée.

Au-delà de la reconnaissance de la voix africaine tout au long des processus intergouvernementaux, l’Afrique doit désormais consolider ses avancées en maintenant fermement sa position et en protégeant ses gains tout au long de la phase préliminaire. Le continent doit de toute urgence définir des tactiques spécifiques offrant le plus grand potentiel en termes d’inclusion et de création de capacités de production. Parallèlement, les acteurs du développement africain doivent démarrer un cycle vertueux d’apprentissage par la pratique en vue de créer une philosophie de développement endogène prenant en considération les meilleures pratiques adaptables et les échecs. Néanmoins, la seule approche capable de produire à la fois une transformation structurelle et un changement informé conformes aux stratégies à long terme propres au continent et dirigées par lui est… l’intégration régionale.  

[1] Issus respectivement des négociations intergouvernementales à l’occasion de la Troisième Conférence sur le financement du développement (FFD3), l’Agenda du développement post 2015 et la Conférence des Nations Unies sur les changements climatiques (COP21).

[2] Égypte, Madagascar, Maroc, Sierra Leone, Togo et Ouganda

[3] Comme précisé au Programme d’action d’Addis-Abeba par exemple : « Nous engageons instamment la communauté internationale, notamment les institutions financières internationales et les banques multilatérales et régionales de développement, à accroître leur soutien aux projets et aux cadres de coopération qui favorisent cette intégration régionale et sous régionale, notamment en Afrique, et qui améliorent la participation et l’intégration des entreprises et notamment des petites entreprises industrielles, en particulier celles des pays en développement, dans les chaînes de valeur mondiales et les marchés mondiaux. »

Keeping with tradition, we start the year with a compendium of forecasts for 2016 from our guest bloggers and ourselves.  At the end of the year, we will assess how we did (for last year’s forecasting performance, click here).

The prevailing sentiment about economic developments during 2016 is decidedly mixed. There are positive and negative views, sometimes from the same source. Here is a sampling:

On the negative side, “emerging economies will continue to disappoint;” “ODA will be squeezed by refugee costs (and climate change financing commitments);” “geopolitical tensions will remain;” “the dollar will be stronger with a severe impact on emerging economies;” and a range of idiosyncratic, political risks: weak governance and terrorist threats in Kenya; declining investor confidence and rising social strife in South Africa; corruption scandals in Brazil; and low oil prices coupled with domestic and geopolitical tensions in Russia.

On the positive side, “oil prices will remain low;” “the Islamic State will be defeated;” “the effect of monetary policy normalization will be very limited;” “food prices will remain low or fall, helping reduce global hunger;” “African countries will improve cereal yields;” “OECD countries will accept a record number of refugees and migrants;” “oil exporters will reform their economies;” and “peace agreements to end the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen will be signed.”

An emerging theme is whether the disappointments in developing country growth in 2015 stem from idiosyncratic factors in specific countries—especially the BRICS, Turkey, and Indonesia—or whether those idiosyncratic factors, often associated with domestic political developments, are symptomatic of a broader issue of a slowing down of global convergence. Indeed, this theme of whether convergence remains a strong force that will continue to dominate developing country prospects, or a weak force that is all too easily offset by other factors, will likely remain one of the critical unknowns of 2016.

In summary, it is fair to say that with views as diverse as those we received, the picture for 2016 is complicated to say the least.

There is no analytical clarity in the global economy, despite forecasts from most major organizations (e.g., the IMF) that growth will be better in 2016 than in 2015 in every region except perhaps East Asia (although Asia will still probably record higher growth than anywhere else).

The fears generated by a slowing of one of the main engines of the global economy over the past decade, namely China, are palpable. The big story of 2016 is perhaps that it is an emerging economy, China, which is the major source of uncertainty over this year’s global outlook. While prospects for the major advanced economies—the USA, Europe, and Japan—are relatively stable, it is the developing world where there is the least clarity over the short- term outlook. Certainly, the volatility in global stock markets in the first days of the year suggests that volatility, risk aversion, and differences of views over short-term developments are all high as 2016 begins.

But there is at least one bright note. Almost certainly, prospects will improve for almost 200 million people who were living in countries that last year remained outside the scope of a normally functioning global economy. In Myanmar, Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, economic conditions will improve as a result of recent political developments. In addition, in 2016 there will probably be at least 100 million more people joining the global middle class—those living in households with incomes of $10-100 a day (2005 PPP). Good news for them but a reminder that the task of moving towards a world with sustainable consumption and production patterns remains huge.

There was one consensus thread among our bloggers—all the Europeans appear consumed by the Euro 2016 soccer event (“Spain, France, or Germany will win”), while only one blogger dared to comment on the Olympics (that Brazil would do twice as well as in 2012). It seems that sports will be less complicated than economics in 2016.

On February 9, President Obama submitted his FY 2017 budget request to Congress. The proposed international affairs budget is down 1 percent from current funding levels and 12 percent (in constant dollars) since 2010, better than many domestic accounts. In addition, outside the regular budget, the administration is proposing $1.8 billion ($376 million from the international affairs budget account) to meet the latest pandemic—the Zika virus. Given the budget environment, the proposed amounts for the international affairs budget seem reasonable.

But from a long-term perspective, the budget is alarming. It seems unable to take account of global trends, it relies on fractured and ad hoc processes, and it is excessively siloed into pre-determined sectors.

Being satisfied with relatively small budget cuts does not face the reality of far greater and more pressing challenges today than in 2010. Today, Iraq and Afghanistan are still demanding sizable budget resources. We need to respond to Russia’s muscle-flexing by demonstrating our commitment to its independent neighbors. The effort to move HIV/AIDS to a more sustainable model is commendable but showing minimal success, so U.S. funding cannot slip. The Ebola crisis has been succeeded by the Zika virus. The Middle East is unstable and violent, with half the population of Syria killed or displaced. Sixty million displaced persons is the highest level ever reached. The world is addressing four Level 3 humanitarian crises, an unprecedented number. The fear of terrorism is spreading and disrupting rational political dialogue. Domestic violence and civil strife is increasing in Central America. Free expression is under siege in many countries and civil societies are in need of reinforcement.

Many of these challenges reflect an underinvestment in development in the past. We are using a Rube Goldberg budget system that cobbles together funding from multiple sources for a single objective and locks in funding several years before a penny flows, making it difficult to adjust to changing circumstances.

The budgeting system problem

The 2017 budget uses a gimmick that may not be sustainable. To fund the Iraq war, the Bush administration invented an off-budget account (Overseas Contingent Operations, or OCO, a successor to earlier emergency funding) that does not count against the annual budget caps. The State Department and USAID got part of their budgets starting in 2012 from this account. OCO for FY 2017 is proposed at one-quarter of the international affairs budget. The problem is that OCO cannot be counted on in the long-term, and the sustainable base budget for FY 2017 is down 30 percent from FY 2010 in constant dollars.

The budget process is also absurdly long. The Obama administration began planning the FY 2016 budget in the spring of 2014, roughly 18 months before Congressional appropriations. Typically, it could take another six months for agency officials and appropriation committees to agree on country and program allocations. Only then, 30 months later, can U.S. development professionals working overseas get on with the business of putting those resources to work.  

This budget process, with its long timeframes and pre-determined earmarks and presidential initiatives, means that despite best efforts by USAID, it is difficult to respect “local ownership” of development—something that development experience demonstrates is fundamental to successful and sustainable development.

Presidential initiatives have their place as a way to bring along political allies and the American populace. It is also appropriate and constructive for Congress to weigh in on funding priorities. But it can be counterproductive to effective development when presidential initiatives and congressional earmarks dictate at the micro level and restrict flexibility in implementation, especially in a rapidly changing world with frequent crises. 

Another problem with the current budget system is that most but not all sectors are protected by budget accounts or earmarks. Health is protected and the funding divided into various sub-accounts. Education and agriculture get earmarks. New in the FY 2016 appropriations bill is a separate line item for democracy.

Another structural issue is the crisis-reactive nature of our assistance programs. Health, which garners the lion’s share of U.S. economic assistance, has been dominated for nearly two decades by responses to global crises — first massive funding for combatting HIV/AIDS, followed by significant funding to tackle malaria, Ebola, and now the Zika virus. It is funding by individual disease. Crisis galvanizes political and popular support for the here and now. But what if we had focused on building up national health systems for the last 20 years rather than fighting one-off diseases? If we moved to more preventive approaches now, maybe in 10 or 20 years the pandemic of the day could be met less by the U.S. ramping up in a crisis mode and more by the health systems in those countries affected, with the U.S. playing a supportive and technical role rather than the core funding role. 

These issues are examples of why it is imperative for the next administration and congress to engage in a strategic dialogue on the objectives and priorities of foreign assistance programs, both in funding levels and how the funds are used. It is time to move away from the current structure that resembles building a Cadillac from parts of models stretching from 1949 to 1973, as in the Johnny Cash song "One Piece at A Time.”

Figure 1: How we build our budget

Source: Abernathyautoparts, CC BY-SA 2.5

It is not unrealistic to envisage a more strategic approach. One option is to return to the approach in the 1970s, when all development funding was put into one of just five or six functional accounts, and provide some flexibility in moving funds between accounts.

Policymakers who believe that America is an exceptional or indispensable nation and that world problems do not get solved without American involvement need to take a hard look at whether they are providing the U.S. government with the required diplomatic and development tools. It is high time for U.S. policymakers to take a more strategic approach to the level of funding of international affairs and how the U.S. uses its foreign assistance. The inauguration of a new president and Congress in 2017 offers the opportunity to seize this challenge.

At a legislative conference in Cambridge, Ohio, Bruce Katz stressed the importance of cities and metro areas to the state's overall prosperity. Acknowledging the decline of Ohio's older industrial cities, Katz noted the area's many assets and argued for a focus on innovation, human capital, infrastructure, and quality communities as means to revitalize the region. 

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Introduction

During 2006, the United States saw a considerable upswing in the number of new mortgage defaults and foreclosure filings. By 2007, that upswing had become a tidal wave. Today, national homeownership rates are falling, while more than a million American families have already lost their homes to foreclosure. Across the country, boarded houses are appearing on once stable blocks. Some of the hardest hit communities are in older industrial cities, particularly Midwestern cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis.

Although most media attention has focused on the role of the federal government in stemming this crisis, states have the legal powers, financial resources, and political will to mitigate its impact. Some state governments have taken action, negotiating compacts with mortgage lenders, enacting state laws regulating mortgage lending, and creating so-called “rescue funds.” Governors such as Schwarzenegger in California, Strickland in Ohio, and Patrick in Massachusetts have taken the lead on this issue. State action so far, however, has just begun to address a still unfolding, multidimensional crisis. If the issue is to be addressed successfully and at least some of its damage mitigated, better designed, comprehensive strategies are needed.

This paper describes how state government can tackle both the immediate problems caused by the wave of mortgage foreclosures and prevent the same thing from happening again. After a short overview of the crisis and its effect on America’s towns and cities, the paper outlines options available to state government, and offers ten specific action steps, representing the most appropriate and potentially effective strategies available for coping with the varying dimensions of the problem.

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Vanda Felbab-Brown writes that after more than a decade of struggles against al-Qaida and the Taliban, U.S. President Barack Obama hoped to extricate the United States from participating militarily in Afghanistan’s counterinsurgency. But as the end of his presidency approaches in the summer of 2016, Afghanistan again faces crisis. Very few trends in the country are going well. The U.S. drone killing of the Taliban leader Mullah Akhtar Mohammad Mansour in Baluchistan, Pakistan in May 2016 provides a fillip to the embattled Afghan government and may in the long-term result in fragmentation and internal withering of the Taliban. But that outcome is not guaranteed nor likely to materialize quickly. In fact, the Taliban swiftly announced Mawlawi Haibatullah Akhundzada, a deputy to Mullah Mansour, as its new leader to avoid the tensions and chaos that surrounded Mansour’s appointment.

The Taliban has mounted and sustained its toughest military campaign in years, and the war has become bloodier than ever. Despite the Taliban’s internal difficulties, its military energy shows no signs of fizzling out. The influence of the particularly vicious Haqqani network within the Taliban has grown. Moreover, the Islamic State established itself in Afghanistan in 2015, although it faces multiple strong countervailing forces.

Most ominously, Afghanistan’s political scene remains fractious and polarized. The National Unity Government of President Ashraf Ghani and his chief executive officer and rival Abdullah Abdullah (created in the wake of the highly contested presidential elections of 2014) has never really found its feet. Fundamental structural problems of the government remain unaddressed, and after two years in power the government may face its end as a result of a possible Loya Jirga assembly in the fall of 2016. Even if the Jirga does not meet, Afghanistan’s leadership will face potentially debilitating crises of legitimacy. Afghanistan’s elite has not taken any steps to heal the country’s deep and broad political wounds. Instead, the dominant mode of politics is to plot the demise of the government and focus on a parochial accumulation of one’s power at the expense of the country’s national interest, and even the very survival of the post-2001 order.

