India: Poverty, Inequality and Inclusiveness

There has been a lot of stories in the Indian and international media about  "growing inequalities".  Every one has his own story about slums and Ambani palaces. Prominent International journals publish articles about the increase in "Indian" billionaires forgetting that many of them are citizens of UK and other countries, and their rise is more reflective of inequality in UK or these countries than in India!  A proper understanding of this issue requires an understanding of the key types of inequality.
    At the first level we must distinguish between income distribution and wealth distribution.  At one level, wealth is merely a an accumulation of savings from income and is likely to rise with income. However in a fast growing economy like India with shortages arising from failure of government policies and regulations, it can be a reflection of large and arbitrary changes in prices of assets.  The most visible and glaring instances in wealth inequality in India today are those arising from a stratospheric increase in land prices(higher in Mumbai and Delhi than in New York or Washington).  Anybody who owns or controls the limited supply of urban land in the fast growing cities of India, can become an instant millionaire or billionaire. Almost by definition this will change the wealth distribution adversely! The solution is to change the policies, regulatory systems and management of cities so as to rapidly increase the supply of habitable land.  this will bring down the price of land to a level that is appropriate for a lower middle income country that India is, so that a middle class person can afford to buy land.
   At the second level we have to distinguish between the distribution of private income/consumption and the supply of Public goods and services by the government.  Again the most glaring and visible inequality/inadequacies are in the supply of public goods and services.  The best example of these are the slums.  It is the lack of good roads, drains, clean drinking water, sewage and sanitation that hits you when you go into or even pass by one of the ubiquitous slums in every city of India.  This contrasts with the relatively orderly and clean appearance of the upper middle class and richer colonies.  The limited research done on the quality and distribution of basic public services in India suggests that it is among the worst in the world.  This what need correction most urgently. Further it is to a great extent linked to Urban governance and urban infrastructure issues, though village development also leaves much to be desired.
   An additional factor at the other end of the spectrum is resource rents (minerals-coal, iron ore, telecom spectrum) and rent seeking in Government procurement.  Such rents give windfall revenues to those who take leasing and contracting decisions and those who collude with them and thus worsen both the income and wealth distribution.  A simple situation is to institute a transparent auctioning procedure that ensure that any rents accrue to the State not to individuals.
  At the third level we have to distinguish between income poverty, hunger and malnutrition.  Even though the first two are related they are quite different from the third.  Though poverty reduction has been closely co-related with reduction in proportion of people who are hungry, the latter is completely unacceptable in modern India.  However, hunger is either located in isolated pockets or specially dis-advantaged people and the only way to eliminate it is to identify exactly where each hungry person is! Generalized solutions will not work quickly enough.  One of the purposes of the Multi application smart card (MASC) based on the Unique identification number (UID) that committee(s) chaired by me had proposed and worked out the operational plan, was to achieve this objective.
  On the other hand the problem of malnutrition is completely different problem from income or consumption poverty. It exists even among the non-poor and an increase in income or reduction in poverty will not automatically solve this problem.  On the other hand programs like the wheat-rice based Public Distribution System (PDS) designed for the poor seems to have accentuated the problem for both poor and near poor, by focusing excessive attention on stomach filling but not very nutritious cereals! My research has shown that there are two major causes of malnutrition.
   One is lack of public health and hygene i.e. clean water, drainage, sewage, sanitation and control of communicable diseases.  When a person (infant, child or teenager) has dyarheea no amount of food is going to reduce malnutrition.  The other is information and knowledge about personel health, hygiene and nutrition. In the old days before PDS, grand mothers and old wives tales passed down nutrition information gained over centuries through do's and don'ts on what foods items to consume and when has been lost, partly because of wrongheaded ideas that wheat and rice are better foods than locally available coarse cereals, berries, vegetables and obscure fruits.  The only thing that can be done now is to teach modern nutrition in schools and through public education campaigns and try to relate it to locally available produce, particularly in rural and semi-rural areas and to food labelling in urban and semi-urban areas.

Dealing with the Basic problem of Euro Debt vs Financial Engineering

Many imaginative, perhaps, even innovative approaches are being proposed for dealing with Euro crises. They contain a wealth of interesting ideas and mechanisms that can be useful in designing solutions.  There is a danger however, of getting lost in the minutiae of solutions and forgetting the basic fundamental economic problem that has to be addressed.     One of the most important lessons of the financial bubble and the subsequent financial crisis in the USA was that the slicing, dicing and recombining risk through levels and layers does not necessarily help risk diversification; it can as likely help to hide risk from innocent buyers of these products and make it easier to fool them into thinking that the risk has somehow dis-appeared.  In other words, the finest financial engineering cannot make the existing risk magically vanish, it can only hide it and confuse the naïve for a while.  Even the latter will be short lived as long as the memory of the financial crisis remains in the public mind! It is therefore useful to go back to the source(s) of the Euro crises and reiterate the essential economic measures that are required to diffuse the crisis!

