Economic Survey: Civil Services Mentor Magazine: March - 2017

Economic Survey

The Indian Economy has sustained a macro-economic environment of relatively lower inflation, fiscal discipline and moderate current account deficit coupled with broadly stable rupee-dollar exchange rate. The Economic Survey 2016-17 presented in the Parliament by the Union Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley states that such a sustenance is despite continuing global sluggishness. It says : Growth rate of GDP at constant market prices for the year 2016-17 is placed at 7.1 per cent, as against 7.6 per cent in 2015-16. This estimate is based mainly on information for the first seven to eight months of the financial year. Government final consumption expenditure is the major driver of GDP growth in the current year. Fixed investment (gross fixed capital formation) to GDP ratio (at current prices) is estimated to be 26.6 per cent in 2016-17, vis-à-vis 29.3 per cent in 2015-16. For 2017-18, it is expected that the growth would return to normal as the new currency notes in required quantities come back into circulation and as follow-up actions to demonetisation are taken. On balance, there is a likelihood that Indian economy may recover back to 6 ¾ per cent to 7 ½ per cent in 2017-18.

Important points mentioned in the Survey are given below:

Fiscal

• Indirect taxes grew by 26.9 per cent during April-November 2016.
• The strong growth in revenue expenditure during April-November 2016 was boosted mainly by a 23.2 per cent increase in salaries due to the implementation of the Seventh Pay Commission and a 39.5 per cent increase in the grants for creation of capital assets.
• The headline inflation as measured by Consumer Price Index (CPI) remained under control for the third successive financial year. The average CPI inflation declined to 4.9 per cent in 2015-16 from 5.9 per cent in 2014-15 and stood at 4.8 per cent during April-December 2015.
• Inflation based on Wholesale Price Index (WPI) declined to (-) 2.5 per cent in 2015-16 from 2.0 per cent in 2014-15 and averaged 2.9 per cent during April-December 2016.
• Inflation is repeatedly being driven by narrow group of food items, of these pulses continued to be the major contributor of food inflation.

Trade

• The trend of negative export growth was reversed somewhat during 2016-17 (April-December), with exports growing at 0.7 per cent to US$ 198.8 billion. During 2016-17 (April-December) imports declined by 7.4 per cent to US$ 275.4 billion.
• Trade deficit declined to US$ 76.5 billion in 2016-17 (April-December) as compared to US$ 100.1 billion in the corresponding period of the previous year.
• The current account deficit (CAD) narrowed in the first half (H1) of 2016-17 to 0.3 per cent of GDP from 1.5 per cent in H1 of 2015-16 and 1.1 per cent in 2015-16 full year.
• Robust inflows of foreign direct investment and net positive inflow of foreign portfolio investment were sufficient to finance CAD leading to an accretion in foreign exchange reserves in H1 of 2016-17.
• During 2016-17 so far, the rupee has performed better than most of the other emerging market economies.

External Debt

• At end-September 2016, India's external debt stock stood at US$ 484.3 billion, recording a decline of US$ 0.8 billion over the level at end-March 2016.
• Most of the key external debt indicators showed an improvement in September 2016 vis-à-vis March 2016.
• The share of short-term debt in total external debt declined to 16.8 per cent at end-September 2016 and foreign exchange reserves provided a cover of 76.8 per cent to the total external debt stock.
• India's key debt indicators compare well with other indebted developing countries and India continues to be among the less vulnerable countries.

Agriculture

• Agriculture sector is estimated to grow at 4.1 per cent in 2016-17 as opposed to 1.2 per cent in 2015-16; the higher growth in agriculture sector is not surprising as the monsoon rains were much better in the current year than the previous two years.
• The total area coverage under Rabi crops as on 13.01.2017 for 2016-17 is 616.2 lakh hectares which is 5.9 per cent higher than that in the corresponding week of last year.
• The area coverage under wheat as on 13.01.2017 for 2016-17 is 7.1 percent higher than that in the corresponding week of last year.
• The area coverage under gram as on 13.01.2017 for 2016-17 is 10.6 percent higher than that in the corresponding week of last year.

Industry

• Growth rate of the industrial sector is estimated to moderate to 5.2 per cent in 2016-17 from 7.4 per cent in 2015-16.During April-November 2016-17, a modest growth of 0.4 per cent has been observed in the Index of Industrial Production (IIP).

• The eight core infrastructure supportive industries, viz. coal, crude oil, natural gas, refinery products, fertilizers, steel, cement and electricity registered a cumulative growth of 4.9 per cent during April-November 2016-17 as compared to 2.5 per cent during April-November 2015-16.

• The production of refinery products, fertilizers, steel, electricity and cement increased substantially, while the production of crude oil, natural gas fell during April-November 2016-17. Coal production attained lower growth during the same period.

Services

• Service sector is estimated to grow at 8.9 per cent in 2016-17, almost the same as in 2015-16. It is the significant pick-up in public administration, defence and other services, boosted by the payouts of the Seventh Pay Commission that is estimated to push up the growth in services.

India's economic experience shows that the fiscal activism embraced by advanced economies- giving a greater role to counter-cyclical policies and attaching less weight to curbing debt- is not relevant for India. This observation was made in the Economic Survey 2016-17 presented by the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley in the Parliament today. The Economic Survey has also stated that India's fiscal experience has underscored the fundamental validity of the fiscal policy principles enshrined in the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBM) Act 2003.