Struggling to deliver the promised improvements in government efficiency and reduction in corruption, President Ghani staked the two first years of his presidency on negotiations with the Taliban. In order to facilitate the negotiations, he reached out to Pakistan in a daring and politically costly gambit in the fall of 2014 and repeatedly since. The payoff so far has been limited and Ghani’s political space is shrinking. The death of Mullah Mansour is likely to complicate the process even more.

In the paper, Felbab-Brown discusses the evolving international support for Afghanistan; military developments in Afghanistan since the fall of 2014 and the intensity of the Taliban’s battlefield thrust; the Taliban’s internal cohesion, fragmentation and leadership successions; President Ghani’s outreach to Pakistan and the effort to negotiate with the Taliban; and Afghan political processes and trends.

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• Blood and faith in Afghanistan: A June 2016 update

The United States exported and imported $4.0 trillion worth of international goods in 2014, making it the world’s second-largest trader, after China. The responsibility for moving all those products falls to the country’s 400-plus seaports, airports, and border-crossing facilities, though a smaller group does most of the country’s heavy lifting. In fact, ports in just 10 metropolitan areas move 60 percent of all international goods by value.

This level of concentrated port activity creates a spatial mismatch in the country’s trade flows. While a few ports handle a majority of international trade, few of the goods leaving or entering those ports start or end their journey in that port’s local market: 96 percent actually move to or from other parts of the United States. As a result, problems within and outside certain port facilities—whether a labor dispute like the recent West Coast port strike or congestion near Philadelphia’s seaport or airport—quickly become logistical costs borne by the entire country.

The 10 largest metropolitan port complexes represent a wide range of U.S. geographies, modal specialties, and international connections. Total volumes for these port complexes, listed below, are based on an aggregation of imports and exports across all sea, air, truck, rail, and pipeline facilities in each region. All data are from 2010, and you can find more detailed metrics within the Metro Freight interactive.

10. Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI

Total Value: $92.8 billion
Local Share: 4.6 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($41.5 billion)

A traditional Midwest powerhouse of production, metropolitan Chicago is home to a variety of industries and infrastructure assets that connect it to the Midwest and global marketplace. The proximity of factories, warehouses, and rail lines to its major port facilities, particularly O'Hare International Airport, places Chicago at a strategic crossroads for goods distribution.

9. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA

Total Value: $103.9 billion
Local Share: 4.4 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($77.6 billion)

The San Francisco metro area—and the Bay Area as a whole—may be more well-known as a center for tech innovation, but it also contains some of the largest port facilities in the country. The Port of Oakland and the Port of San Francisco  account for the bulk of water traffic ($55.3 billion overall) moving through the area, while Oakland International Airport and San Francisco International Airport help transport nearly $48.6 billion in electronics, precision instruments, and other high-value goods.

8. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA

Total Value: $116.9 billion
Local Share: 8.2 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($89.4 billion)

The Seattle metro area plays a critical role cycling goods throughout the Pacific Northwest and the rest of the country, largely owing to the key connections its port facilities have forged with China ($47.9 billion) and Japan ($22.0 billion). Valuable transportation equipment and electronics represent a large chunk of these port volumes ($52.7 billion), although sizable amounts of machinery, textiles, and agricultural products are also processed through area facilities. The Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma are especially important in this respect, as they look to partner more closely in years to come.

7. Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL

Total Value: $123.7 billion
Local Share: 2.0 percent
Top Trade Region: Latin America ($97.2 billion)

Miami is the country’s primary gateway to Latin America, especially when excluding petroleum-related trade moving through Gulf Coast ports. And while the region and state have made impressive investments at the Port Miami seaport, it is actually Miami International Airport that generates the most regional trade ($74.8 billion). Miami’s facilities are a key component of Florida’s statewide strategy to use trade and logistics to grow local industries.

6. Laredo, TX

Total Value: $124.4 billion
Local Share: 0.0 percent
Top Trade Region: NAFTA ($121.0 billion)

Laredo may only house 250,000 people, but it might be the most important Texas metro area you’ve never heard of, considering that virtually every international good passing through it heads somewhere else in the U.S. The border town is the southernmost point of Interstate 35—the so-called NAFTA superhighway—and handles almost half of U.S./Mexican surface trade. With automotive and other supply chains continuing to stretch across the binational border, Laredo is poised to grow in importance over the coming years.

5. Anchorage, AK

Total Value: $137.4 billion
Local Share: 0.2 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($136.0 billion)

Anchorage may be thousands of miles from the closest U.S. market, but it has a long legacy as a major connector to the Pacific marketplace, resting less than 9.5 hours by air from 90 percent of the industrialized world. In particular, Ted Stevens International Airport was the cargo hub for Northwest Airlines Cargo, once the country’s largest carrier, and still has a vibrant freight business led by FedEx Express and UPS hubs. Continued growth in high-value, low-weight goods trade with Asia can only benefit Anchorage’s cargo business.

4. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX

Total Value: $168.1 billion
Local Share: 10.6 percent
Top Trade Region: Latin America ($48.3 billion)

As one of the world’s leading centers for energy and chemical production, the Houston metro area—along with other parts of the Gulf Coast region—depends on an enormous set of seaport facilities to transport these goods. Collectively, $100.6 billion of energy products and chemicals/plastics pass through these ports annually, accounting for about 60 percent of all their international goods. Stretching more than 25 miles in length and situated close to the Gulf of Mexico, the Port of Houston houses many of the area’s marine terminals.

3. Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI

Total Value: $206.7 billion
Local Share: 4.9 percent
Top Trade Region: NAFTA ($186.6 billion)

Although the Detroit metro area contains a number of freight facilities, such as the Port of Detroit, that unite the Great Lakes region, its land border crossings to Canada make it one of the busiest sites of commerce in North America and beyond. Each year, nearly $175.8 billion in international goods travel by truck and rail between Detroit and Canada—relying almost exclusively on the aging Ambassador Bridge and the Michigan Central Railway Tunnel. The planned New International Trade Crossing (NITC), however, holds promise for expanding capacity at this crucial junction.

2. New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA

Total Value: $349.2 billion
Local Share: 9.7 percent
Top Trade Region: Europe ($153.9 billion)

The Port of New York and New Jersey, which spans several marine facilities including the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, is one of the biggest freight assets in the country, cementing the New York metro area’s role as the chief East Coast seaport complex ($185.0 billion). Remarkably, almost the same value of goods ($162.7 billion) flows through the area’s expansive air cargo facilities, including John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport. Combined with New York’s enormous amount of global corporate headquarters, New York is the country’s most globally fluent metro area.

1. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA

Total Value: $417.5 billion
Local Share: 6.0 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($362.2 billion)

The Los Angeles metropolitan area not only boasts two of the largest seaports in the Western Hemisphere—the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach—but also has one of the busiest cargo airports nationally, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Together, these port facilities channel a wide range of international goods like electronics, machinery, and textiles across the country, many of which come from Asian trade partners like China ($211.3 billion) and Japan ($58.5 billion). Still, only a fraction of these goods actually start or end locally (6 percent), speaking to the port complex’s extensive geographic reach in the U.S.

This inaugural issue of the India Policy Forum, edited by Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya, includes papers on the trade policies that would do the most to enhance India’s future growth prospects, analyses of recent developments in India’s balance of payments and an examination of the performance of the Indian banking system. The editors' summary appears below, and you can download a PDF version of the volume, purchase a printed copy, or access individual articles by clicking on the following links:

Download India Policy Forum 2004 - Volume 1 (PDF) »
Purchase a printed copy of India Policy Forum 2004 - Volume 1 »

Download individual articles:

• India's Trade Reform, by Arvind Panagariya
• Should a U.S.-India FTA Be Part of India's Trade Strategy, by Robert Z. Lawrence and Rajesh Chadha
• Foreign Inflows and Macroeconomic Policy in India, by Vijay Joshi and Sanjeev Sanyal
• India's Experience with a Pegged Exchange Rate, by Ila Patnaik
• Liberalizing Capital Flows in India: Financial Repression, Macroeconomic Policy, and Gradual Reforms, by Kenneth Kletzer
• Banking Reform in India, by Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole and Ester Duflo

The India Policy Forum (IPF) is a new journal, jointly promoted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi, and the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., that aims to present high-quality empirical analysis on the major economic policy issues that confront contemporary India. The journal is based on papers commissioned by the editors and presented at an annual conference. The forum is supported by a distinguished advisory panel and a panel of active researchers who provide suggestions to the editors and participate in the review and discussion process. The need for such real-time quantitative analysis is particularly pressing for an economy like India’s, which is in the process of rapid growth, structural change, and increased involvement in the global economy. The founders of the IPF hope it will contribute to enhancing the quality of policy analysis in the country and stimulate empirically informed decisionmaking. The style of the papers, this editors’ summary, and the discussants’ comments and general discussions are all intended to make these debates accessible to a broad nonspecialist audience, inside and outside India, and to present diverse views on the issues. The IPF is also intended to help build a bridge between researchers inside India and researchers abroad, nurturing a global network of scholars interested in India’s economic transformation.

The first India Policy Forum conference took place at the NCAER in Delhi on March 26–27, 2004. In addition to the working sessions, the occasion was marked by a public address given by Stanley Fischer, vice chairman with Citigroup International and a member of the IPF advisory panel. This inaugural issue of the IPF includes the papers and discussions presented at that conference. The papers focus on several contemporary policy issues. The first two papers provide alternative perspectives on the trade policies that would do the most to enhance India’s future growth prospects in the context of ongoing developments in the global trading system. The three papers that follow are devoted to an analysis of recent developments in India’s balance of payments and their implications for the future exchange rate regime, the integration of exchange rate policy with other aspects of macroeconomic policy, and capital account convertibility, respectively. The sixth paper is devoted to an examination of the performance of the Indian banking system and the implications of the dominant role of government-run banks.

India's Trade Reform, by Arvind Panagariya

The first paper, by Arvind Panagariya, provides a broad review of India’s external sector policies; the impact of these policies on trade flows, efficiency, and growth; and the future direction trade policies should take. Since trade policies are a means to an end, namely faster growth and improved efficiency, and since trade policies support other domestic policies, Panagariya’s review necessarily ranges into these areas as well. Finally, to place India’s performance in perspective, Panagariya makes extensive comparisons throughout between Indian and Chinese outcomes over the past two decades (1980–2000), a period when both economies have chosen to reintegrate into the world economy.

India’s growth experience since 1950 falls in two phases. The first thirty years were characterized by steady growth of around 3.5 percent; thereafter growth has tended to stay in the 5 to 6 percent range. Panagariya links this differential growth performance with the imposition and subsequent relaxation of microeconomic controls, particularly in the external sector. In turn he divides these external sector policies into three phases. Between 1950 and 1975 the trend was toward virtual autarky, particularly after a balance of payments crisis in 1956–57. This was succeeded by a period of “ad hoc liberalization” starting around 1976, when reform of quantitative restrictions on trade was complemented by deregulation of industrial licensing in certain sectors. A further balance-of-payments crisis in the period from late 1990 to early 1991, concurrent with a general election, provided the background for a switch to deeper and more systematic liberalization, which, in fits and starts, continues today.

In the merchandise trade area the focus of reform has been to reduce tariff levels, particularly on nonagricultural goods. This has been done by gradually reducing the peak rate and reducing the number of tariff bands. In 1990–91 the peak rate stood at 355 percent, while the simple average of all tariff rates was 113 percent. By early 2004 the peak rate on individual goods was down to 20 percent, though there were notable exceptions, such as chemicals and transport equipment. Similarly, there has been less than ideal progress in reducing end-user and other exemptions. In nonindustrial areas there has been substantial liberalization of trade (and investment) in services, but following the OECD example, less in agriculture.

Panagariya next reviews the impact of this liberalization on trade flows, on efficiency, and on growth, in many cases using China as a benchmark. India’s share in world exports of goods and services—which had declined from 2 percent at Indian independence in 1947 to 0.5 percent in the mid-1980s—bounced back to 0.8 percent in 2002, implying that for roughly twenty years India’s trade has grown more rapidly than world trade. In addition, the deeper reforms of the 1990s yielded a pick-up of almost 50 percent over the previous decade, from 7.4 percent to 10.7 percent. Encouraging though these numbers are in light of India’s past performance, they pale in comparison with the Chinese record over the same period. Aside from any issues that may arise in the measurement of Chinese GDP at a time of rapid institutional and economic change, the combined share of exports and imports of both goods and services rose in China from 18.9 percent in 1980 to 49.3 percent in 2000, according to World Bank data. For India, the comparable numbers were 15.9 percent (in 1980) and 30.6 percent (in 2000).