There are five elements of any viable solution.  These are presented in their simplest form without bells and whistles, perhaps even in over simplified form in the light of the previous point.

(1)   Countries with unsustainable debt (GIIPS?) must put it on a sustainable path through a combination of fundamental reform of the expenditure, tax, transfer and growth policies.  The objective is to meet the sovereign debt sustainability condition [g-r+Pb > 0, where g = GDP growth rate, r = real interest rate on sovereign debt, Pb = Primary balance]. In this context it is important to remember that a fiscal squeeze by previously extravagant countries is not a morality play but an attempt to meet the debt sustainability condition!  Thus, beyond some point (the optimal) an immediate and sharp fiscal squeeze will reduce growth more than it increases the primary balance or reduces the real interest rate and thus make the fiscal situation less (not more) viable.

(2)   Greece (+Portugal?) is in a situation in which even the optimal policy mix outlined in (1) cannot put it in a sustainable path without debt restructuring.  In other words, Greece has been structurally insolvent for the past year or so.  The ‘grant’ funds needed to convert this problem from one of insolvency to one of liquidity must come from somewhere outside Greece - no amount of financial engineering can make this fact disappear.  Rough calculations suggest that a 60% haircut on Greek government debt would be sufficient to make Greece solvent.  It seems logical and fair that those who took the risk (or deliberately overlooked it) to earn higher returns (profits, bonuses) from Greece should pay when the risk materializes.

(3)   A Greek debt restructuring will have consequences for Euro area banks who have lent to Greece.  These consequences should have been anticipated and dealt with at least a year ago, by recapitalizing the banks.  The European Banking Authority now (reportedly) estimates these cost to be of the order of Euro 80 -100 bi (FT  Oct. 20, 2011).  To the extent that private investors are unwilling to raise the equity in these banks, the home country of these banks will have to provide the capital.  The 60% haircut on Greek debt presumably accounts for the indirect cost to the Greek Govt. of the effect of this default on Greek banks.  Other affected countries would also have to do the needful.  To the extent that the home country is not in a position to recapitalize, support is needed from outside the home country- the EFSF can be used to provide this additional support, either for direct financing or to underwrite repayments.  If the above estimate is correct, there will be money left over in the EFSF to strengthen the provisioning of bank loans to governments of countries that are on the border line of solvency, so as to remove doubts about potential contagion to these countries.

(4)   Once the direct and indirect effects of solvency problem are addressed, the borderline Euro area countries, such as Spain and Italy (along with Greece and Portugal), would be left with a liquidity problem.  If the ECB acted like a normal country central bank, such as the US FED, it could provide as much liquidity as needed to solve the liquidity problems of Spain and Italy.  As there is no explicit medium-long term grant element (once steps 1-3 are undertaken), there is no logical reason for not doing so in a period of low demand and low inflation (only ideology or primordial fear).  To the extent that mark to market accounting will impose temporary balance sheet losses on the ECB, the EFSF could be used to provide fiscal support till the markets stabilize and return to normal (at which point the ‘mark to market’ profits of ECB would revert to the EFSF).

A simple example illustrates.  Assume that the long term interest rate for a solvent Italy is the German rate +0.5%.  Because of all the problems outlined above, the premium above Germany has gone up to 2.5% (say).  Thus the ECB will be effectively picking up the risk equivalent to 2% points for debt coming due in the next 6 -12 months and will therefore constitute ‘mark to market losses’ in its balance sheet of this amount.  This fiscal cost has to be borne by the EFCF till the markets realize that the problems at 1-3 have been addressed (after which Italian interest rate will go back to the German rate +0.5%).  Thus the fiscal cost is borne by the EFCF not the ECB – with Euro 300 billion of Italian debt coming due in the next 12 months (in this example) the temporary fiscal cost to be borne by the EFSF will be Euro 6 bi).  The ECB provides the liquidity, whether directly or through Banks.

(5)  Finally for other non-Euro area countries that may be affected in the days/weeks/months following a Greek debt restructuring, the IMF must stand ready to provide liquidity support to “innocent bystanders”.  The IMF still has sufficient funds for this purpose, and these could easily be augmented to the needed extent, if prior action has been taken on points 1 to 4 above.

