Shutting Out Chinese Products is Not Going to Create Jobs

Public rallies against imported Chinese goods are held quite regularly these days, across different parts of the country. India’s dependence on Chinese goods has only grown over the years. This can be made out from Figure 1, which plots India’s imports from China every quarter, for the last few years.

Figure 1 tells us very clearly that India’s imports from China have grown over the years. Having said that, it doesn’t make sense to look at imports in isolation given that India exports stuff to China as well. Hence, Figure 2 plots India’s trade deficit with China (i.e. the difference between our total imports from China and our total exports to it).

Figure 1:
Figure 2 clearly shows that India’s trade deficit with China has grown over the years. This means that we import much more from China than we export to it. A major reason for this lies in the fact that most of the Indian firms are small in size. Take a look at Figure 3.

Figure 2:
What does Figure 3 tell us? It tells us very clearly that close to 85 per cent of Indian manufacturing firms are small. They employ less than 50 workers. In case of China, only around 25 per cent of the manufacturing firms are small. Also, in case of China, more than 50 per cent of manufacturing firms are large i.e. they employ more than 200 workers. In the Indian case, around 10 per cent of the manufacturing firms are large. And India has very few middle-sized firms which employ anywhere between 50 to 200 workers.

Figure 3: Distribution of manufacturing workforce among small,
medium and large firms in India and China
Given this small size, Indian firms lack economy of scale, which is basically a proportionate fall in costs gained with increased production. Hence, Indian products are costlier than Chinese products. In a recent newsreport, Blooomberg quotes a small shopkeeper as saying: “India-made lights cost twice as much… Customers aren’t willing to pay that.”

The other factor that helps make Chinese imports cheaper is the huge fall in international shipping costs over the years. This is a point that Tim Harford makes in his new book 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy: “Goods can now be shipped reliably, swiftly and cheaply: rather than the $420 that a customer would have paid… to ship a tonne of goods across the Atlantic in 1954, you might now pay less than $50 a tonne.”

This has had a major impact on the way goods are manufactured and business in general is carried out. As Harford writes: “Manufacturers are less and less interested in positioning their factories close to their customers – or even their suppliers. What matters instead is finding a location where the workforce, the regulations, the tax regime and the going wage all help make production as efficient as possible. Workers in China enjoy new opportunities; in developed countries [and developing countries] they experience new threats to their jobs; and governments anywhere feel that they’re competing with governments everywhere to attract business investment. On top of it all, in a sense, is the consumer, who enjoys the greatest possible range of the cheapest possible products – toys, phones, clothes, anything [emphasis added].”

The point is that the Chinese factories operate on a very large scale and that makes their products cheaper than the ones being made in India. The fact that transportation costs are low, helps as well.

Those against Chinese products want this dominance of Chinese products on India to end. As Arun Ojha, national convener of Swadeshi Jagran Manch recently told Bloomberg: “Our youth are losing jobs and we are becoming traders of Chinese products.”

It is important to dissect Ojha’s statement. What he is essentially saying is that because Indians are buying Chinese products, Indian industry is shutting down and the Indian youth are losing jobs. So, what is the way out? The way out is that we stop buying Chinese products and start buying Indian ones. Will this help?

This is where things are no longer as straightforward as they seem. The straightforward interpretation here is that, as Indians stop buying Chinese goods and start buying Indian goods, Indian industry will flourish, and Indian youth will find jobs. Now only if it was as simple as that.

Henry Hazlitt discusses a similar situation in his brilliant book Economics in One Lesson, in the context of United Kingdom of Great Britain and United States of America. As he writes: “An American manufacturer of woollen sweaters… sells his sweaters for $30 each, but English manufacturers could sell their sweaters of the same quality for $25. A duty of $5, therefore, is needed to keep him in business. He is not thinking of himself, of course, but of the thousand men and women he employs, and of the people to whom their spending in turn gives employment. Throw them out of work, and you create unemployment and a fall in purchasing power, which would spread in ever-widening circle.”

An American manufacturer of sweaters can sell his sweaters for $ 30 per piece. At the same time, an English manufacturer can sell the same sweater for $25 per piece. Hence, the American manufacturer charges $5 or20 per cent more for the same product than the British one. Of course, if both the products are allowed into the American market, the consumer will buy the cheaper one. This would mean that the British manufacturer would flourish. In the process, the American manufacturer might have to shutdown and this would mean a loss of a huge number of jobs.