The increase in India’s trade intensity has been accompanied by significant shifts in composition. The most dramatic has been the increased share of service exports in the 1990s. Within industry, exporting sectors with above-average growth tended to be skill- or capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive, while on the import side the share of capital goods imports declined sharply. In the area of services, rapid growth was exhibited by software exports and recorded remittances from overseas Indians. However, tourism receipts remain below potential. With regard to trade partners, the main shift over the 1990s was a move away from Russia toward Asia, particularly developing Asia. An interesting recent development has been the rapid expansion of India’s trade with China.

Panagariya then reviews the evidence on the impact of liberalization on static efficiency and on growth. One common approach is to use a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to estimate the effects of the removal of trade distortions. The one study cited estimates the impact as raising GDP permanently by 2 percentage points. Additional domestic liberalization could raise this figure to 5 percentage points. Panagariya argues, however, that such models miss some key sources of gains. He cites two in particular: the disappearance of inefficient sectors and improvements in product quality. In addition, disaggregated analysis at the five-digit SITC level reveals far more dynamism in product composition of both exports and imports than is revealed at the two-digit level. This suggests greater gains from trade and improved welfare from enhanced choice than is captured in more aggregate models.

The links between liberalization and aggregate growth—or growth in total factor productivity (TFP)—have been controversial both in India and elsewhere in the emerging economies of Asia. In the case of India, the focus has been almost exclusively on manufacturing. After reviewing several studies, which admittedly differ in methodology and data quality, Panagariya judges that the weight of the evidence indicates that trade liberalization has led to productivity gains. Notwithstanding this reasonably positive assessment, Panagariya reminds us that overall, Indian industry’s performance in the 1980s and 1990s has been pedestrian, particularly compared with that of services.

The poor performance of Indian industry and the stronger growth performance of Chinese industry form the backdrop for Panagariya’s final section, on future policy. He discusses four issues: domestic policies bearing on trade; autonomous liberalization; regional trade agreements; and India’s participation in multilateral negotiations. With regard to the first, the central question for Panagariya is why Indian industry’s response to liberalization has been more sluggish than China’s. Panagariya attributes this in part to differences in economic structure but also to differences in the two countries’ domestic policies. He argues that it is easiest to expand trade in industrial products, and it is easier to do so if the industrial sector represents a large share of national value added. As far back as 1980, the share of industry in China was 48.5 percent, while in India it was half that, at 24.2 percent. Two decades later things are not very different. Panagariya makes a further interesting point: a relatively small industrial sector also reduces the capacity of the economy to absorb imports, leading to a tendency toward exchange rate appreciation (although even China has not been immune from this tendency). He concludes that it is imperative to stimulate industrial growth and cites reform in three areas as being essential: reduction of the fiscal deficit; reduction and ultimately elimination of the list of manufactured products “reserved” for small-scale industry; and reform of the country’s labor laws, which make reassignment or retrenchment of workers prohibitively difficult in the so-called formal or organized sector.

Turning next to autonomous trade reform, Panagariya is critical of the view, widely held in India, that the tariff structure ought to favor final goods over intermediates. He also notes that the current tariff structure remains riddled with complexity. He urges the authorities to move quickly to a single uniform tariff of 15 percent for nonagricultural goods and to move to a uniform tariff of 5 percent by the end of the decade. With regard to agriculture, Panagariya points out that India stands to gain from autonomous tariff liberalization given its potential as an agricultural exporter. He also addresses the issue of “contingent protection,” wherein India’s liberal use of antidumping regulations has clearly had protectionist intent. Panagariya urges changes in the antidumping procedures currently in place and also greater use of safeguard measures, as they are applied on a nondiscriminatory basis to all trading partners.

While India has traditionally taken comfort in a multilateral rule-based system of international trade, it has more recently embarked on an ambitious program of regional trade negotiations. It has signed free trade area (FTA) agreements with Sri Lanka and Thailand and is in the advanced stages of negotiating an FTA with Singapore. Panagariya analyzes the global, regional, and domestic factors that have brought about this shift in strategy—essentially the weakening of the U.S. commitment to multilateral negotiations, together with political imperatives. Panagariya observes that for a relatively protected economy, trade diversion and the associated revenue loss should be important concerns. He is also concerned that preoccupation with FTAs diverts attention from both unilateral liberalization and multilateral negotiations, each of which yields greater return for the effort expended. However, Panagariya concedes that there is a strategic case for FTAs, both to exert leverage in the multilateral sphere and to create a template that reflects India’s interests in future bilateral and multilateral negotiations. In this context he is critical of the template developed in the agreement on the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA), which, in his view, is cluttered with many nontrade issues. In the specific case of a U.S.-India FTA, he believes that there is a strong case for an agreement in services, with mutually beneficial exchange of market access.

The paper ends with a discussion of India’s interests in ongoing multilateral trade negotiations. Panagariya’s main point is that India has a strong interest in successful conclusion of the Doha Round and could agree to the U.S. proposal aimed at eliminating tariffs on industrial goods by 2015. As noted before, India also has interests in improved market access in agriculture; given the considerable water in its bound tariffs, some concessions should be possible, particularly if accompanied by reductions in subsidies by rich countries.

Should a U.S.-India FTA Be Part of India's Trade Strategy, by Robert Z. Lawrence and Rajesh Chadha

The 1990s and the new millennium have seen a massive proliferation of preferential trade arrangements (PTAs), which typically lead to free trade among two or more countries, as, for example, under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Until recently, Asian countries had more or less stayed away from these arrangements, but this is changing rapidly, with many countries in the region now forging free trade areas. In their paper, Robert Lawrence and Rajesh Chadha assess the likelihood and benefits of the negotiation of a free trade area between India and the United States. Like Panagariya, Lawrence also embeds his discussion of India’s trade policy within the framework of the larger Indian reform effort.^[1] Following Ahluwalia, he characterizes Indian reform since 1991 as incremental, not radical.^[2] While there has been deepening consensus about the broad direction of reform within the policy elite, excessive clarity on endpoints and on the pace of transition is seen to be politically risky. Trade policy reform has been an important part of this liberalization effort, and it has been similarly characterized by a clear direction but fitful implementation and shifting promises as to endpoints.

Lawrence accepts that this strategy has been relatively successful in producing steady growth without major policy reversals or financial crises over the last decade. Yet, like Panagariya, he notes that trade reform is a job only half done. India’s tariff rates remain among the world’s highest, and there remain significant barriers to foreign investment. Within India, there continues to be political resistance to liberalization. Lawrence asks what the best trade and reform strategy for India is now, given the tasks yet to be accomplished.

Lawrence articulates three options available to India at this time: continued incremental unilateralism dictated, as in the past, by domestic concerns and feasibility; more active engagement with multilateral negotiations through the World Trade Organization (WTO); and what he calls a multitrack approach, whereby deeper bilateral free trade agreements complement the first two channels. Within this larger context the specific question he explores in depth is what role might be played by an FTA between India and the United States. He recognizes that consideration of such an FTA is at best at a nascent stage in official circles and that it is far from being an idea whose time has come. Nonetheless, his core thesis is that given India’s domestic reform goals, a multitrack approach centered on a U.S.-India FTA would be superior to excessive reliance on the WTO, given likely outcomes under the ongoing Doha Round. This is the argument that the paper attempts to substantiate.

Lawrence first considers a purely defensive motive for such a FTA. From this perspective, the key issue is to establish a legal and institutional framework for keeping trade in information technology (IT) services free. Noting the rapid growth in India’s export of such services, Lawrence cites studies that suggest that this trade is still in its infancy. Given that the United States is currently the destination of two-thirds of India’s IT services exports—and that this share could well be maintained—trade between the United States and India has the potential to become one of the most dynamic examples of trade in global commerce.

Will this growth be allowed to take place? Protectionist pressures in the United States already are strong. Outsourcing is headline news in the United States, and federal and state governments are taking politically visible stands to restrict the practice under government contracts. While some of this is undoubtedly election year politics, preserving access for India in the U.S. market is a genuine challenge. Lawrence explores various options available to India to preserve its access, including through the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) agreement within the WTO. He notes that GATS operates on a positive list approach, which can create some ambiguity as to what forms of market access have been bound. By contrast, services liberalization in U.S. bilateral agreements already uses a negative list approach: trade is allowed unless it has specifically been prohibited.

Lawrence then explores the possibility, from the U.S. perspective, of an FTA with India. He notes that the United States first moved away from exclusive reliance on multilateral negotiations as far back as the 1980s, when it signed FTAs with Canada and Israel, followed by NAFTA in 1993. Under the Bush administration the pace of negotiation of bilateral agreements has accelerated dramatically. Agreements with Chile, Singapore, and Jordan have been implemented; those involving the Central American Free Trade Area (CAFTA), Morocco, and Australia have been completed; and numerous others are either under active negotiation or planned.

In this environment Lawrence believes that an FTA with India would be seen by the U.S. authorities as being of great strategic interest in the larger U.S. negotiating strategy but also politically difficult to achieve, given the current mood in Congress. But he is skeptical of the possibility that such an agreement could be restricted to services alone—as proposed, for example, by Panagariya and by a recent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations. The United States is unlikely to forgo the opportunity of obtaining preferential access for the exports of its goods to the Indian market. In addition, dropping all goods trade in an agreement with India would create a difficult precedent for the United States in its other FTA negotiations, in which, with few exceptions, there have not been sectoral opt-outs.

Accordingly, in his discussion Lawrence deals with the case for a comprehensive U.S.-India FTA with most of the features of those that the United States already has concluded. These include a negative list for services; investment provisions with a few sectoral exclusions; full national treatment for U.S. companies; intellectual property rules that might be more comprehensive than those in the WTO; and additional provisions relating to labor, environmental standards, technical barriers, and government procurement. While the phase-in periods may differ for the two sides, once the agreement was fully implemented (generally in fifteen years), the obligations would be symmetric.

Lawrence readily concedes that willingness to sign an FTA agreement of this scope with the United States would be a radical departure for India in a number of respects. While much Indian trade liberalization has been unilateral, India has so far been a strong advocate of multilateral trading rules, but there too its efforts have concentrated on obtaining special and differential treatment for developing countries. As Panagariya has also noted, India has only lately entered the game of bilateral FTAs, so far with countries in Asia, but even in terms of goods trade these have not been comprehensive. A U.S.-India FTA would have major implications for India’s trade and domestic policies. It is the positive (or offensive) case for such a radical shift that Lawrence next examines.

He starts by offering some hypotheses on the political economy of liberalization. At the beginning, an opportunistic and piecemeal approach may be necessary to create constituencies for liberalization. But unilateralism carries the risk of reversal, and such policy uncertainty can inhibit the private investment decisions needed to shift the economy in the direction of its comparative advantage. Trade agreements, whether bilateral, regional, or multilateral, can impart credibility to commitments by the home government, making it more likely that liberalization will be successful. Such enhanced credibility is not costless, however. In contrast to an incremental approach, a comprehensive agreement means that many political battles have to be conducted simultaneously. This drawback can be offset by the fact of reciprocity, which can be used to develop coalitions of exporters who favor the trade reform. A further set of allies is provided by proponents of domestic reform, who can argue that the domestic reforms necessary for domestic growth can also deliver improved access to international markets. Lawrence believes that such a strategy was followed by the Chinese in connection with their accession to the WTO.

If these are some of the benefits of comprehensive reciprocal agreements, the question of what type of reciprocal agreements, multilateral or bilateral, remains. This is the choice addressed by Lawrence in the remainder of the paper. In making his assessment, Lawrence uses as a yardstick the impact of each of the two routes in assisting India to undertake changes in its own interest while avoiding constraints that have the potential to damage its welfare.

In order to assess the impact of a U.S.-India FTA, Lawrence examines some of the FTAs that the United States has recently negotiated. His review makes it clear that the institutional changes needed in the Indian economy would indeed be deep but in most areas they would prod Indian policymakers to move in directions that are inherently desirable. A particular concern of Indian policymakers is the introduction of labor and environmental standards through an FTA, and Lawrence clears up several misconceptions in this area. Recent bilateral agreements place the emphasis on each government enforcing its own domestic environmental and labor laws and not weakening those laws or reducing protections to encourage trade or investment. While these obligations are backed by the dispute settlement provisions of the agreements, trade measures may not be used to retaliate. On balance, implementing a U.S.-India FTA at this time would probably help to bolster and accelerate many dimensions of economic reform, but Lawrence notes that the benefits depend crucially on taking a range of complementary actions. Failure to do so could lead to conditions that were worse than before.

Lawrence then examines whether a successful conclusion to the Doha Round could deliver equivalent benefits to the cause of Indian reform. In so doing he notes that those who argue for exclusive reliance on multilateral liberalization compare actual FTAs with an idealized version of multilateral liberalization. But actual achievement under multilateral liberalization is heavily conditioned by the specific rules of trade negotiations, which may not actually result in significant domestic liberalization at all. As a developing country, India benefits from the “special and differential treatment” provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), while benefiting from the most-favored nation provisions of the multilateral system. An additional institutional feature is the gap between applied and bound tariffs, which is particularly large where agricultural goods are concerned. A final feature is what Lawrence (following Jagdish Bhagwati) calls “first difference” reciprocity, where the offers made by each nation are measured against their protection levels at the beginning of the round.