The longer the basic problems outlined above remain unaddressed, the more difficult they become to address, as private creditors gradually reduce their exposure to insolvent countries at the cost of official and multilateral lenders and borderline solvent countries are pushed over the line by rising interest rates.

Fiscal Sustainability: Economic Theory vs. Market Fashions

In discussions of Fiscal Policy and Fiscal vulnerability I have repeatedly (over the past 25 years) come across a clash between Economic theory and Market Fashions.  The use of the word “Fashion” might suggest to some a harmless diversion a matter for amusement or entertainment, but a proper understanding of the economics is critical to dealing with the fiscal crises that threaten the World today. Let me illustrate this with four points that have a bearing on Fiscal sustainability.

The first basic principle of economics is the debt sustainability condition: g – r - Pd > 0 (g is the growth rate, r the real interest rate payable on sovereign debt, Pd is the primary deficit).  A sovereign’s debt is sustainable if the growth rate exceeds the real interest rate paid on the debt by the extent of the Primary surplus.  With few exceptions (e.g. William Buiter of Citi), the public discussion of debt sustainability has been carried out without reference to this basic essential data.  Unfortunately this is not new: Over the past 25 years I have often seen even highly respected institutions such as the IMF ignore this simple number when it did not fit with their conclusions and recommendations (which therefore inevitably turned out to be wrong).  Market fashion has shifted dramatically away from this measure since an empirical paper estimated” that 60% was the safe level of gross debt to GDP ratio for every country under the sun.  Subsequent work concluded that this was the safe level for Developing countries but the safe level for Developed countries was higher (90%?).  I am sure that there will many subsequent revisions and refinements to these estimates.  I call this a fashion not because these estimates are not useful, but because it has led to herd behavior in which analysts do not even think it worthwhile to produce and present the basic numbers for the sustainability conditions. It would seem to me that we can easily produce this data, not only for the US, Japan and European countries currently under pressure but also other economies with weak fiscal situations and poorer economic data. This will allow us to define the relative fiscal sustainability of different countries more accurately and identify the source of the problem, the better to deal with it.

Economic theory tells us that, the debt that is relevant to the fiscal sustainability issue is the net debt (debt net of assets) not gross debt.  This is such a simple and well understood (by private individuals) principle of economics that it is almost embarrassing to raise it in a professional context.  Yet public discourse over the last two years barely ever mentions the asset side of the balance sheet or presents the comparative net debt position of countries under stress.  When financial markets sense a crisis, even a minor temporary one, only the short term matters, as each market participant tries to be the first to unload its holding of the concerned sovereign debt or loans.  Only the gross debt, coming due and needing refinancing seems to matter to the markets.  If this is true, why call it a ‘market fashion’?  Because it is the obligation and duty of responsible analysts, including the international financial institutions, to focus not just on the short term but also on the medium and long term – the original definition of “sustainability”.  The short term can be dealt with by liquidity support, whether from the Country’s Central Bank or the IMF, it is or should be the medium term that determines sustainability.

The theorists who emphasize Net debt are quite aware of the problem of maturity mismatch between sovereign debt and sovereign assets (e.g. loans or bond debt and public companies or infrastructure assets) and about the difference in risk associated with the different type of assets (e.g. physical assets versus future tax obligations).  This cannot distract from the basic economic fact that fiscal solvency depends on the net debt position – a country or individual cannot be insolvent if its assets exceed its debt. Further, the fact that a country’s fiscal situation (as against an individual’s) can be sustainable with debt larger than its assets matters even in the short term, because it is possible to loan or sell some assets (perhaps at a discount) to meet short term debt obligations! The safety threshold of 60% or 90% gross Debt-GDP ratio will surely be refined if we put in the effort to determine net debt.   To say that we do not have a perfect measure of sovereign assets or net debt is an evasion; imperfect measures (for instance physical assets valued at depreciated book value) are better than no measures, if we are clear and transparent about the limitations.

The theory also makes a distinction between sovereign debt financed externally and that financed domestically, though mostly in a very elementary manner of differential interest rates. Some of us who have had to advise on fiscal control and fiscal debt issues and to face the consequences of bad or incomplete advice, have long asserted that external financing of sovereign debt is not worth the risk.  The advantage of lower nominal interest is very tempting economically and politically: However the exchange risk is likely to be neglected or ignored and the danger of sudden stops and reversals is very real.  The country can suddenly find itself at huge risk from shocks to global financial markets and overreaction to temporary problems in the domestic economy and polity.  In addition the valuation of assets that go into the determination of net debt, is likely to be asymmetric – foreign lenders to the sovereign are likely to value it much less than domestic debt holders relative to debt.   Besides the home bias and exchange risk, other factors include differential costs of using the legal system.