The American government would obviously be bothered about the American manufacturer and the American jobs. Given this, to ensure that the American manufacturer can compete, the American government needs to impose a duty of $5 on the British manufacturer. This will mean the British manufacturer will also sell sweaters for $30. In the process, the American manufacturer would be able to compete, and jobs would be saved.

This trouble with this argument, as convincing as it sounds, is that it does not take the point of view of the consumer buying the sweater into account. As Hazlitt puts it: “The fallacy comes from looking merely at this manufacturer and his employees, or merely at the American sweater industry. It comes from noticing only the results that are immediately seen, and neglecting the results that are not seen because they are prevented from coming into existence.”

If the consumer ends up paying $30 per sweater, he would be paying $5 more. This basically means that he would have $5 less to spend on other things. As Hazlitt writes: “Because the American consumer had to pay $5 more for the same quality of sweater he would have just that much less left over to buy anything else. He would have to reduce his expenditures by $5 somewhere else. In order that one industry might grow or come into existence, a hundred other industries would have to shrink. In order that 50,000 persons might be employed in a woollen sweater industry, 50,000 fewer persons would be employed elsewhere.”

If the British manufacturer was allowed a level playing field and sweaters continued to sell at $25 per piece, the American manufacturer would soon have to shutdown. The loss of these 50,000 jobs would be noticed. This would be the seen effect of letting the British sell in the American market.

If these jobs are to be protected, then even the British sweaters would have to sell at $30 per piece. This would leave the consumer with $5 less, which he could have spent on something else, otherwise. This lack of spending would impact other industries and jobs would be lost there. It’s just that the loss of these jobs would not be so visible as was the case with the American sweater industry. This is the unseen effect.

Now replace the United States with India and the United Kingdom with China in the above example, the entire logic remains the same. If Indians move towards buying more Indian goods than Chinese, they will end up paying more for those goods. This will leave them with less money to spend elsewhere. This would impact other industries, where jobs would be lost. It’s just that these job losses won’t be so obvious.

This is a rather obvious point that most people miss out on while analysing this issue. There is a certain opportunity cost of money. As Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler write in Dollars and Sense-Money Mishaps and How to Avoid Them: “The opportunity cost of money is that when we spend money on one thing, it’s money that we cannot spend on something else, neither right now nor anytime later.”

Given this, shutting out Chinese products is not going to create jobs in India. The only way jobs can be created is if Indian industry can compete with China. Right now, it doesn’t.

The column originally appeared in Equitymaster on Nov 27, 2017.

Why We End Up Buying Things We Normally Wouldn’t

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When I visit a supermarket or a large store to buy grocery, I inevitably end up buying stuff which I wouldn’t otherwise. On some days, it can be products like muffins or a chocolate bar, placed strategically near the billing counter. On other days, it can be a new flavour of ready to eat noodles.

What is happening here? Human beings look at purchasing decisions from the relative value lens. The question is, relative to what.

I buy grocery around once in three weeks. And on most occasions, I end up with a bill of around Rs 4,000-5,000. When I am buying something like a chocolate muffin which costs around Rs 100, it feels like a very small part of the overall bill. (Rs 100 is only 2 per cent of Rs 5,000). It is basically a useless unhealthy purchase, which one can easily buy at an outside bakery for Rs 30-40. But given that it feels like a very small part of the overall price, I simply go ahead and buy it.

The same stands true for the chocolate bars which supermarkets and large grocery stores tend to stock near their checkout counters. As Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler writes in Dollars and Sense: Money Mishaps and How to Avoid Them: “Supermarket checkout queues dare us to resist trashy tabloids and sugary sweets, using the same approach.”

This approach is also at work in hotel rooms where soft drinks which are placed inside the refrigerator in the room, are expensively priced. On a visit to Pune earlier this year, I paid around Rs 100 for a soft drink can which at that point of time was generally priced around Rs 30. My calculation was the same. The per day room rent was around Rs 5,000 and a charge of Rs 100 more wasn’t going to make a significant dent to it. Having said that, I would have never paid Rs 100 for a soft drink can, otherwise.