Taking these elements into account and reviewing the actual performance of past rounds in reducing industrial tariffs, Lawrence comes to the strong conclusion that the current WTO system actually impedes a developing country like India from using WTO agreements to support meaningful liberalization; he also believes that the diffuse reciprocity involved in the most-favored nation system is not a strong catalyst for rallying exporter interests in favor of import liberalization.

Having provisionally concluded that an FTA would be of greater assistance than exclusive reliance on multilateral negotiations, Lawrence then explores the benefits to India of blending the two approaches in what he calls a multitrack approach. In his view, a U.S.-India FTA would certainly make India a more attractive negotiating partner for third countries hoping to match the access obtained by U.S. firms. Equally, assuming that it preceded the conclusion of the Doha Round, willingness to sign an FTA with the United States would also improve India’s negotiating credibility in the multilateral sphere. India could then challenge developed countries to improve their own offers dramatically by indicating a willingness to engage in extensive multilateral liberalization itself. A comprehensive FTA with India would also be of strategic importance to the United States in its current policy of competitive liberalization. This would strengthen India’s hand in its negotiations with the United States, while strengthening the U.S. hand in negotiating with other significant but reluctant partners.

The paper ends with some quantitative welfare simulations undertaken by Lawrence’s coauthor, Rajesh Chadha of the NCAER, using a computable general equilibrium model of world production and trade developed by the NCAER and the University of Michigan. The simulations deal only with the impact of liberalization on trade in goods. The model is designed to capture the long-run impact of an agreement. More crucially, it is a real model that holds employment and the trade balance constant; as such it captures the second-round adjustments needed to restore full employment in the economy following an initial trade shock.

A U.S.-India FTA is compared first with the current situation and then with a number of counterfactuals. The results reveal that aggregate welfare gains are greatest under multilateral liberalization, next greatest under unilateral liberalization in each country, and least under a bilateral FTA, but they note that even in the last case the effects are positive. The results also point out asymmetries between the United States and India in unilateral and multilateral liberalization, given the differences in the openness of the two economies. Indian and world welfare both rise significantly when India liberalizes unilaterally, while for the United States the greatest welfare gains flow from multilateral liberalization.

Lawrence concludes that the more difficult decision facing India today is whether to opt for reciprocal approaches in lieu of the unilateral approach that it has traditionally pursued. There are gains in credibility to be achieved, but these could entail reduced policy space and require a significant agenda of complementary reform to achieve their full effect. Should India choose to pursue the reciprocal route, he suggests a U.S.-India FTA as worthy of serious consideration, precisely because of its comprehensive and deep character.

Foreign Inflows and Macroeconomic Policy in India, by Vijay Joshi and Sanjeev Sanyal

India has had a turnaround in its balance of payments in recent years, with a swing in the current account from a deficit to a surplus and rapid growth in the capital account surplus. It has used those inflows to build up substantial holdings of foreign exchange reserves that now stand at $120 billion. While the initial reserve accumulation was welcome insurance against the risk of unanticipated future outflows, the current level is adequate to meet any foreseeable challenge, and policymakers need to develop an exchange policy that goes beyond simple reserve accumulation. Should India accelerate the process of capital account liberalization, perhaps allowing the export of capital by residents? Should it allow an appreciation of the exchange rate or speed up the liberalization of the trade regime? Above all, how should the exchange policy be integrated with the broader concerns of domestic economic policy?

In their paper, Vijay Joshi and Sanjeev Sanyal provide a broad review of the external aspects of Indian macroeconomic policy over the past decade. They use that review as the backdrop for a discussion of the policy options open to India in the future, posing the question of how economic policy should respond to the continuation of the strong balance-of-payments position of recent years. In their answer, they argue in favor of a combination of accelerated import liberalization on the external side and domestic fiscal consolidation. In particular, they view trade liberalization, which provides a means of absorbing continued capital inflows without constraining the competitiveness of the export sector, as an alternative to exchange rate appreciation.

In reviewing the economic events of the 1990s, they emphasize the degree to which India relied on an extensive system of capital controls. Foreign direct investment and portfolio investment inflows were gradually liberalized and foreign investors could freely repatriate their investments, but capital outflows by residents were prohibited. Offshore borrowing and lending by Indian companies and banks were also strictly limited. The capital controls allowed Indian monetary policy to maintain a relatively fixed exchange rate regime with minimal conflict with domestic economic policy. India’s restrictive measures on the capital account, reluctance to permit short-term foreign borrowing, and strong accumulation of foreign exchange reserves allowed it to escape any serious consequences from the Asian financial crises.

By accumulating foreign reserves over the decade, India passed up the opportunity to use capital inflows to finance a larger current account deficit. Joshi and Sanyal argue that this policy imposed relatively small costs in terms of forgone investment and growth. The reserve accumulation averaged 1.2 percent of GDP annually, and even if all of the accumulation had been used alternatively to purchase investment goods, the incremental impact on economic growth would have been small. This conclusion is in sharp contrast to the claims of others that foreign reserve accumulation imposed large costs in terms of forgone growth.

Overall, Joshi and Sanyal believe that the external aspects of Indian economic policy were well executed during the 1990s. However, the ample level of foreign exchange reserves and the continuation of strong capital inflows present a more difficult policy choice going forward. The current policy of sterilized intervention in exchange markets has outlived its usefulness, and further additions to reserves will impose rising fiscal costs with few benefits. At the same time, the authors oppose exchange rate appreciation because of its negative impact on export competitiveness. An intermediate policy of continued intervention in the foreign exchange market but without any attempt at sterilization would translate into an easing of domestic monetary policy and higher growth in the short run. However, they fear that it would quickly lead to increased inflationary pressures, and the resulting rise in the real exchange rate would be as unattractive from the export perspective as outright nominal appreciation.

Instead, Joshi and Sanyal argue for a mixed strategy that combines a faster rate of import liberalization on the external side with domestic fiscal consolidation. A rise in imports would provide a means of absorbing the excess capital inflows with no loss of export competitiveness. Since India’s tariff structure is among the world’s highest, the policy would also intensify the competitive pressures on the import-competing industries and strengthen incentives to raise productivity. The constraining factor is the negative public revenue impact of reductions in tariffs, but that is consistent with greater reliance on an expanded value-added tax to meet the revenue needs of both the central government and the states.

They stress the importance of action on the fiscal side because of fear that maintaining the large deficit will crowd out investment and slow the pace of growth in future years. A combination of fiscal contraction and monetary expansion would produce lower interest rates with strong incentives for growth. The greater foreign and public saving would provide the resources necessary to support the higher rate of investment and growth.

Finally, Joshi and Sanyal reflect a strong shift in professional sentiment in their lack of enthusiasm for further liberalization of the capital account. They argue against liberalization of the restrictions on capital outflows by residents, based on the risks they pose in the event of adverse future shocks. In fact, they conclude with a willingness to use Chilean-type taxes in the event that inflows of foreign capital should intensify.

India's Experience with a Pegged Exchange Rate, by Ila Patnaik

In a paper that is largely devoted to a positive analysis of the experience with exchange rate management in India, Ila Patnaik examines the reactions of the monetary authority to the changing external environment. The exchange rate plays a central role in the economic policy of most emerging economies, as monetary policy is torn between a focus on stabilizing the domestic economy and maintaining an exchange rate that is consistent with export competitiveness. In a world of capital controls, it is possible to manage both of these goals simultaneously, but once the economy is fully open to the free inflow and outflow of capital, monetary policy must choose between the external and the internal balance. Over the 1990s, Indian monetary policy operated in a transitional phase, as it only gradually reduced its restrictions on capital account transactions. Since 1993, the external value of the rupee has been determined by market forces, but the central bank intervenes extensively to maintain a stable rate vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar. The continuation of partial controls on capital flows provides some room for an independent monetary policy.

Patnaik focuses on two periods of substantial net capital inflows that necessitated large-scale intervention by the central bank to prevent currency appreciation. The first was a relatively short episode extending from June 1993 to November 1994; the second lasted from August 2001 until at least the middle of 2004. Despite official protestations to the contrary, Patnaik’s empirical analysis demonstrates that India is best characterized as operating a tightly pegged exchange rate over the full period. Her paper explores the extent to which the focus on the exchange rate limited the operation of a monetary policy directed at stabilizing the domestic economy.

The first period began with an easing of the restrictions on inflows of portfolio capital in early 1993. The result was a sharp surge of capital inflows and private expectations of a rise in the exchange rate. However, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) chose to purchase a large portion of the inflow to prevent appreciation. The bank also acted to sterilize a portion of the inflow, financing some purchases through the sale of government debt. However, the lack of liquidity in the bond market restricted the efforts at sterilization and led the bank to finance much of its purchases through an expansion of reserve money. It attempted to offset the inflationary effects of a rapid growth in the monetary base through a series of increases in the cash reserve ratio. However, the net result was still a significant acceleration of growth in the money supply and, at least in the early months, a decline in interest rates. Despite the small size of the external sector and the limited openness of the capital account, the episode represented India’s first experience with the partial loss of monetary policy autonomy, dictated by the need to intervene in the currency market.

The second episode, beginning in the summer of 2001, was triggered by a swing in the current account from deficit to surplus. Increased capital inflows played a significant role only in later years. Again, the RBI intervened to prevent appreciation, and the exchange rate actually depreciated slightly up to mid-2002. This time around, the market for debt was considerably more developed. The bank was able to finance nearly all of its purchases of foreign currency through the sale of government debt instruments, avoiding use of the currency reserve ratio. There was little or no acceleration of growth in reserve money, and the growth of a broad-based measure of the money supply (M3) actually slowed. However, the RBI did not attempt to hold the exchange rate completely fixed after the summer of 2002, opting instead for a small but steady appreciation. Capital inflows also began to accelerate at the same time, perhaps motivated by currency speculation.

The two episodes differ in the extent to which the RBI was able to engage in sterilizing interventions to avoid any conflict with its policies for domestic stabilization. Patnaik’s review suggests that controls on the capital account are still sufficient to permit considerable discretion in the conduct of domestic monetary policy. To date, Indian policymakers have opted to prevent the capital inflow from translating into a current account deficit. However, the sustainability of the bank’s interventions in future years is debatable because the fiscal costs of accumulating additional reserves are rising.

Liberalizing Capital Flows in India: Financial Repression, Macroeconomic Policy, and Gradual Reforms, by Kenneth Kletzer

The paper by Kenneth Kletzer offers a third perspective on India’s exchange rate regime, focusing on the issue of capital account convertibility. Should India accelerate the pace of its liberalization of capital account transactions? Kletzer views this as a particularly critical decision in light of a history of severe repression of domestic financial markets. He points to numerous international examples in which liberalization led to large financial inflows followed by equally abrupt outflows and financial crisis. In his paper, he lays out the conditions necessary to achieve a successful policy for capital account liberalization.

Kletzer begins with a review of the potential benefits and costs of capital mobility. On the benefits side, he points to five factors. First, there are gains from trade in commodities across time, just as there are gains from contemporaneous trade in goods and services. Second, international financial integration, which brings direct foreign investment, may raise the growth rate by raising productivity growth. Third, such integration allows the sharing of risk between savers and investors. Domestic residents are able to diversify risk, which may raise the saving rate. Fourth, the presence of these flows may reduce output and consumption volatility. Finally, capital account liberalization may provide a means for forcing an end to financially repressive policies. The ability of resources to move across borders in response to unsustainable fiscal or financial policies may impose discipline on public authorities.

The principal cost of an open capital account is the possibility that a crisis may occur in the form of capital flight, leading to large depreciation, large-scale bank failures, or both. For example, under a pegged exchange rate regime, a realization or expectation of monetization of public sector budget deficits that is inconsistent with the pegged rate of currency depreciation forces its abandonment sooner or later in a sudden outflow of international reserves. Such depreciations may then spill over into bank failures if the banks have large, unhedged foreign currency–denominated liabilities and home currency–denominated assets.

To date, the international empirical evidence on the growth effects of capital account liberalization for emerging markets is inconclusive. The bottom line is that countries tend to benefit from liberalization when they can better absorb capital inflows by having higher levels of human capital, more developed domestic financial markets, and greater transparency in financial and corporate governance and regulation. On the other hand, the opening of the capital account in the presence of significant macroeconomic imbalances reduces net gains and raises the prospects of subsequent crisis.

