crowding out

Farm Loan Waivers: Why Bad Economics Makes for Good Politics

Farm_Life_Village_India

Several state governments have waived off farm loans over the past few months. The second volume of the Economic Survey released late last week analyses the economic impact of this phenomenon. Here are the points that the Survey makes:

a) What farm loan waivers basically do is that they transfer debt from the level of individuals and households to that of the state governments. When a state government waives off farm loans it needs to compensate the banks which had originally given the loans to farmers. Hence, it ends up with the debt of the farmers.

The Economic Survey expects the farm loan waive offs to cost anywhere between Rs 2.2 lakh crore and Rs 2.7 lakh crore. As the Survey points out: “It is assumed that waivers will apply at the loan rather than household level, since it will be administratively difficult to aggregate loans across households. It is also assumed that other states will follow the UP model. On this basis, an upper bound of loan waivers at the All-India level would be between Rs. 2.2 and Rs. 2.7 lakh crore.”

This is simply because the demand for waive offs will come from other states as well and the state governments are expected to comply. The Survey points out that “the widespread demand for loan waivers could simply be a demonstration effect from the UP loan waiver.”

b) The Survey believes that waivers will reduce demand in the country to that extent of Rs 1.1 lakh crore or 0.7 per cent of the GDP. This will be a huge deflationary shock to the economy. c) The farmers will benefit from the waive off and increase their consumption, the Survey says. While, this sounds true in theory, the actual evidence from 2008-2009 when the central government had announced farm loan waivers, is different. Research found that actual consumption did not go up after the farm loan waivers.

d) The state governments will have to borrow more in order to compensate the banks which have given loans to farmers. A part of the compensation for the banks will also come from the governments having to cut their expenditure in other areas. Since the governments will not be in a position to cut their regular expenditure like salaries, repayment of interest on the outstanding debt, etc., it will have to cut the asset creating capital expenditure. As the Survey points out: “a recent illustration is Uttar Pradesh which has slashed capital expenditure by 13 per cent (excluding UDAY) to accommodate the loan waiver.”

This is a point that the latest monetary policy statement of the Reserve Bank of India, also made: “Farm loan waivers are likely to compel a cutback on capital expenditure, with adverse implications for the already damped capex cycle.”

e) Also, the state governments are yet to clearly define who will benefit from the waivers and who won’t. This essentially leads to two points. One, it is difficult to come up with the overall cost of the waivers. Two, in order to implement the waivers, the state governments need to come up with clear definitions. This basically means that any implementation will take time and the benefits won’t be immediate.As the Survey points out: “Three states have been specific about the waiver schemes: UP has announced waivers of up to Rs. 1 lakh for all small and marginal farmers; Punjab’s limit is Rs. 2 lakh for small farmers without defining who these are; and Karnataka has limited the waiver amount to Rs. 50,000 (Maharashtra’s waiver terms are still unclear). The waiver announcements also do not make clear whether the amounts will apply to households or loans: typically, a household will have more than one loan.”

f) There are other negative effects of the waiver as well. Credit discipline (or the basic idea that loans need to be repaid) goes for a toss. Further, it benefits only those who borrowed from formal sources. Also, a “World Bank study found that lending increased following the 2008-09 waiver even if not in the districts with greater exposure to the waiver.”

Given these negatives on the economic front, it is important to ask why are farm loan waivers being made. The reason for this is fairly straightforward: the gains of farm loan waivers are more visible than losses.

When farm loan waivers are announced in one state, a large section of the farmers in that state who had taken on loans from the banking system, benefit from it. This is a clear visible effect, which the governments like to cater to. The negative effects are not so visible.Now take the case of a state government which needs to borrow more in order to pay off the banks which had made the farm loans in the first place. It will end up paying a higher rate of interest on its increased borrowings because at the end of the day the financial system has only so much money that can be borrowed. And any increased demand leads to higher interest rates.

As the Economic Survey points out: “Demands for farm loan waivers have emerged at a time when state finances have been deteriorating. The UDAY scheme has led to rising market borrowings by the states, expected soon to overtake central government borrowings. As a result, spreads on state government bonds relative to g-secs have steadily risen by about 60 basis points.”