The Survey lists the some of the challenges that might impede India's progress. These challenges are classified by the Survey as follows: ambivalence about property rights and the private sector, deficiencies in State capacity, especially in delivering essential services and inefficient redistribution. The Survey highlights difficulties in privatizing public enterprises, even for firms where economists have made strong arguments that they belong in the private sector. In this context, the Survey points towards the need to further privatize the Civil Aviation, Banking and Fertilizer sectors. The Survey points out that the capacity of the State in delivering essential services such as health and education is weak due to low capacity, with high levels of corruption, clientelism, rules and red tape. At the level of the states, competitive populism is more in evidence than competitive service delivery, the Survey adds. Constraints to policy making due to strict adherence to rules and abundant caution in bureaucratic decision-making favours status quo, the Survey cautions.

According to the Survey, redistribution by the government is far from efficient in targeting the poor. This is intrinsic to current programs because spending is likely to be greatest in states with better institutions and which will therefore have fewer poor. The Survey notes that over the past two years, the government has made considerable progress toward reducing subsidies, especially related to petroleum products. Technology has been the main instrument for addressing the leakage problem and the pilots for direct benefit transfer in fertilizer represent a very important new direction in this regard, the Survey adds. Noting that India has come a long way in terms of economic performance and reforms, Economic Survey 2016-17 says that there is still a journey ahead to achieve dynamism and social justice. Completing this journey will require broader societal shifts in the underlying vision, the Survey adds.

Redistributive Resource Transfer or RRT to a state (from the Centre) is defined as gross devolution to the state adjusted for the respective state's share in aggregate Gross Domestic Product(GDP). The top 10 recipients are: Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Assam. The Economic Survey 2016-17 points out that there is no evidence of a positive relationship between these transfers and various economic outcomes, including per capita consumption, GSDP growth, development of manufacturing, own tax revenue effort, and institutional quality.

Instead, there is a suggestive evidence of a negative relationship. For example, larger RRT flows seem to negatively affect fiscal effort (defined as the share of own tax revenue to GSDP). These trends are robust to alternative definitions of RRT. Also, whether mineral rich states like Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Rajasthan and Gujarat ,are doing well on the metrics of economic outcomes and governance is considered in the context of redistributive transfers. However, this does not reveal conclusive results and there is no evidence of a negative relationship between fiscal effort and reliance on revenue from natural resources over the period 2001-14. The Economic Survey 2016-2017, also suggests providing a part of the RRTs or to redistribute the gains from resource use as a Universal Basic Income (UBI) directly to households in relevant states which receive large RRT flows and are more reliant on natural resource revenues.

Finally, recognizing and responding creatively to possible pathologies created by large bounties-either in the form of redistributive resources or natural resources, will be important to avoid making the errors of history.
Apparel and Leather & Footwear sectors are eminently suitable for generating jobs that are formal and productive, providing bang-for-buck in terms of jobs created relative to investment and generating exports and growth. This was stated in the Economic Survey 2016-17 presented by the Finance Minister Shri Arun Jaitley in the Parliament today. The Survey adds that these sectors provide immense opportunities for creation of jobs for the weaker sections, especially for women, and can become vehicles for broader social transformation in the country.

The Survey highlights the opportunity for India in this sector in global context by saying that India has an opportunity to push exports since rising wage levels in China has resulted in China stabilizing or losing market share in these products. India is well positioned to take advantage of China's deteriorating competitiveness due to lower wage costs in most Indian states, it adds.

On logistics, the Survey says that costs and time involved in getting goods from factory to destinations are greater in India than those for other countries. On labour costs, India's source of comparative advantage in this sector, also seem not to work in its favour due to problems like regulations on minimum overtime pay, onerous mandatory contributions that become de facto taxes for low-paid workers in small firms that result in a 45 per cent lower disposable salary, lack of flexibility in part-time work and high minimum wages in some cases.

Several measures have been initiated that form part of the package approved by the Government for textiles and apparels in June 2016, the Survey notes. Accordingly, textile and apparel firms will be provided a subsidy for increasing employment, but these need to be complemented by further actions such as the following:

• An FTA with EU and UK in the case of apparel will offset an existing disadvantage by India's competitors- Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia. In the case of leather and footwear, the FTA might give India an advantage relative to competitors. In both cases, the incremental impact would be positive.
• The introduction of the GST offers an excellent opportunity to rationalize domestic indirect taxes so that they do not discriminate in the case of apparels against the production of clothing that uses man-made fibers; and in the case of footwear against the production of non-leather based footwear.
• Third, a number of labor law reforms would encourage employment creation in these two sectors.

The Economic Survey states that seeing only the shift in the levels of these indicators does not give us the full picture because there is no benchmark for relative assessment. Here, economic theory provides us a useful metric: convergence (or unconditional convergence). Convergence means that a state that starts off at low performance levels on an outcome of importance, say the level of income or consumption, should grow relatively faster over time, improving its performance so that it catches up with states which had better starting points.

The Economic Survey mentions that, when convergence in real per capita GDP is studied for the latest decade (2004-2014), it is found that while incomes converge for provinces in China and for countries in the world, in India, they diverge. When convergence in real per capita consumption for states in India is studied, the same trend of divergence is observed. Despite growing rapidly on average, there is sign of growing regional inequality among the Indian states. This is puzzling because the underlying forces in favor of equalization within India-namely strong and rising movements of goods and people-are strongly evident. This is not found to be the case in the previous decade (1994-2004), when we see that incomes in China, India and the world were all diverging/weakly converging.

The Economic Survey further states that one possible hypothesis for seeing a regional dispersion in income and consumption is that there might be governance traps that impede the catch-up process. And if there are such traps, labor and capital mobility might even aggravate underlying inequalities. But why such traps persist if competitive federalism is forcing change upon the lagging states remains an open question.

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