Turning to India, Kletzer notes that India had a relatively unrestricted financial system until the 1960s. Starting in the 1960s, interest rate restrictions and liquidity requirements were adopted and progressively tightened. The government established the State Bank of India, a public sector commercial bank, and went on to nationalize the largest private commercial banks toward the end of the decade. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, credit directed to “priority” sectors constituted a rising share of domestic lending and interest rate subsidies became common for targeted industries. With the start of economic reforms in 1985, steps were taken toward internal financial liberalization, mainly in banking. The government began to reduce financial controls by partially deregulating bank deposit rates, though that step was partially reversed in 1988. However, in later years the government simultaneously began to relax ceilings on lending rates of interest. Progressive relaxation of restrictions on both bank deposit and lending rates of interest and the reduction of directed lending was under way by 1990.

Liberalization accelerated after the 1991 crisis, when important steps were taken toward external liberalization. Specifically, both direct foreign investment and portfolio investment were progressively opened. A major development was full current account convertibility of the rupee under IMF Article 8 in August 1994. In the subsequent years, sectoral caps on direct foreign investment and restrictions on portfolio borrowing and foreign equity ownership were relaxed. Currently, foreign investment income is fully convertible to foreign currency for repatriation. External commercial borrowing has been relaxed, but it is regulated with respect to maturities and interest rate spreads. Effective restrictions continue on the acquisition of foreign financial assets by residents and on currency convertibility for capital account transactions.

According to Kletzer, there remain four macro-cum-financial vulnerabilities that must be considered in evaluating the case for full capital account convertibility: high public debt and fiscal deficit; financial repression; weakness in the banking sector; and a tendency to peg the exchange rate. India’s external debt is low in relation to its foreign exchange reserves, so there is less to fear on that front.

Using two alternative measures of the real interest rate, Kletzer evaluates the sustainability of the current public debt as a proportion of GDP and concludes that without a major reduction in the primary deficit (fiscal deficit minus interest payment on the debt) it cannot be stabilized at its current level of 82 percent. Based on one measure, the current primary deficit of 3.6 percent must be turned into a primary surplus of 0.8 percent for the debt to be sustained at its current level. On the deficit, Kletzer points out that the combined central and state government budget balances understate total public sector liabilities. Unfunded pension liabilities, various contingent liabilities, and guarantees on the debt issued by loss-making public enterprises (most notably state electricity boards) must also be taken into account.

High levels of public debt and deficits have been sustained partially through financial repression, which has been a central aspect of the Indian fiscal system for decades. Capital controls provide the public sector with a captive capital market and allow lower-than-opportunity rates of interest for government debt. Kletzer estimates that the implicit subsidy to the government averaged 8.2 percent of GDP from 1980 to 1993 and 1.6 percent from 1994 to 2002. Thus the liberalization of the 1990s is clearly reflected in the substantial reversal, though not elimination, of financial repression. In the same vein, the government collected seignorage revenues that averaged 2 percent over the entire 1980–2002 period, but 1.4 percent from 1997 to 2002. The decrease in public sector revenue from financial repression is large, indicating some significant progress in financial policy reform.

Policies of financial repression hamper domestic financial intermediation and raise the vulnerability of the banking system to crisis as international financial integration increases. At the end of March 2003, according to the Reserve Bank of India, the gross nonperforming assets of the commercial banks were 9.5 percent of bank advances; taking provisions into account, this figure drops to around 4.5 percent. Directed credit to priority sectors accounted for 31 percent of commercial bank assets but about 40 percent of nonperforming assets of the banks. At 2 percent of GDP, nonprovisioned and nonperforming assets are not large. But some researchers estimate that the actual figure may be twice as large as the official one. Banks also suffer from unhedged interest rate exposure arising from the large holdings of government debt (currently 40 percent of their total assets) and the liberalization of deposit rates.

Finally, capital controls allow policymakers to manage the nominal exchange rate and influence domestic rates of interest as independent objectives of monetary policy. Past exchange rate management in India displays resistance to currency appreciation. The adoption of a floating exchange rate, albeit managed relatively tightly, reduces crisis vulnerability. The government can resist exchange rate movements while not offering any exchange parity guarantee, as under a pegged exchange rate (or crawling peg or narrow target zone). The uncertainty that is induced, especially for short-term rates of change in the exchange rate, could lead to private sector hedging against currency risk. A possible source of concern is the revealed tendency of the government to lean against exchange rate movements that could result in sudden losses of reserves and capital account reversals under an open capital account.

Kletzer concludes that the initial conditions for capital account convertibility in India are strong, with the exception of public finance. India’s very low short-maturity foreign debt exposure, low overall foreign debt, large stock of foreign reserves, and flexible exchange rate place the Indian economy in a strong position by international standards. The average maturities of foreign and public debt could be expected to fall with international financial integration, but a prospective rise in short-term debt does not in itself justify capital controls. The stock of foreign reserves exceeds the current level of short-term external debt several fold. Liberalization and further opening of the banking system requires regulatory improvement, but the present level of nonperforming assets in the banking system is not excessive in comparison with the emerging markets.

In concluding, Kletzer notes two aspects of fiscal vulnerability relevant to financial integration. First, the primary deficit and the need to amortize public debt constitute the government borrowing requirement that would need to be financed on international terms under an open capital account. Second, the banking system holds the overwhelming majority of the public debt; with international financial integration, these become risky assets. Any gain to the government from currency depreciation or rising interest spreads on public debt would be matched by losses by the banks. These holdings pose a threat to the banking system, and a capital account crisis could begin with the exit of domestic depositors. In this case, deposit insurance could reduce the exposure of the banking system to crisis. Limiting the contingent liability of the government created by deposit insurance so that it just offsets public sector capital gains requires institutional reform to ensure successful prudential regulation.

Banking Reform in India, by Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole and Ester Duflo

The final paper, by Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, and Esther Duflo, addresses some of the concerns raised above about India’s domestic financial system. In comparison with its peers at similar stages of development, India has an advanced and extensive banking system, with branches throughout rural and urban areas, providing credit not only to industry but also to a significant number of farmers. As in many other developing countries, publicly held banks are by far the largest players, and financial sector reforms have become major policy goals. The authors evaluate the performance of India’s banking sector in terms of its provision of financial intermediation and its contribution to the achievement of a variety of “social goals.” They also offer a comparison of the performance of public and private sector banks.

The paper begins with an overview of banking in India, including the two episodes of bank nationalization in 1969 and 1980. Because the Indian government used a strict policy rule (based on the asset base of banks) to determine which banks were nationalized and which were left in the private sector, India offers an ideal case study in the relative performance and behavior of public and private sector banks.

A primary rationale for bank nationalization was to increase the flow of credit, both in general and to targeted “priority sectors” such as agriculture and small-scale industry. In the first section of the analysis, Banerjee and colleagues use detailed records from a public sector bank to determine whether there is “under-lending” to priority sector firms in the Indian financial system. They define under-lending as a situation in which the marginal product of capital for a firm is higher than the rate of interest it is currently paying. A change in lending regulations that increased the amount of credit issued by banks to one group of firms but not another allowed them to estimate the effect of additional credit on output and profits. They find a strong, positive effect of the change, suggesting that the firms are indeed credit constrained.

Enhancing credit supply was a primary goal of nationalization: while the performance of this public sector bank was not impressive, perhaps private sector banks fared worse? Using a regression discontinuity approach, the authors compared the propensity of public and private banks to lend to borrowers in several sectors of the economy: agriculture, small-scale industry, and the composite sector called trade, transport, and finance. They find that public sector banks did lend substantially more to agricultural borrowers than did private sector banks. Contrary to popular wisdom, however, they find that once bank size is taken into account, public sector banks lend no more to small-scale industry than do private sector banks.

Nor does bank nationalization appear to have increased the overall speed of financial development. The authors find that in the period 1980–91, nationalized and private banks of similar asset size grew at about the same rate. However, in the more liberalized period of 1992–2000, old private sector banks grew 8 percent more than public sector banks. (The lack of attention to new private sector banks is explained by the fact that there are simply not enough data at this stage to allow meaningful analysis.)

To gain further insight into under-lending and a low level of financial development, the authors again study the loan information from the same public sector bank. Under government regulations, loan officers are required to calculate credit limits on the basis of firm size (as measured by turnover) rather than profitability; though the rules do allow for some flexibility on the part of the loan officer, the authors find that in most cases loan officers simply reapproved the previous year’s limit. Because of inflation, real credit thus typically shrinks. Firms that are growing rapidly or that have profitable opportunities are not rewarded with additional credit, nor are poorly performing firms cut off.

The authors then turn to potential explanations for the reluctance of loan officers to lend. Public employees are subject to strict anticorruption legislation, and bank officers have expressed concern that if they issue a new loan that subsequently goes bad, they could be charged with corruption, denied promotion, fired, or even put in jail. The authors test this hypothesis by examining whether a corruption charge against a bank employee in a specific bank led to a reduction in overall lending by all loan officers in that bank. They find that it did: corruption charges led to a reduction in lending of approximately 3 percent compared with lending of other banks. That decline lasted approximately twenty-four months.

Critics of public enterprises are quick to point out that since employees tend not to have a stake in the performance of the enterprise, they may tend to exert less effort. For public bankers, this may mean making guaranteed safe loans to the government rather than spending time and energy on screening new clients and monitoring existing ones. To test this possibility, the authors compare how public sector banks in low- and high-growth states responded to a change in spread between lending rates and the rate at which the government was willing to borrow. They find that banks in lowgrowth states were more inclined to make “low-effort” loans to the government when the spread increased.

The final exercise was to examine the contentious issue of nonperforming assets, bank failures, and bailouts. The official rates of nonperforming loans in public sector banks tend to be higher than those in private sector banks, but because those numbers are notoriously unreliable, the authors instead compare the fiscal costs of bailing out failed private banks with the costs of recapitalizing poorly performing public sector banks. Using data starting from the first nationalization, they identify twenty-one cases of bank failure between 1969 and 2000 and compute the costs imposed on the government in rupees at 2000 prices. That sum is compared with the substantial cost of recapitalization of public sector banks in the 1990s. Controlling for size, the cost of the bank failures appears to be slightly higher than recapitalization, implying a small advantage for public sector banks. However, since recapitalization expenses are recurring, in all likelihood the public sector banks represent a greater cost to the treasury.

The authors conclude by arguing that the evidence suggests a tentative case for privatizing public sector banks. Privatization is not a panacea, however, and both public and private sector banks could benefit from significant internal reform. Liberalization and privatization should be accompanied by strong regulation to ensure the continued existence of social banking. But in net terms, the reduction in agency problems, the increased flexibility, and the reliance on private rather than public incentives to limit corruption and NPAs should make for a more dynamic banking system that is more responsive to borrowers’ needs.

The sixth annual India Policy Forum conference convened in New Delhi from July 14-15. This fourth issue of the India Policy Forum, edited by Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya, covers the global financial crisis and the implications for India. The editors' summary appears below, and you can download a PDF version of the volume, or access individual articles by clicking on the following links:

Download the India Policy Forum 2009-2010 agenda »
Download India Policy Forum 2009-2010 - Volume 6 » 

Download the individual volumes:

• Why India Choked When Lehman Broke
• Global Crisis and the Indian Economy - On a Few Unconventional Assertions
• India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988-2007
• Climate Change and India: Implications and Policy Options
• India Equity Markets: Measures of Fundamental Value

EDITORS' SUMMARY

The sixth annual conference of the India Policy Forum was held on July 14 and 15, 2009 in New Delhi. The meeting was dominated by considerations of the global financial crisis and its implications for India. The events of 2009 provided evidence of India’s growing integration with the global economy, an illustration of the resilience of country’s economic growth, and its emergence as a major participant in an expanded system of governance for the global economic system. This issue of the journal includes four papers and the associated discussion from the conference, and a fifth paper that was originally presented at the 2007 conference. 

Indian Equity Markets: Measures of Fundamental Value

Beginning in 2005, the Indian equity market underwent a period of explosive growth rising from a valuation equal to about 50 percent of GDP to a peak of 150 percent by early 2008. Growth of this magnitude raised concerns that the market was hugely overvalued and it was often characterized as an example of an asset market bubble. The market valuation subsequently fell back to about 70 percent of GDP during the global financial crisis. This experience stimulated interest in India in the question of what would constitute a reasonable or fair value for equities that could be use as a standard for evaluating market fluctuations. In “India Equity Markets: Measures of Fundamental Value,” Rajnish Mehra examines this question by comparing corporate valuations in India over the period of 1991–2008 relative to three key market fundamentals: the corporate capital stock, aftertax corporate cash flows, and net corporate debt.

Mehra’s model builds on the idea of a link between the market value of the capital stock and the debt and equity claims on that stock—a concept known as Tobin’s q. He extends the existing framework using some prior work by McGrattan and Prescott on US equity valuations, and he incorporates both intangible capital and key features of the tax code. It is a multi-period model in which firms maximize shareholder value subject to a production function with labor and two kinds of capital—tangible and intangible—as the inputs. Wages, intangible investment and depreciation of tangible capital are treated as tax-deductible expenses. It yields an equilibrium representation of the relationship between the market value of equity and the reproduction value of tangible and intangible capital in the corporate sector. All of the nominal values are normalized by GDP and the result is a framework that can be used to evaluate the effect on equity prices of a range of different policy actions, such as changes in the taxation of corporate dividends.