The UDAY scheme was basically debt restructuring scheme which moved debt from the balance sheets of power companies run by state governments to that of the balance sheets of the state governments. Due to this the interest paid by state governments on their debt is around 60 basis points higher than that paid by the central government on its debt. The extra borrowing because of the farm loan waivers will only push up this rate of interest for state governments, making things even more difficult for them.

At the same time, states will also have to cut down on their capital expenditure in order to finance a part of their waiver. The deflationary shock because of this will be spread across the length and breadth of the country. Hence, each individual will have to take on only a small part of the pain. And he or she may not even feel it in the first place.

These are negative impacts of farm loan waivers, which are not as clearly visible in comparison to the direct benefit to farmers whose loans have been waived off.

Or take the case of the government of Maharashtra charging a drought cess of Rs 9 every time one litre of petrol is bought in the state. Why is this cess even there during a time when there is really no drought in the state? It is there so that the government can meet its expenditure on account of farm loan waivers and other expenses.

The question is how many people even know that such a cess exists, in the first place. The point is that there no free lunches when it comes to economics. It’s just that their cost is not visible many times and politicians simply make use of that.

(The column originally appeared on Equitymaster on August 14, 2017).

Dear Mr Urjit Patel, Have You Ever Heard of Wasim Barelvi?

For a man who rarely and barely speaks, the Reserve Bank of India governor Urjit Patel spoke quite a lot in the press conference that happened after the first monetary policy of this financial year was presented on April 6, 2017.

In response to the question, “What do you think are the implications of the farm loan waiver schemes and is it a cause of concern for the RBI?”, Patel had this to say: “There are several conceptual issues, if one were to put one’s hat as an economist on. I think it undermines an honest credit culture, it impacts credit discipline, it blunts incentives for future borrowers to repay, in other words, waivers engender moral hazard. It also entails at the end of the day transfer from tax payers to borrowers. If on account of this, overall Government borrowing goes up, yields on Government bonds also are impacted. Thereafter it can also lead to the crowding out of private borrowers as higher government borrowing can lead to an increase in cost of borrowing for others. I think we need to create a consensus such that loan waiver promises are eschewed, otherwise sub-sovereign fiscal challenges in this context could eventually affect the national balance sheet.”

Basically in one paragraph, Patel summarised all that is wrong about waiving off farmer loans or in fact, any loan. I had discussed most of these issues in my Diary dated April 5, 2017, last week.

The first issue that a waive-off of bank loans creates is that of a moral hazard. The economist Alan Blinder in his book After the Music Stopped writes that the “central idea behind moral hazard is that people who are well insured against some risk are less likely to take pains (and incur costs) to avoid it.”

This basically means that once the farmer sees a loan being waived off today, he will wait for elections in the future for the newer loans he takes on to be waived off as well. Essentially, he will see little incentive in repaying loans that he takes on in the future. Or as Patel put it: “it impacts credit discipline, it blunts incentives for future borrowers to repay”.

The second issue that a waive-off of bank loans creates is that it can lead to the crowding out of private borrowers. The state government waiving off the bank loans needs to compensate banks which had given these loans. In case of the Uttar Pradesh government which recently wrote off the loans, this amounts to Rs 36,359 crore. The government will have to borrow this amount in order to pay the banks simply because its earnings are lesser than its expenditure.

When a government borrows more, it leaves a lesser amount of money for others to borrow. This can push up interest rates and as Patel aptly puts it, “higher government borrowing can lead to an increase in cost of borrowing for others”. What also needs to be taken into account here is the fact that the Uttar Pradesh government waive-off might inspire other state governments to waive-off farmer loans as well. This will mean greater government borrowing and a higher crowding out effect.

It will also lead to the overall fiscal deficit of the nation (i.e. fiscal deficits of state governments plus that of the central government) going up. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends during the course of a year. The difference between the earning and the spending is met through borrowing.

