Late last week, the central statistics office of the government of India declared its forecasts for the gross domestic product (GDP) growth for 2017-2018. The GDP is a measure of economic size and the GDP growth is a measure of economic growth.
The GDP growth for 2017-2018 is expected to be at 6.5 per cent. It is the slowest economic growth that the country will see after Narendra Modi took over as the prime minister. Take a look at Figure 1, which plots GDP growth.
Figure 1:
This slowdown is a clear impact of the negative impacts of demonetisation continuing into 2017-2018, which was followed by the terribly botched up implementation of the Goods and Services Tax (GST).
Take a look at Figure 2, which basically plots the growth of various sectors.
Figure 2:
Figure 2 tells us that agriculture and industry in 2017-2018, will slow down considerably in comparison to 2016-2017. Within industry, manufacturing will slow down considerably as well. The growth of the services sector continues to remain robust. Within the services sector, the public administration, defence and other services, which is basically a representation for the government, grew the fastest at 9.4 per cent (though it slowed down in comparison to last year).
What this basically means is that a fast growth in government expenditure in 2016-2017 and 2017-2018, pushed up economic growth, otherwise the economic growth would have been lower than what it finally turned out to be.
Now let’s take a look at investment to GDP ratio in Figure 3.
Figure 3:
For the year 2017-2018, the investment to GDP ratio is expected to be at around 29 per cent of the GDP. This ratio has been falling since 2011-2012 and there have been no signs of improvement since then. I have taken data from 2011-2012 onwards because the new GDP series data being used since January 2015, has a back series starting from 2011-2012 only.
In fact, the data from Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy suggests that new projects announcement in the period of three months ending December 2017, came in at a 13-year low. Take a look at Figure 4.
Figure 4:
The new investment projects announced during the period of three months up to December 2017, were the lowest since the period of three months ending June 2004. This is a clear indication of the fact that the industry is not betting much on India’s economic future because if they were they would be expanding at a much faster rate and announcing more investment projects than they currently are. The industrialists may say good things about India in the public domain and in the media, but they are clearly not betting much of their money on the country.
Unless, investment picks up, jobs can’t be created. And without jobs the one million youth entering the workforce every month or India’s so called demographic dividend, is likely to turn into a demographic disaster. Indeed, that is a very worrying point.
To conclude, the GDP data for 2017-2018, brings us back to that basic question: Where are the jobs?
The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on January 8, 2018.