The model is calibrated to the Indian situation with respect to the capital stock, tax rates, and the characteristics of economic growth in the nonagricultural sector. Mehra also develops his own estimates of the valuation of intangible capital using three different methodologies. The first method is that used by McGrattan and Prescott and is based on the assumption that tangible and intangible capital earn the same rate of return along a balanced growth path. That assumption allows him to derive the equilibrium ratio of tangible and intangible capital. The alternative methods are based on recent work in the United States by Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel that involves cumulating investment flows to estimated stocks. Mehra uses two different methods to calibrate the Indian data with information from the United States, and he estimates the stock of intangible capital for two periods of 1991–2004 and 2005–08. The focus on two sub-periods is designed to capture a structural break in the data: Indian equity valuations as a fraction of GDP were fairly constant over the period 1991–2004, rising sharply starting in 2005. The two estimates of the stock of intangibles based on the comparison with the United States are very similar, but they are significantly lower than the estimates obtained with the McGrattan and Prescott methodology.

His analysis suggests that an optimistic estimate of the fundamental value of the current Indian equity market is about 1.2 times GDP, considerably lower than the 1.6 value observed in 2008, but close to the average over the full period. One effect on equity prices that the study does not account for is a change in investor demand from foreign institutional investors. If the effect of this is a change in the characteristics of the marginal investor, the relevant marginal rate of substitution will change, and with it market valuations. Thus, Mehra suggests that the extension of the model to include foreign investors should be a major objective for future research.

Why India Choked when Lehman Broke

Mehra’s paper generated an active discussion that centered on the difficulties of accurately measuring some of the values, such as the rate of technological change and real interest rates, required to calibrate the model to India’s situation. Several commentators also emphasized the important role of foreign investors. Others pointed to the difficulties of applying a model based on equilibrium conditions to the highly transitional nature of the Indian economy. In “Why India Choked when Lehman Broke,” Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah analyze the rapid transmission of the impact of the Lehman bankruptcy into Indian financial markets. The authors propose an explanation that revolves around the treasury operations of Indian multinational corporations (MNCs). Such MNCs are less subject to the capital controls imposed on purely domestic Indian companies. 

The developments that emerged within Indian financial markets in September and October following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 14, 2008 were quite extraordinary. First, there was a sudden change in conditions in the money market. Call money rates shot up immediately after September 15. Despite swift action by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the tightness persisted through the month of October. The operating procedures of monetary policy broke down in unprecedented fashion and interest rates were persistently above the target range of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The call rate consistently breached the 9 percent ceiling for the repo rate and attained values beyond 15 percent. There was a huge amount of borrowing from the RBI. On some days, the RBI lent an unprecedented Rs 90,000 crore through repos. These events are surprising given the extent of India’s de jure capital controls that were expected to isolate its financial markets from global developments. Greater understanding of crisis transmission, the effectiveness of capital controls, and India’s de facto openness could be achieved by carefully investigating this episode and identifying explanations.

The main hypothesis of this paper is that many Indian firms (financial and non-financial) had been using the global money market before the crisis to avoid India’s capital controls. This was done by locating global money market operations in offshore subsidiaries. When the global money market collapsed upon the demise of Lehman, these firms were suddenly short of dollar liquidity. They then borrowed in the rupee money market, converting rupees to US dollars, to meet obligations abroad.

The result was strong pressure on the currency market, and the rupee depreciated sharply. The RBI attempted to limit rupee depreciation by selling dollars. It sold $18.6 billion in the foreign exchange market in October alone. Ordinarily, one might have expected depreciation of the exchange rate in both the spot and the forward markets. However, instead of the forward premium rising in response to the pressure on the rupee to depreciate, it crashed sharply. The authors’ hypothesis is that some Indian MNCs that were taking dollars out of India planned to return the funds within a few weeks. To lock in the price at which they would bring that money back, they sold dollars forward. Thus, the one month forward premium fell sharply into negative territory.

Balance of payments data shows outbound FDI was the largest element of outflows in the “sudden stop” of capital flows to India of the last quarter of 2008. This supports the aforementioned hypothesis. During this time there was no significant merger and acquisitions activity taking place owing to the banking and money market crisis around the world. The explanation for the large FDI outflow when money market conditions in India and the world were among the worst seen in decades, could lie in the offshore money market operations of Indian MNCs. Finally, the authors analyze stock market data, finding that Indian MNCs were more exposed to conditions in international money markets as compared to non-MNCs.

This paper’s main contribution lies in showing that Indian MNCs are now an important channel through which India is financially integrated into the world economy. This raises questions about the effectiveness of India’s capital controls, which inhibit short-dated borrowing by firms. This restriction appears to have been bypassed to a substantial extent by Indian MNCs. This phenomenon contributes to a larger understanding of the gap that exists between India’s highly restrictive de jure capital controls and its de facto openness.

De jure capital controls have not made India as closed to global financial markets as expected. The expectation that a global financial market crisis would not hit India owing to these controls was proved to be incorrect when the financial crisis was transmitted to India with unprecedented speed. This evidence of India’s integration with global capital markets will influence the future discussion of its de facto capital account convertibility.

Climate Change and India: Implications and Policy Options

Climate change and the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have moved to the forefront of international discussion and negotiations. While global warming may have adverse effects on Indian society, there are also concerns that efforts to mitigate emissions within India could seriously impair future economic growth and poverty alleviation. These concerns are the focus of the paper, “Climate Change and India: Implications and Policy Options” by Arvind Panagariya.

The basic perspective is that India’s current per capita carbon emissions are very small, only one-fourth those of China and one-twentieth those of the United States; and given the strong association between income and emissions, the capping of emissions at current levels would make it impossible for India to sustain the growth required to match Chinese income levels, much less narrow the gap with the developed economies. Panagariya argues that India should resist making binding emission commitments for several decades, or until it has made greater progress in poverty alleviation.

The paper begins with a discussion of various uncertainties relating to the response of temperatures to GHG emissions, and in turn, the impact of any temperature changes on rainfall and various forms of extreme weather. There is further uncertainty about the effects of those weather changes on productivity and GDP growth. The author discusses the changes in temperatures and rain patterns specific to India during the last century, as well as their impact if any on sea levels, glacier melting, and natural disasters such as drought and cyclones.

The paper then explores the question of optimal mitigation and instruments to achieve it. A key conclusion is that, absent any uncertainties, either a uniform worldwide carbon tax or a fully internationally system of tradable pollution permits should be employed to reach the optimal solution. A more complicated issue relates to the distribution of the costs of mitigation. Efficiency dictates that countries in which the marginal loss of output per ton of carbon mitigated is the lowest should mitigate more. But absent any international transfers, this may lead to an inequitable distribution of costs of mitigation. An additional question arises with respect to past emissions for which the responsibility largely rests with developed countries. A case can be made that if countries are asked to pay a carbon tax for future emissions, they should also pay for the past emissions. This is especially relevant since big emitters of tomorrow are likely to be different from big emitters of yesterday.

Panagariya argues that these distributional conflicts are the primary explanation of why countries have found it so difficult to arrive at a cooperative solution. Developing countries argue that since developed countries are responsible for the bulk of the past emissions and are also among the largest current emitters, they should undertake much of the mitigation. In turn, the United States has responded by raising the specter of trade sanctions against countries that do not participate in the mitigation efforts. The paper discusses whether such trade sanctions are compatible with the existing World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. It argues that the legality of the trade sanctions is far from guaranteed although the ultimate answer will only be known after the specific measures are tested in the WTO Dispute Settlement Body.

Turning to the specific situation of India, Panagariya argues that it should resist accepting specific mitigation obligations until 2030 or even 2040. The case for an exemption from mitigation for the next two or three decades is justified by the fact that India is a relatively small emitter in absolute as well as per capita terms. Based on 2006 data, it accounts for only 4.4 percent of global emissions, and in per capita terms it ranks 137th worldwide. This is in contrast to China, with which it is often paired. China currently emits the most carbon in the world in absolute terms, and as much as one-fourth of the United States in per capita terms. In addition, Panagariya argues that India needs to give priority to the reduction of poverty.

Given the situation of India and other poor countries, how can an international agreement to combat global warming be reached? Panagariya proposes first that significant progress can be made through agreements on the financing of investments devoted to the discovery of green sources of energy and new mitigation technologies. He believes that private firms will under-invest in such technologies due to the inherent uncertainties. Thus, he argues for establishing a substantial fund financed by contributions from the developed countries and using it to finance research by private firms with the proviso that the fruits of such research would be made available free of charge to all countries. Second, he argues that there is still considerable work to be done in completing an agenda of near-term actions. If developed countries are serious about the necessity of developing countries undertaking mitigation targets beginning some time in the near future, they need to lead by example and accept substantial mitigation obligations by 2020. Finally, he believes that mitigation targets for the developing countries should be stated in terms of emissions per capita or per unit of GDP.

The paper generated a lively exchange among participants on both the effects of climate change and on how India should participate in the international policy discussion. Some thought that Panagariya underestimated the costs to India of climate change, but most of the discussion centered on the development of an appropriate Indian policy response.

Beginning with the major 1991 reform, India has systematically phased out investment and import licensing. Progressive movement toward promarket policies accompanying this phasing out of controls was expected to bring about major shifts in India’s industrial structure. Partly because the opening up itself was uneven across sectors and partly because responses to liberalizing reforms were bound to differ across sectors and firms, it was expected that the changes would be highly variable.

India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988-2005

“India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988–2005” by Laura Alfaro and Anusha Chari, sets out to study the responses of firms and sectors accompanying the ongoing transformation of India’s microeconomic industrial structure. Relying on firm-level data, collected by the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy from company balance sheets and income statements, they study the changes in firm activity from 1988 to 2005. They highlight the differing responses to reforms across sectors, private versus public sector firms, and incumbent versus new firms.
 
The authors define liberalization as consisting of trade and entry liberalization, regulatory reform and privatization that lead to increased domestic and foreign competition. They present a series of stylized facts relating to the evolution of firms and sectors accompanying and following liberalization. The database covers both unlisted and publicly listed firms from a wide cross-section of manufacturing, services, utilities, and financial industries. Approximately one-third of the firms in the database are publicly listed and the remaining two-thirds are unlisted. The companies covered account for more than 70 percent of industrial output, 75 percent of corporate taxes, and more than 95 percent of excise taxes collected by the Government of India.

Detailed balance sheet and ownership information permits the authors to analyze a range of variables such as sales, profitability, and assets for approximately 15,500 firms classified across 109 three digit industries encompassing agriculture, manufacturing, and services. Therefore, in contrast to most existing firm level studies that focus on manufacturers, the authors are able to study the firms in the services and agriculture sectors as well. The data also permit distinction according to ownership categories such as state-owned, business groups, private stand-alone firms, and foreign firms. The authors divide the years from 1988 to 2005 into five sub-periods: 1988–90, 1991–94, 1995–98, 1999–2002, and 2003–05. This division into sub-periods is intended to capture the effects of various reforms taking place over time.

The authors present detailed information on the average number of firms, firm size, as measured by assets and sales, and profitability as measured by operating profits and the return on assets. The information is presented by sector as well as by category of firm: state-owned enterprises, private firms incorporated before 1985 (old private firms), private firms incorporated after 1985 (new private firms), and foreign firms for the five sub-periods. Sales, entry, profitability, and overall firm activity are interpreted as disaggregated measures of economic growth and proxies for efficiency; and thus, they provide an understanding of the effectiveness of reforms. The authors also look at market dynamics with regard to promotion of competition in order to understand the efficiency of resource allocations. They also examine the evolution of industrial concentration over time.
 
Alfaro and Chari find some evidence of a dynamic response among foreign and private firms as reflected in the expansion of their numbers as well as growth in assets, sales, and profits. But overall, they find that the sectors and economy continue to be dominated by the incumbent state-owned firms and to a lesser extent traditional private firms that were incorporated before 1985. Sectors dominated by state-owned and traditional private firms prior to 1988–90, where dominance is defined by 50 percent or larger share in assets, sales, and profits, generally remain so in 2005. Interestingly, rates of return remain remarkably stable over time and show low dispersion across sectors and across ownership groups within sectors. Not only is concentration high, but there is persistence in terms of which firms account for the concentration.

The exception to this broad pattern is the growing importance of new and large private firms in the services industries in the last ten years. In particular, the assets and sales shares of new private firms in business and IT services, communications services and media, health, and other services have expanded at a rapid pace. These changes coincide with the reform measures that took place in the services sectors after the mid-1990s, and they are also consistent with the growth in services documented in the aggregate data.