If several state governments waive-off bank loans and borrow more, it will lead to the national fiscal deficit going up. As Patel puts it: “sub-sovereign fiscal challenges in this context could eventually affect the national balance sheet.”

So far so good. It is nice to see the RBI governor speak out against what is essentially bad economics and can screw up the economic and financial situation of the nation. Nevertheless, the question is where has all this forthrightness been when it comes to the issue of corporate defaults and loan write-offs?

As is well known, corporates have defaulted on several lakhs of crore of bank loans over the years. These defaulters have been treated with kid gloves. Over the years, a huge amount of corporate loans have been written off. It needs to be mentioned here that loans written off are different from loans being waived off, at least theoretically.

This is something I discuss in detail in my new book India’s Big Government—The Intrusive State and How It is Hurting Us. The loans written off are no longer be a part of the balance sheet of the bank, even though they can be recovered in the future. There is no chance of recovery in case of a loan that is waived off. Hence, theoretically there is a difference between a write-off and a waive-off.

Let’s try and understand this issue in a little more detail. Let’s first take the case of the State Bank of India. As of April 1, 2015, the bank had Rs 56,725 crore of bad loans, or gross NPAs. During the course of the year, Rs 4,389 crore of bad loans was recovered. At the same time, the bank wrote off Rs 15,763 crore of bad loans. The loans written off would no longer be a part of the balance sheet of the bank, even though they could be recovered in the future.

As we can see in case of the State Bank of India, the total amount of the loans written off during the year was more than three times the total amount of the loans recovered. That tells us the sad state of the loan recovery process. There were also fresh bad loans that were added to the balance sheet of the bank during the course of the year, and by March 31, 2016, the total bad loans of the bank had slipped to Rs. 98,173 crore.

Or take a look at Table 1 which shows the overall scenario comparing write-offs and recoveries.

Table 1: Write-offs versus recoveries of public sector banks

Write-offs versus recoveries of public sector banks

YearWrites-Offs
(in Rs. Crore)		Recoveries
(in Rs. Crore)
2015-201659,54739,534
2014-201552,54241,236
2013-201434,40933,698
2012-201327,23119,832

Source: Reserve Bank of India

As is clear from Table 1, write-offs of public sector banks have been greater than their recoveries. And the absolute difference between the two has only gone up over the years. A bulk of these loans are corporate loans. Hence, it is safe to say on the basis of this data that a large portion of corporate loans which are written-off are over the years, are practically waived-off because banks are really not able to recover these loans.

Hence, if the issue of moral hazard comes up with farmer loan waive-offs, it also comes up with corporate loan write-offs. And given that a large portion of what is technically a write-off is actually a waive-off, the case for moral hazard in this case is really very strong. The RBI governor Patel could have talked about this as well, given that he has been in office for more than seven months now.

Over and above this, corporate loan write-offs have led to the situation of diminishing bank capital. This has led to the central government having to recapitalise the public sector banks over the years. Between 2009 and now, the amount of money put in has been greater than Rs 1,30,000 crore. This money is ultimately borrowed by the government and leads to crowding out, higher interest rates and a weaker national balance sheet. All these issues pointed out by Patel in case of farm loan waive-offs apply to corporate write-offs as well.

But a word hasn’t been spoken against them.

In the Diary dated March 22, 2017, I had quoted the British author George Orwell. In his book Animal Farm, Orwell writes: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” The point being, if there is a moral hazard for the farmer, there is also one for corporates. And if the RBI governor has pointed out one, he should have pointed out the other as well.

Over the weekend, I came across a very interesting couplet which makes the same point has George Orwell did in the Animal Farm, but rather more forcefully.

As Wasim Barelvi, probably the greatest Urdu poet alive today, writes:

“Garib lehron par pehren bithaye jaate hain
samundaron ki talashi koi nahi leta”.

(I couldn’t come across a good translation of this couplet. Hence, I am leaving it untranslated. But its basic meaning is the same as the line from Orwell’s Animal Farm, quoted earlier).

The column originally appeared on April 10, 2017 on Equitymaster