Recent, preliminary empirical analysis also suggests that the net external debt of a country has a positive effect on the volatility of capital flows (i.e. higher net debt more capital flow volatility).  In other words the lower the cumulative gap between domestic investment and domestic saving (Id-Sd) the more stable capital flows are likely to be.  This implies that higher domestic private and household savings are likely to lead to lower capital volatility lower risk to foreign borrowing (private and government) and a higher threshold limit for safe Debt-GDP ratios. The hypothesis is that (other things being equal), higher domestic private saving rates allow a country to sustain higher Sovereign Debt-GDP levels.[1]  If this is true it would certainly be useful to know the relative household and private saving rates of different countries, along with the other data mentioned above.  We would then be in a better position to judge relative fiscal sustainability and to identify the key problems and  focus on the policies that can make a difference.

---

[1] A currency union raises a host of other issues that need separate discussion.  The reference here is to countries with their own currency.

Will China Eclipse the USA and Dominate the World?

Virmani (2005), concluded that "the (current) unipolar world will be transformed into a bipolar world during the first quarter of this century and into a tri polar one (China, USA, India) during the second quarter of the century."  This was based on construction of a simple new Index of Power Potential (VIPP), which took account of a country's size and technological competence measured succinctly by per capita GDP, and projection of the underlying economic/demographic variables.  These projections have been updated and refined in a series of subsequent papers and books(2006, 2009).*  My latest projections for VIPP indicate that China's Power Potential (or economic power) will equal that of the USA around 2025 and exceed it by 2030, while India's will attain the US level around 2045.  Does this mean that China will 'Eclipse' the USA or Dominate the World? Not necessarily, for two reasons.
   Firstly my analysis of the Cold War period, based on the same index, shows that at the peak of its power in the 1980s the USSR had about 25% of the power potential (VIPP) of the USA. Yet the World power structure was Bipolar and considered by everyone to be so.  Second overall power depends both on economic power and Strategic power (strategic technology and assets, including arms, nuclear and aero space) which have to be factored in to get an index of overall power (VIP).  Though China will eventually catch up with the USA on this front this will happen at least a decade or two after it equals the USA's economic power.  Based on these three factors, I conclude that the World's power structure is likely to  become Bipolar, with two superpowers  (USA-China) around 2025 and to become tri-plolar, with three super powers (US, China, India) around 2035-40.
    The greater uncertainty about the latter arises from a fourth ingredient in global power. The motivation of the country (its intellectuals, government, politicians), to obtain and use global power (the 'Will to Power").  Both the USA and China have this 'will' as did the USSR, and therefore the US will eventually do all in its power to maintain its strategic lead, not least by resisting by countering China's strategy of acquiring technology by every conceivable means.  On the other hand it is not clear that India has this global motivation!  If it develops the 'will' then India will become a 'super power' by 2035, if not then it may not happen till a decade later.
-----------
*See earlier blogs or  https://sites.google.com/site/drarvindvirmani/

A Simple, Transparent Quota Formula For IMF

There is widespread agreement that a new quota formula for the IMF must be simple and transparent. The simplest and most transparent formula is one with a single variable, the share of country GDP in total GDP.  This will still require agreement on whether we should use GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP), which measures the relative weight of countries' in the real world economy, or GDP at Market exchange rates (MER) which some believe is a better reflection of the financial clout of countries.  A realistic and practical solution to this would be a blend of the two measures with the ratio decided by a tussle between the Low Income (LICs) and Middle Income countries (MICs) favouring PPP, on one side and the High income countries (HICs) on the other favouring MER. A simple calculation illustrates the why!

The impact of a change in the shares of GDP PPP for the four major groupings defined by the WDI (LICs, MIC-lower, MIC-upper and HICs) are shown (for 2009) in the table below:

Table: Shares of countries in total blended GDP (and quota)
Share of GDP PPP in blend=>	0%	50%	100%
High Income countries	70.8%	62.4%	55.4%
Upper Middle Income countries	14.0%	16.6%	18.8%
Lower Middle Income countries	14.5%	20.0%	24.5%
Lower Income countries	0.7%	1.0%	1.3%

Thus in going from 0% of GDP PPP in the blend, to 100%, the Low Income Countrie's quota share goes up by 90%, that of the Lower middle income countries' goes up by 63% and that of the Upper Middle income countries' by 17%. The High income countries' quota declines by 20%.  Consequently the High income countries favour a low proportion of GDP PPP in the blend, while it is in the interest of the rest to have a high proportion. As the rich countries of Europe (with 25% or so of the vote) have a veto on such a major decision, thier willingness to loose some vote power will be critical to the sucess of such a reform!