According to Joseph Schumpeter (1942), creative destruction, defined as the replacement of old firms by new firms and of old capital by new capital, happens in waves. A system-wide reform or deregulation such as the one implemented in India may have been the shock that prompted the creative destruction wave. Creation in India seems to have been driven by new entrants in the private sector and foreign firms forcing the incumbent firms to shape up as well. Outside of the services sectors noted in the previous paragraph, and especially in many manufacturing sectors, transformation seems not to have gone through an industrial shakeout phase in which incumbent firms are replaced by new ones. In many of these sectors, stateowned enterprises and private business groups have continued to dominate despite many liberalization measures.

Different explanations may account for these findings. In part, continued dominance of public sector firms in certain sectors may reflect the high barriers to exit that not only impede destruction of marginal firms but also discourage new firms from entry. On the one hand, potential entrants know that exit of public sector firms is unlikely; on the other hand, they may fear paying high exit costs in case they fail to find a foothold. An additional explanation, perhaps not sufficiently stressed in the debate, is the possibility that entrenched public sector and business group firms subvert true liberalization in sectors in which they dominate. The authors find, for example, that both industry concentration and state ownership are inversely correlated with measures associated with liberalization.

Recent literature highlights the idea that economic growth may be impeded not simply by a lack of resources such as capital and skilled labor, but also by a misallocation of available resources. The high levels of state ownership and ownership by traditional private firms in India raise the question of whether significant gains could be made simply through the allocation of existing resources from less efficient to more efficient firms.

Land Reforms, Poverty Reduction, and Economic Growth: Evidence from India

In “Land Reforms, Poverty Reduction, and Economic Growth: Evidence from India,” Klaus Deininger and Hari K. Nagarajan consider the important but relatively neglected issues of land market policies and institutions. They focus attention on three issues: the role of rental markets in land, the contribution of land sales to the promotion of efficiency, and the potential benefits of better land ownership records and the award of land titles. The authors posit that well-functioning rental and sales markets lead to superior outcomes by raising productivity and providing improved access to land. On an average, these markets shift land toward more efficient farmers, thus contributing to poverty alleviation. The paper also brings into question the long-held view that land sales markets are dominated by distress sales whereby poor farmers facing credit constraints are forced to sell their land for below-market prices to their creditors.

In evaluating the impact of rental markets, the authors test three hypotheses: 

1. Whether a household becomes a lessor or a lessee should be a function of the household’s agricultural ability. Efficient but land-poor households would rent additional land to cultivate while inefficient and land-abundant households should rent out their land for cultivation by other more efficient households. In this manner, well-functioning rental markets in land enhance productivity and improve factor use in the economy.
2. The presence of high transactions costs inhibits households from participation in rental markets. These costs may force households to withdraw from rental transactions altogether and undermine productivity.
3. Participation in rental markets is crucially impacted by wage rates offered in the market. Increases in wage rates will prompt households with low ability to manage their land to rent their land to other households. The resulting increase in the supply of land to the rental markets leads to lower rental rates.

Using survey data, the authors test these various hypotheses. They show that rental markets improve productivity of land use by transferring land to more efficient producers. The results suggest that the probability for the most productive household in the sample to rent additional land is more than double that of the average household. The paper also shows that higher land and lower labor endowments increase the propensity of households to supply land to the rental market. By transferring land to labor-rich but land-poor households, markets allow gainful employment of rural labor. The current policies have severely curtailed rental and have therefore retarded advancement of efficiency and equity in rural India.

The authors next turn to markets for land sales. They examine the impact of a well-functioning land sales market on land access. The long-held view has been that land sales are primarily motivated by adverse exogenous shocks. To the contrary, the authors find that such markets have helped more productive and more labor-abundant farmers to gain access to land. The authors also show that land sales markets exhibit greater activity in the presence of higher economic growth. This suggests that if other factor market imperfections are removed, the role of sales markets in promoting equity and efficiency will be expanded. Finally, identifying the source of shocks leading to distress sales and adopting policies that directly address these shocks can ameliorate the adverse effects of such sales in otherwise well-functioning land sales markets.

The last issue addressed in the paper concerns the importance of land administration for the promotion of efficient rental and sales markets. In India, there exist multiple institutions governing land records, registration, and transactions. This situation has led to a duplication of land records, leading to confusion and conflicts over ownership. It also creates a general sense of insecurity of tenure. The authors argue that the computerization of land records can help alleviate these problems. They cite Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as examples of this experience. They note that the computerization of records can reduce petty corruption, ease access to land records, and possibly increase the probability of land becoming acceptable as collateral to obtain credit.

The seventh annual India Policy Forum conference convened in New Delhi from July 13-14. This seventh volume of the India Policy Forum, edited by Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya, cover economic growth, infrastructure, and politics in India. The editors' summary appears below, and you can download a PDF version of the volume, or access individual articles by clicking on the following links:

Download India Policy Forum 2010-2011 - Volume 7 »

EDITORS' SUMMARY

The India Policy Forum held its seventh conference on July 13 and 14, 2010 in New Delhi. This issue of the journal contains the papers and the discussions presented at the conference, which cover a wide range of issues. The first paper examines the services sector in India, evaluating its growth and future prospects. The second paper looks at India’s corporate sector, analyzing the profitability of firms in the wake of liberalization. The third paper explores the reasons for the large time and cost overruns that have been endemic to Indian infrastructure projects. The final two papers focus on more political issues, looking at the impact of political reservations used to increase women’s political voice, as well as the politics of intergovernmental resource transfers.

Among fast-growing developing countries, India is distinctive for the role of the service sector. Whereas many earlier rapidly growing economies emphasized the export of labor-intensive manufactures, India’s recent growth has relied to a greater extent on the expansion of services. Although there are other emerging markets where the share of services in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) exceeds the share of manufacturing, India stands out for the dynamism of its service sector. Barry Eichengreen and Poonam Gupta critically analyze this rapid service-sector growth in their paper “The Service Sector as India’s Road to Economic Growth?”

Skeptics have raised doubts about both the quality and sustainability of the increase in service-sector activity. They have observed that employment in services is concentrated in the informal sector, personal services, and public administration—activities with limited spillovers and relatively little scope for productivity improvement. They downplay information technology and communications-related employment on the grounds that these sectors are small and use little unskilled and semi-skilled labor, the implication being that a labor-abundant economy cannot rely on them to move people out of low-productivity agriculture. Some argue that the rapid growth of service sector employment simply reflects the outsourcing of activities previously conducted in-house by manufacturing firms—in other words, that it is little more than a relabeling of existing employment. They question whether shifting labor from agriculture directly to services confers the same benefits in terms of productivity growth and living standards as the more conventional pattern of shifting labor from agriculture to manufacturing in the early stages of economic development.

This paper evaluates these claims, coming up with an in-depth look at the services sector in India. Eichengreen and Gupta find that the growth of the sector has been unusually rapid, starting 15 years ago from a very low level. The acceleration of service-sector growth is widespread across activities, but the modern services such as business services, communication, and banking are the fastest growing activities. Other rapidly growing service sectors are hotels, restaurants, education, health, trade, and transport. Some observers have dismissed the growth of modern services on the grounds that these activities constitute only a small share of output and therefore contribute only modestly to the growth of GDP. However, the results show that the contribution of the category communication, business services, and financial services has in fact risen to the point where this group contributes more to growth of GDP than manufacturing. A slightly broader grouping of communication, business services, financial services, education, health, and hotels accounted for roughly half of total growth of the service sector in 2000–08. These activities explain most of the post-1990 acceleration in service sector growth.

Modern services have been the fastest growing in India and their takeoff began at much lower incomes than in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. This, clearly, is a unique aspect of the Indian growth experience. Furthermore, the expansion of the modern service sector is not simply disguised manufacturing activity. Only a relatively small fraction of the growth of demand for services reflects outsourcing from manufacturing. Most production that does not go towards exports, in fact, derives from fi nal demand at home. Thus, the growth of service sector employment does more to add to total employment outside agriculture than outsourcing arguments would lead one to expect.

Looking at the proximate determinants of services growth, Eichengreen and Gupta show that tradable services have grown 4 percentage points a year faster than nontradable services, other things equal. Services that have been liberalized have also grown significantly faster than the average. Regulatory change has been an important part of the story: where essentially all services were heavily regulated in 1970, the majority have since been partially or wholly deregulated. The services segments which were both liberalized and tradable grew 7–8 percentage points higher than the control group (nontradable/nonliberalized services). All this implies that policy makers should continue to encourage exports of IT, communication, fi nancial, and business services while also liberalizing activities like education, health care, and retail trade, where regulation has inhibited the ability of producers to meet domestic demand.

The fact that the share of services has now converged more or less to the international norm raises questions about whether it will continue growing so rapidly. In particular, it will depend on the continued expansion of modern services (business services, communication, and banking). But, in addition, an important share of the growth will result from the application of modern information technology to more traditional services (retail and wholesale trade, transport and storage, public administration and defense). This second aspect obviously has more positive implications for output than for employment.

Finally, the authors find that the mix of skilled and unskilled labor in manufacturing and services is increasingly similar. Thus it is no longer obvious that manufacturing will need to be the main destination for the vast majority of Indian labor moving out of agriculture, or that modern services are a viable destination only for the highly skilled few. To the extent that modern manufacturing and modern services are both constrained by the availability of skilled labor, growth in both areas underscores the importance for India of increasing investments in labor skills.

The paper concludes that sustaining economic growth and raising living standards will require shifting labor out of agriculture into both manufacturing and services, not just one or the other. The argument that India needs to build up labor-intensive manufacturing and the argument that it should exploit its comparative advantage in services are often posed in opposition to one another. Eichengreen and Gupta argue that these two routes to economic growth and higher incomes are in fact complements, not incompatible alternatives.

In their paper “Sources of Corporate Profits in India: Business Dynamism or Advantages of Entrenchment?” Ashoka Mody, Anusha Nath, and Michael Walton ask whether the liberalization during the last two decades has led to increased competition, characterized by innovation and growth, or to profiteering through entrenchment and increased market power of the large firms. While the authors consider various indicators of market structures, the main focus of their analysis is the evolution of the profit rate at the firm level in the wake of liberalization. The authors find that while liberalization induced considerable new entry in the 1990s, that pattern did not continue into the 2000s. On the whole, the major business houses and public sector firms were able to maintain their dominance in terms of market share. 

The authors employ firm-level data from the Prowess database, which provides detailed information on large- and medium-sized companies in India. They focus on firms listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. While they present some trends for the period spanning 1989–2009, their core econometric analysis covers the shorter period from 1993 to 2007, during which the sample size increased from 1,000 to about 2,300 firms. Several significant conclusions emerge from the authors’ discussion of corporate and macroeconomic trends and their econometric analysis.

First, despite some deviations in the early years, they find a consistent pattern that the corporate profit rate—measured as a return on assets—has gone up and down in line with overall economic growth. Profit rates were high in the early 1990s (with a median rate of 10–12 percent) when growth accelerated and fell subsequently as GDP growth decelerated until around 2001 (reaching about 4 percent). The rates rose again (to about 8 percent in 2007–08) as growth in the Indian economy accelerated again.

Second, unless the expansion of the tradable sectors lagged behind the growth in nontradable sectors—a possibility that cannot be ruled out—the trade liberalization of the late 1980s did not have a major influence on corporate profi ts. There is a striking similarity in the evolution of profitability in the tradable and nontradable sectors, both moving in unison with domestic growth. Tradable sectors enjoyed a somewhat higher profit rate than nontradable sectors.

In contrast to trade liberalization, industrial deregulation was associated with a more definite impact on profitability. Following deregulation around 1991, the number of firms increased in virtually all sectors. This increase was associated with reduced market shares. The authors’ econometric analysis suggests that smaller market shares, in turn, were associated with reduced profitability. Thus, in the second half of the 1990s, slower GDP growth and the scramble for market shares both contributed to driving down profit rates. 

The bulk of new entry, in terms of numbers, was of Indian stand-alone firms, but both government-owned firms and business houses remain dominant in terms of sales and asset shares. Indeed, the share of business houses in the total sales rose slightly from 41 percent in 1989 to 42 percent in 2008.

Firm profitability does show substantial year-to-year persistence, raising the possibility of some market power. But the persistence declines when profitability is averaged over longer periods (up to four years), implying that some “super-normal” profits are whittled away over time. Also, more efficient firms tend to have more persistent profits. Thus, some part of the persistence reflects greater efficiency, although because of the overlap between efficient and large firms, the possibility that market power may play a role in maintaining the profit rate over time cannot be completely ruled out.

There is no consistent evidence of a general influence of market concentration on profitability: if anything, firms in less concentrated sectors have slightly higher profit rates. The 2000s witnessed some reconcentration in some sectors, affecting about a third of all the firms, but the profit behavior of firms in re-concentrating sectors appears to be similar to that in the overall sample. Firms with growing market shares do enjoy higher profitability, but the pattern of results is more consistent with causality fl owing in the other direction, that is, with the success of dynamism. In particular, this association is at least as strong for small firms and for less concentrated industries. 