In fact, the same approach is at work in a restaurant, where soft drinks, water bottles and even bottles of wine, are more expensively priced. In fact, wine in a restaurant costs much more than in a wine shop.

As Ariely and Kreisler write: “It’s logical to pay more for the convenience of wine with dinner – we don’t want to take a bite, then have to run to our car to [take a ] swig… – but it’s also a tribute to relative versus absolute value.”

In all these situations we tend to find value in something, which we otherwise wouldn’t, by comparing it to the overall cost. Marketers make use of this and try to sell us things we wouldn’t have bought otherwise. This plays out almost every time one buys electrical goods like a washing machine or a refrigerator or a television or even a laptop.

The salesman on such occasions always tries to sell us something known as an extended warranty. This is a warranty over and above the one which is offered by the manufacturer of the product that we have bought. It is pretty much useless in most cases given that electrical goods these days tend to function well and rarely go bad.

But the pitch is that now that you are spending so much money, why not spend a little more and get yourself an extended warranty.

This approach is also at play when buying a car. As Ariely and Kreisler write: “Car dealers… know that when we’re spending $25,000, additional purchases, like a $200 CD changer, seem cheap, even inconsequential, in comparison. Would you ever buy a $200 CD changer? Does anyone listen to CDs anymore? No and no. But at just 0.8 per cent of the total purchase price, we hardly shrug.”

The overall point being that marketers are a devious lot and if there is a trick out there they can use to sell more, they are most likely to find it and use it. Beware!

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on November 22, 2017.

 

One Example of How a Good and Simple Tax Should Work

Late last week I was paying the Goods and Services Tax (GST) I had collected on behalf of the government, to the government.

In the process of payment, I made a mistake, which, with the benefit of hindsight I can say was a rather silly one. Basically, the entries for the state GST and integrated GST got interchanged. In the process, I ended up paying more integrated GST than I had to and less state GST than I had to.

Integrated GST is a tax which the seller must collect from the buyer on the inter-state supply of goods and services. State GST and central GST are taxes which the seller must collect from the buyer on the intra-state supply of goods and services.

Let’s understand this through an example. I am based out of Mumbai in the state of Maharashtra. I write a column for a magazine, which is based out of New Delhi. In this case, when I bill the magazine (the buyer), I will raise an invoice with an integrated GST of 18 per cent.

If I write a column for a website (it could even be a magazine/newspaper) based out of Mumbai, then I will raise an invoice with a central GST of 9 per cent and a state GST of 9 per cent. The point to be noted here is that the overall rate of tax in both the cases (interstate and intrastate) is the same. Only the division is different.

Anyway, getting back to my story. Given that I hadn’t paid the right amount of state GST, this meant that I had logon to the GST portal once again and pay the state GST I hadn’t. The integrated GST I had already paid will now get adjusted against the payments that I will make in the months to come. The money is safe. There is nothing to worry on that front.

Of course, I didn’t realise I had made a mistake while paying the GST. It was only when my chartered accountant started filing the GST return, this mistake was noticed. After this, I frantically logged on to the GST portal in order to pay the state GST, I hadn’t. In fact, I almost ended up paying the integrated GST all over again. Thankfully, I noticed the mistake this time around.

In the process of making this mistake I had a rather obvious realisation. As someone who is collecting GST on behalf of the government, it doesn’t matter to me whether I am collecting state GST or central GST or integrated GST. This is something that should work at the backend of the system that has been created to implement GST.

How the GST collected by the government is split between the different governments (central and states) is not something I am really bothered about. Once I have upload my returns and have paid the right amount of GST, the system should be able to figure out, using GST numbers which have state codes and the PAN number of buyer as well as the seller built into it, what proportion of the GST should go to the central government and what proportion should go to the state governments.

Given this, I as a user should simply be making an entry for the total GST that I need to pay. The GST system can then easily figure out, the various kinds of GST, given that each buying-selling transaction along with the value, is reported as well.

But that is not how the current GST system works. The backend has become the front end as well. That is how the system has been designed.

It is well worth asking why? Dear Reader, if you have ever filed an income tax return form on your own even once, you would already know the answer. When the government designs these forms, it does not keep the ease of use of the end user in mind. That’s the idea with which the government has always operated. This has seeped into the GST system as well.