      The final issue would be whether or not to average the GDP over three years as is done for the GDP blend in the current formula. It is argued that a country GDP may have declined in that year because of a negative shock.  As the averging process delays adjustment to the latest economic position it favours slow growing economies at the expense of the more dynamic economies. A simple practical compromise, that would address both arguments, is to take the higher (maximum) of the 3 year average and the latest year.

    This simple solution could be achieved quickly and without laboured arguments, which everyone can see are designed to favour ones own country, allowing the IMF to focus unitedly on the revived crises in the rich countries (US, Euro area).

IMF: Equity based global institution or systemically important financial institution

   The IMF is an equity based financial institution with countries as share holders, who are represented on the IMF board by elected Executive Directors (except 5 heriditary 'peers'). It is important to understand the differences and similarities with private financial institutions, so as to adopt practices from the latter to increase efficency.  One of the most fundamental differences is that IMF shares are not tradable but assigned to member countries by means of a Quota formula. The quota formula determines the maximum share holding and vote share of individual countries, though a country can in principle, not take up its full entitlement if it does not have the funds or is not interested in the higher vote share.  A related difference is that all loans made by the IMF (its principle financial expendiduteres)  have to be approved by the executive board. These differences are (except the heriditary rights) appropriate for a global economic institution!

    In other respects there is nothing in the "articles of agreement of the IMF" preventing it from acting like a systemically important private financial institution, only self imposed restrictions/practices that can and should be changed. The IMF should use a mix of equity and market debt (borrowing from private global markets) to carry out its primary work of lending to countries in need of liquidity support.  A debt-equity ratio of 4:1 (say) would be quite consistent with a safe conservative financial institution, while allowing the IMFs lending resources to be five time its equity base.  As a macroprudential policy the approved debt;equity ratio could be allowed to vary around a mean value depending on the state of the Global economy.  Thus the debt:equity limit would be allowed to rise automatically during the upside and peak of the cycle and fall on the downside and trough of the cycle.  This would add a global automatic stabiliser to the World economy and also allow the IMF to respond more flexibly and quickly to liquidity crises arising from financial crises.
   There would be no need for special arrangements such as NAP/NAB that have been criticised as 'government bail outs' and give rise to a replay of governance and control issues that should be settled once and all through a modern, 21st century quota formula.  One welcome outcome would be to subject IMF lending, which is professedly for meeting liquidity problems, to some market discipline. This is particularly important for lending to countries who are likely to remain on the border line of solvency (below or above), even if stringint policy reforms are carried out (conditionality).  This reform would also allow the total resource requirements of the fund to be easily met by relatively small adjustments (up or down) in the total outstanding equity, as is routinely done in private institutions.
    Traditionally the IMF quota has also determined access to IMF loan funds.  Since the start of the global financial crisis the link between the IMF quota and the maximum allowed borrowing from it has been decisively broken. Many countries have recieved loans of 100s of per cent's their quota while some have recieved loans of 1000s of per cent's their quota.  Thus the link between the quota and access (borrowing limit) has been decisively broken.  The argument that as a matter of principle the quota formula must have variables determining access is not credibile given this recent history.  More important is the practical link between GDP and these new loan levels, which has clear implications for raising the weight of GDP in the formula. 

The Sudoku of India's Economic Growth

In the Sudoku (2009) I showed how India's 1990s economic reforms raised the underlying/potential growth rate of the Indian economy to a rnage of 8.5 to 9.0. I also said that this growth could (not would) be maintained for several decades provided economic reforms continued at the average rate seen since 1991.    The analysis of high growth economies has shown that numerous countries attaned high growth for 3 to 5 years (shooting stars) but only a handfull have been able to sustain it for two decades (HGEs).  These (HGEs) were countries that reacted quickly to adverse developments and shocks to the economy, by removing impediments to growth and stimulating new drivers to take the place of declining ones.  Thus there was a great danger of complacency  (Eco Survey 2008-9) and inaction on the policy front that would result in  a slowing down of India's growth below its potential. Unfortunately this what seems to have happened, with a resultant slowdown in growth below 8% and likely hood of further slowdown, unless policy reforms resume.  Despite the highly unfavourable global situation, I still believe that policy reforms, several of which have been on the table, can reverse the decline and put the economy back on the high growth path.