This said, following significant new entry and competition for market shares in the first half of the 1990s, the pace of entry abruptly stalled in the late 1990s, market shares stabilized, and concentration rates started to rise again in some sectors. Thus, the findings are also consistent with the possibility that the phase of competitive dynamism may be diminishing, with incentives for the exercise of market power and investment in business– government relationships being on the rise.

Finally, the authors’ econometric results show that the faster a firm grew, the higher was its profitability. Supporting descriptive statistics add interesting nuances to this finding. The gap in firms’ growth rates opened up in the 2000–07 period. During that period, the fast-growing firms opened up the largest gap in profitability rates relative to the medium-growth firms. Slow growing firms, typically much smaller in size, have had particularly low profit rates and have actually been shrinking in terms of real sales. This suggests that efficiency was rewarded: the dynamic medium-sized firms were able to grow fast and garner sizeable profits, reinforcing their ability to grow. The smallest firms fell increasingly behind. Thus, the shakeout resulted in a potentially more efficient structure.

Greatly expanded level of infrastructure investment is critical to sustaining Indian economic growth. During the last decade, an increasing volume of funds has been allocated to building infrastructure, and successive governments have accorded infrastructure a high priority. Nevertheless, delays and cost overruns remain large and frequent. Moreover, owing to a paucity of research on the subject, our understanding of the causes behind the cost and time overruns and their remedies remains poor. These issues assume additional importance in view of the recent changes in the official procurement policy in infrastructure. The central government as well as state governments are increasingly looking to private funding for infrastructure projects principally through public–private partnerships (PPPs). Though a shortage of funds within the government sector is largely responsible for this shift, there is equally a belief that private-sector participation can reduce delays and cost overruns. However, there is insufficient empirical work to either support or repudiate this confidence in the superiority of the private sector.

In his paper “Determinants of Cost Overruns in Public Procurement of Infrastructure: Roads and Railways,” Ram Singh provides a detailed analysis of time and cost overruns in infrastructure projects in India using two large datasets that contain information on the key dates for implementing and completing projects and the difference between planned and actual costs. The first dataset includes 934 infrastructure projects completed during April 1992–June 2009. The second dataset includes 195 road projects under the supervision of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI). The analysis develops several hypotheses and subjects them to empirical testing. Among other issues, the paper compares delays and cost overruns in PPPs with traditionally funded projects.

A simple tabulation of the data shows large cost overruns, averaging 15 percent, and time delays of about 80 percent. However, the author also finds that delays and cost overruns have declined over time. It is also evident that time delays are the primary cause of cost overruns and that larger projects lead to larger percentage cost overruns. Projects in sectors such as roads, railways, urban development, civil aviation, shipping and ports, and power have experienced much longer delays and higher cost overruns than those in other sectors, but the author finds no evidence of any regional pattern of cost overruns or delays. He suggests that incompleteness in the initial planning and contracting is responsible for many of the cost overruns.

The study shows that the design of the contract has a significant bearing on the level of delays. Traditional item-rate contracts provide little or no incentives to avoid delays. In contrast, since a PPP allows contractors to reap returns as soon as the project is complete, it creates a strong incentive to complete the project at the earliest possible date. Moreover, by bundling responsibility for maintenance with construction, the PPP also motivates contractors to avoid compromising on quality. Somewhat surprisingly, PPP projects experience higher cost overruns even though they have significantly lower time delays. The author attributes the shorter time delays to the fact that the project revenues do not begin until it is complete. The larger cost overruns are more puzzling, but may reflect incentives to expand the scope of the project.

Finally, according to the author, a comparison of road with railways sector projects suggests that organizational factors also contribute to delays and cost overruns. The author identifies three specific aspects. The railways sector is slower during planning and contracting phases. Second, contract management by the railways sector is poorer than by the roads sector. While the NHAI awards most project works to a single contractor, the railways award different works to different contractors. This results in poor project coordination. Third, in the railways sector, projects are allocated funds only for the relevant fiscal year and this is done in the second half of the year. The NHAI’s project delivery mechanism is not subject to this constraint.

Despite recent progress in India toward the social inclusion and empowerment of women, their presence in the country’s state and national lawmaking bodies remains low, raising concerns about how well women’s interests are represented. Previous empirical evidence has substantiated these concerns: women have different policy preferences than men, and elected leaders tend to implement policies in line with their own personal policy preferences, regardless of earlier campaign promises. These arguments provide an important motivation for gender-based affirmative-action policies.

In order to increase women’s political voice, the Indian government amended its constitution in 1993, devolving significant decision-making powers to village-level councils called Gram Panchayats (GPs) and requiring a randomly selected third of all members and leaders (Pradhans) of these councils to be reserved for women. Most recently, in 2010, the upper house of the Indian parliament passed a bill applying similar reservation requirements to the state and national levels of government in the face of considerable resistance and skepticism. Despite the widespread adoption of such gender-reservation policies, several concerns about their effectiveness remain. First, little will change if husbands of female leaders elected to reserved seats lead by proxy, and second, reservation could leave fewer seats to be contested among other disadvantaged groups for which reservations were not established, such as India’s Muslims.

Using new data spanning 11 Indian states, the paper by Lori Beaman, Esther Duflo, Rohini Pande, and Petia Topalova, “Political Reservation and Substantive Representation: Evidence from Indian Village Councils,” assesses the impact of introducing political reservation in India’s GPs, with particular attention to the aforementioned concerns. In conducting their study, the authors collect GP meeting data across fi ve economically and socially heterogeneous states, obtain data on public-good provision from a nationwide survey, and conduct their own survey of 165 GPs within the Birbhum district of West Bengal.

The study examines the effect of reservations in local village councils; the results are likely to be applicable to similar provisions within higher levels of government because the electoral process is the same, voter participation is high, and political parties invest significant resources in elections across all levels of government. Furthermore, by exploiting the random assignment of GP gender reservations, the authors are able to ensure that observed effects can be attributed to political reservations, rather than other factors, such as social attitudes toward women and local demand for public goods. The expansive data and novel study design allow the authors to shed light on three distinct elements of the debate on gender reservations in policymaking: politician selection, citizen participation in politics, and policymaking. 

First, the authors assess the degree to which reservation affects politician selection. Encouragingly, they fi nd no evidence that reservation for women has caused the crowding-out of other politically underrepresented social groups. Evidence does suggest, however, that women elected to reserved seats are less experienced and more likely to enlist their husband’s help in carrying out their duties as Pradhan. Nevertheless, two years into their tenure, female Pradhans from reserved GPs claim they are as comfortable and effective in their roles as their counterparts in nonreserved seats.

The study also reveals the causal mechanisms through which issues important to women might receive insufficient attention in local government. The authors hypothesize that underinvestment in what they determine are “female-friendly” issues occurs because male leaders either possess entirely different preferences, or discriminate against the viewpoints of the opposite gender, regardless of whether or not their preferences diverge. The study revealed that neither is the case. Leaders in reserved GPs are neither more likely to react positively to a female-friendly issue, nor more likely to respond favorably to the inquiry of a female participant in Village Council (Gram Sabha or GS) meetings. On the contrary, women in both reserved and nonreserved GPs were found to receive more constructive responses in these meetings then men. This suggests that the problem lies not in unsympathetic leadership, but in a lack of female constituent participation in the political process that would voice women’s policy concerns. Accordingly, the study also examines the effect of gender reservation on female participation in politics. Reservation does have a positive effect on whether women participate at all in the GS meeting, and the degree to which they remain engaged throughout the meeting. Therefore, inasmuch as electing women to Pradhan seats continues to encourage the participation of women in GS meetings, the reservations will continue to prove effective.

Finally, the study takes advantage of new data to elucidate earlier claims regarding the effects of political reservations on allocations of public goods. A first dataset, much broader in geographic scope than that of previous studies, confirms earlier findings that female Pradhans elected to reserved seats deliver more drinking water infrastructure, sanitation, and roads than their nonreserved counterparts. However, in exploiting the richer cross-time variation of a second dataset, the study reveals that reservations have a much broader impact across sectors than previously thought. The data from the Birbhum region of West Bengal allow the authors to compare public goods allocation patterns between newly reserved GPs, GPs reserved twice in a row, and GPs that are currently unreserved but were reserved before. These new data indicate that, while continuing to push drinking water investments, women elected in the second term under a reserved seat also invest more in “male issues” such as school repair, health center repair, and irrigation facilities. These investment patterns are found to be enduring, as even male Pradhans elected to previously reserved seats continue to invest in female friendly issues, after female reservation for their GP has expired.

Taken together, the findings of the study provide important insights into how leaders in reserved seats are elected, affect policymaking, and actual policy outcomes. While women elected in reserved GPs do differ from their male counterparts in their experience as leaders, they are able to increase female participation in the political process and make different policy decisions. The basic structure of India’s fiscal federalism was in place within fi ve years of the country’s independence on August 15, 1947. The division of expenditure responsibilities and sources of revenue across units of the federation as well as the institutions for allocating resources between levels of government gave substantial discretion to the central government, thereby concentrating economic and political power at the federal level. The design was understandable in light of the perceived need to combat incipient forces of separatism and the economic logic of planned development. This framework for fiscal federalism has been remarkably stable, however, even as the fears of separatism faded, political power dispersed and new parties representing state interests gained representation at all levels of government, and markets replaced planners in directing investment.

In their paper “Inelastic Institutions: Political Change and Intergovernmental Transfer Oversight in Post-Independence India,” T.N. Srinivasan and Jessica Seddon Wallack examine the persistence, and in some cases strengthening, of centralizing features in India’s fiscal federalism, which is a surprising exception to the general trend toward decentralization that other analysts of India’s political economy have described.

The paper focuses in particular on the two institutions—the Finance Commission (FC) and the Planning Commission (PC)—that oversee the bulk of intergovernmental resource transfers. The FC, a constitutional body designed to be independent of both Center and state constitutionally defined jurisdictions, was created to ensure that states had predictable and stable resources and autonomy in their use. In practice, the FC has played a limited role relative to its constitutional potential. Many have argued that it has unique constitutional authority to oversee intergovernmental revenue transfers, but a substantial portion of these transfers are determined and allocated through the PC instead.

The PC, an entity created by a cabinet resolution and hence a part of the constitutional sphere of the Center, was to advise the Center on planning and plans for national development. In contrast to the FC, the PC has in fact played a much larger role in allocating transfers than advising would necessarily imply. As a transfer mechanism, it facilitates Central government oversight of states’ development policies and has ample scope for Central government discretion in transfers. The centralizing aspects of this arrangement have been highlighted in various high-profile public discussions questioning the division of responsibilities between the FC and the PC as well as the various mechanisms for transfers by the PC. Yet, little has changed in terms of the institutional oversight over resource flows.

The authors explore various explanations for the persistence of these centralizing features and conclude that the most likely explanation lies in the barriers that India’s federal institutions pose to collective action by states. State leaders have ample political reasons to seek greater control over their finances and in fact do appear to care about the centralizing implications of the fiscal federal framework. However, they are divided both by design—state boundaries were in many cases drawn on the basis of linguistic or cultural differences—as well as by the economic reality of diverging fortunes and varying dependence on transfers.

India’s institutions also offer no authoritative forum for states and Central government to discuss federal arrangements and propose alternatives. The available arenas for intergovernmental discussions are either toothless or have structures that create incentives for individualist behavior. The Union Parliament, for example, would be able to effect changes to the federal structure through instruments available to it under the constitution or through constitutional amendments if needed. However, the parliamentary system also gives those state parties that are part of the government a vested interest in preserving the status quo.

Srinivasan and Wallack’s analysis implies that there will be limited change in the intergovernmental transfer system, a conclusion that they find worrisome for India’s ability to adjust economically and politically to changing circumstances. Not only does conventional public finance theory favor decentralization of decision making with respect to the financing and provision of public goods and services, especially in heterogeneous societies, but “voices from below” are increasingly valuable as an information source about what is needed in a fast-changing world. They argue that India’s record of government performance also suggests a dearth of accountability, and that real decentralization of roles and responsibilities—not delegated expenditure duties—can be more effective in creating stronger performance incentives.

Event Information

On March 4, The India Project at Brookings hosted an online panel discussion to review the first full-year budget released by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government on February 28, 2015. Panelists discussed the significance of the budget, key takeaways, the hits, and misses, as well as what actions they would like to see the Indian government take vis-à-vis the Indian economy over the next few months. Panelists included James Crabtree, Mumbai bureau chief for the Financial Times; Eswar Prasad, the New Century Chair in International Trade and Economics at the Brookings Institution and senior fellow in Brookings’s Global Economy and Development program; and Shamika Ravi, fellow at the Brookings India Center in Delhi, in the Development Assistance and Governance Initiative at Brookings, and in Brookings’s Global Economy and Development program. Tanvi Madan, fellow in the Foreign Policy program and director of The India Project at Brookings, moderated the discussion.

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