The success of any government system (or for that matter any system) also depends on how easy it is to use. This ease of use will make GST a good and simple tax, which it currently isn’t. In case of the GST, the government has just made the laws. The actual taxes need to be collected by the seller from the buyer. The seller then needs to hand the tax over to the government. The seller also needs to file returns. Currently, this entire process that has been made extremely cumbersome.

I am no GST expert, but I am sure that if some thought was given to the entire process of filing GST returns and paying GST to the government, it could be simplified. But for that to happen, first and foremost what is needed is bureaucratic will, even more than political will.

Indian bureaucrats have never liked to make things simple for the citizens of this country, because a simple system would discourage rent-seeking, which many of them excel in. And therefore, I feel that the GST will continue to be as complicated as ever.

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on November 21, 2017.

 

 

The Javed Akhtar Syndrome in Real Estate

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Poets usually write poems on love, breakups, betrayal, friendships, alcohol, the women serving alcohol, the world at large, politics and so on. But very rarely does a poet write a poem or a couplet on the unaffordability of real estate in India. But Javed Akhtar has done that:

sab kā ḳhushī se fāsla ek qadam hai.
har ghar meñ bas 
ek hī kamra kam hai

A loose translation of this in English would be as follows: “Everyone is just one step away from happiness; Every house has just one room less”.

Given the fact that Akhtar has spent a large part of his adult life in Mumbai, the above couplet reflects or rather captures the sensibilities of the city that never sleeps, very beautifully.

Dear Reader, you must be wondering, why am I talking about a couplet written by Javed Akhtar on a rather muggy Tuesday in Mumbai. Allow me to explain.

Over the weekend, I met a friend who wants to sell his one-room-kitchen (a very Mumbai thing) apartment and buy a one-bedroom-hall-kitchen (one BHK) apartment. Basically, he feels his current apartment has one room less and he wants an apartment which has one room more than his current one.

Of course, the transaction cannot be carried out, unless he is able to sell his current apartment. The money generated from that will partly be used to pay off the current home loan. The new apartment will be bought with whatever remains after selling off the current apartment and repaying the home loan; along with this a fresh larger home loan will have to be taken. Over and above this, some financial savings accumulated through investing in mutual funds through the SIP route, will also have to be used.

My friend had bought the apartment for Rs 50 lakh, nearly three years back. He is looking at a price of at least Rs 60 lakh. In fact, more than looking, he is specifically anchored on to that price and won’t sell for anything less than that price.

As Garly Belsky and Thomas Gilovich write in Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes and How to Correct Them: “Anchoring is really just a metaphoric term to explain the tendency we all have of latching on to an idea or fact and using it as a reference point for future decisions. Anchoring can be particularly powerful because you often have no idea that such a phenomenon is affecting you.”

This is not the first time I am discussing the phenomena of anchoring in real estate, nevertheless, this example is interesting and different, because anchoring, as we shall see, is happening at multiple levels.

My friend is anchored on to a price of Rs 60 lakh because he feels that at that price he will be in a situation of no-profit no-loss, while selling his current apartment. The extra Rs 10 lakh, over and above the price he bought the apartment for, should take care of the home loan EMIs and the maintenance charges paid, over the last three years. This is his logic for being anchored on to a price of Rs 60 lakh.

The trouble is that at that the few buyers who have approached him do not want to pay more than Rs 55 lakh, while my friend remains stuck on the Rs 60 lakh figure.

In this case, the transaction is what we can call a relative transaction. The money that my friend gets for selling the current apartment will be used to buy a bigger apartment in the same locality that he lives in.

If he waits too long to get a price of Rs 60 lakh, chances are that the price of the bigger apartment that he wants to buy will also go up. Currently, the bigger apartment is available for a price of around Rs 80 lakh.

I tried explaining this point to him without much success. In fact, after I explained this point to him, my friend told me that he had a buyer who was willing to pay Rs 60 lakh. The trouble was that this prospective buyer needed to sell an apartment in another city to be able to raise the amount.

This buyer, because my friend had become anchored to a price of Rs 60 lakh, was also anchored to that price. Given that he was a senior citizen, he was not in a position to raise a home loan. Hence, he needed someone to pay Rs 60 lakh for his flat to be able to purchase my friend’s flat.

No one was willing to pay Rs 60 lakh for the flat. In this case, the prospective buyers were willing to pay anything in the range of Rs 55-60 lakh. But that was clearly not enough. And given this, the sale of both the flats remained stuck.

This example clearly shows as to how anchoring works at multiple level and not just at one level, as is often believed. This anchoring essentially stops the market from working. The more general conclusion from this example would be that anchoring working at multiple levels, is one of the reasons why the buying and selling of real estate has slowed down majorly.

The sellers (not necessarily the builders) are still expecting prices that their homes were worth until a few years back. But the buyers, who have paid more than their fair share over the years, are currently not willing to pay the price that the sellers want.

Ultimately, this anchoring on to a specific price will break down. It’s just that it won’t happen overnight and will take some time.

Until then writers like me will have enough masala to keep writing on real estate.

Keep watching this space!

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on November 14, 2017.

The Govt Can’t Do Much, If Restaurants Don’t Pass on Benefits of Lower GST

Dear Reader,

If you are on WhatsApp, I am sure you would have got a forward by now, which basically shows that eating out at a restaurant hasn’t become cheap, after the Goods and Services Tax (GST) was cut to 5 per cent.

In fact, there has been a lot of hungama (for the lack of a better word) around this issue, with people demanding that the government take action against the restaurants. Let’s try and understand this issue in detail.

The GST on restaurant bills was recently cut to 5 per cent. Earlier it was 18 per cent or 12 per cent depending on whether the restaurant was air-conditioned or not. Hence, the expectation was that the cost of eating out will come down, with the rate of tax being slashed. Nevertheless, nothing of that sort has happened in many cases. Hence, people have taken to WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook to highlight this issue.

Before going further, it is important to understand that there is one basic difference between the new GST rate and the earlier GST rates of eating in a restaurant.

The new rate is a flat tax of 5 per cent (and that makes me wonder as to why is it still called GST). This means that no input tax credit is allowed. In case of earlier rates, the tax was a value added tax i.e. input tax credit was allowed. This basically meant that restaurants could claim a set off for the goods and services tax they had paid on their inputs. The inputs in this could be tax paid on dairy products, meat, vegetables etc.

But input tax credit is not allowed now. Hence, the new 5 per cent GST is not a value added tax. It’s just another tax.

Now with the input tax credit not allowed, some restaurants are claiming that the cost of running their business has gone up. This has meant that the pre-GST price of the food products they sell, needs to go up, and in the process, there is not much of a difference in the end price that the consumer is paying for the food products.

McDonald’s India says that with the input tax credit being withdrawn their operating costs have gone up by 10-12 percent. And after taking this increase in cost into account, the effective tax benefit due the lower tax rate of 5 per cent, “would have been less than a per cent.” As the Business Today magazine puts it: “A few restaurant owners… pegged a spike between 7 per cent and 10 per cent in costs.”

The fact that input tax credit is no longer available, hence, there can’t be much of a difference in the final price paid by the consumer now, as against earlier, is a perfectly valid argument to offer, on parts of the restaurants.

This hasn’t gone down well with many people and they have taken to the social media urging the government to take action. They are not convinced about the validity of the input tax credit argument. They feel that this is just an excuse on part of restaurants not to cut prices and increase their profitability. Hence, the government needs to investigate and take action.

The trouble is that the capacity of the Indian government to do anything is fairly limited, let alone going around investigating so many restaurants. Also, it has other more important things to do. Given this, it is not in a position to check the books of accounts of the large number of restaurants. And more than that, it should not even try to entertain any thought of doing this.

What I am saying is that if a restaurant chooses not to decrease price now, it can always offer this explanation of lack of availability of input tax credit, and there is no way to contest the explanation. The government cannot go into the accounts of each and every restaurant in the country in order to establish whether the explanation holds in their case or not. Of course, many restaurants obviously will look at this as an opportunity to make more money and which is precisely what they will do. There is no denying that.

So, what is the solution to this? If you as a consumer feel a restaurant is expensive simply don’t go there. If enough people do that the restaurant will automatically have to cut prices. If people continue going, then the higher price doesn’t really matter to them and they shouldn’t be really complaining.

Also, these are the unseen effects of starting with high tax rates. The trouble with bad economic policy (while GST is not bad policy per se, but its implementation clearly is) is that its ill effects are not always clear from the very beginning. This is now starting to come out in case of GST.

The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on November 20, 2017.