Why India missed out on the industrial revolution and might miss it again

narendra_modi
The Prime Minister Narendra Modi met representatives of Indian business on September 8, 2015. The Indian businessmen as usual asked for lower interest rates, weaker rupee and so on, to get economic growth going.

Modi on the other hand emphasized on job creation and the role the private sector could play in it. A report in the Mint newspaper points out that Modi also prodded the banks to help small and medium enterprises in the so-called informal sector as “they have great potential for generating new jobs”.

As I have mentioned in previous newsletters of The Daily Reckoning, creating new jobs should be a top priority of the Modi government. This is primarily because 13 million Indians are entering the workforce every year.

Also, as I have mentioned in the past, the only way countries have gone from being developing to being developed is by unleashing a manufacturing/industrial revolution. Despite having a huge labour force and initiating economic reforms in 1991, India has missed out on the manufacturing revolution.

Why is that the case? As Sanjeev Sanyal writes in The Indian Renaissance—India’s Rise After a Thousand Years of Decline: “The country [i.e. India] appears to have shifted from farming to services without having gone through an industrial stage. This not only goes against conventional wisdom but also the experience of other fast-growing Asian economies particularly China.”

China and other Asian countries (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and countries of South East Asia) essentially followed an export oriented manufacturing strategy to create economic growth. They started with low-end exports and then gradually started going up the value chain. “These economies usually started out by scaling up low-skill exports like making ready-made garments, toys, cheap household items and so on. With time, they all move up the value chain as wages rise and their workforce become more skilled. Exports shift to things like high-end electronics and automobiles,” writes Sanyal. The services sector becomes a driver of growth only later.

In the Indian case, nothing like that happened. After the 1991 economic reforms, we moved on to exporting complex automobile parts and pharmaceuticals. We also exported information technology and became a global hub of the business process outsourcing industry. India also saw a huge expansion in banking, hotels, airlines, cable television, telecom and so on. None of this was low-end, like was the case of Asian countries as well as China. Hence, we jumped from farming to services, without going through an industrial/manufacturing stage.

And this jump from farming to services, without going through an industrial stage, is counter-intuitive. In fact, India should have latched on to a low end export oriented manufacturing strategy much before the 1991 reforms. But that did not happen.

In order to understand why, we need to go back in history and talk about a gentleman called Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis. Mahalanobis founded the Indian Statistical Institute in two rooms at the Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the early 1930s. He became close to Jawahar Lal Nehru, the first Prime Minister of India, and was appointed as the Honorary Statistical Advisor to the government of India.

As Gurcharan Das writes in India Unbound –From Independence to the Global Information Age “His biggest contribution was the draft plan frame for the Second Five Year Plan…In it he put into practice the socialist ideas of investment in a large public sector (at the expense of the private sector), with emphasis on heavy industry (at the expense of consumer goods) and a focus on import substitution (at the expense of export promotion).”

Hence, big heavy industry became the order of the day at the cost of small consumer goods. The alternative vision of encouraging the production of low-end consumer goods was put forward as well. As Das writes “It belonged to the Bombay [now Mumbai] economists CN Vakil and PR Brahmanand. It was neither glamourous nor as technically rigorous as Mahalnobis’s, but it was more suited to the underdeveloped Indian economy. Its starting point was that India lacked capital but had plenty of people…The thing to do was to put these people into productive work at the lowest capital cost.”

And how could this be done? “The Bombay economists suggested that we employ the surplus labour to produce “wage goods,” or simple consumer products – clothes, toys, shoes, snacks, radios, and bicycles. These low-capital, low-risk, business would attract loads of entrepreneurs, for they would yield quick output and rapid returns on investments. Labour would produce the goods it would eventually consume with the wages it earned in producing the goods,” writes Das.
Nevertheless, with the focus on the public sector, nothing like that happened.

But why did India miss out on a manufacturing/industrial revolution even after the process of liberalization started in 1991? India’s domestic savings through much of the 1990s stood at around 23% of the GDP. A major portion of these savings went into financing the government fiscal deficit. Given this, interest rates were high and “the country was forced to use capital sparingly,” writes Sanyal. Any industrial revolution needs a massive amount of capital, which wasn’t easily available in the Indian case.

Further, even with economic reforms many things on the ground did not change. As Sanyal writes: “The easing of big-picture impediments like industrial licensing and import tariffs did not get rid of the underlying framework of over-regulations, bureaucratic delays and erratic judicial enforcement. The country had built up a huge baggage off laws, by-laws and regulations at every layer of government during the half-century under socialism.” Much of this still remains to be dismantled.

Take the case of labour laws. There are more than fifty labour laws just at the central government level. As Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya write in India’s Tryst with Destiny: “The ministry of labour lists as many as fifty-two independent Central government Acts in the area of labour. According to Amit Mitra (the finance minister of West Bengal and a former business lobbyist), there exist another 150 state-level laws in India. This count places the total number of labour laws in India at approximately 200. Compounding the confusion created by this multitude of laws is the fact that they are not entirely consistent with one another, leading a wit to remark that you cannot implement Indian labour laws 100 per cent without violating 20 per cent of them.”

These laws prevent small Indian firms from growing bigger. They also prevent big Indian industrialists from entering sectors that can employ a huge amount of labour. Bhagwati and Panagariya recount a story told to them by the economist Ajay Shah. Shah, asked a leading Indian industrialist about why he did not enter the apparel sector, given that he was already backward integrated and made yarn and cloth. “The industrialist replied that with the low profit margins in apparel, this would be worthwhile only if he operated on the scale of 100,000 workers. But this would not be practical in view of India’s restrictive labour laws.”

If Narendra Modi wants Indian businesses to create jobs, he first needs to sort out the labour laws. And that will be easier said than done.

The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Sep 10, 2015

 

Economic growth is just 200 years old

deflation
We live in a day and age where economic growth is taken for granted. China was growing at greater than 10% per year for a long time. In the recent past, the growth has slowed down to around 7% per year. If Chinese growth keeps slowing down, the world growth will also slow down.

The United States has grown at around 3% per year, over the long term. The world’s largest economy is now growing at a much slower pace. Economic growth in India has also slowed down over the last few years. And all this has got economists and people who follow such things worried.

Nevertheless, in the context of history, economic growth is a very recent phenomenon, and is just around 200 years old. As John Plender writes in Capitalism—Money, Morals and Markets: “The economist Angus Maddison calculated that in the period from 1500 to 1800, world domestic product per capita[income] grew at an annual average compound rate of just 0.04 percent—one-thirtieth of what has been achieved since 1820.”

While some economists have issues with the methodology Maddison used to arrive at the economic growth number, most agree with the broader point he makes. In fact, economic growth even before 1500 was nothing home to write about.

Why was this the case? There was a great fear of creative destruction that new inventions would unleash. As Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson write in Why Nations Fail—The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty: “The fear of creative destruction is the main reason why there was no sustained increase in living standards between the Neolithic and Industrial revolutions. Technological innovation makes human societies prosperous, but also involves the replacement of the old with the new, and the destruction of the economic privileges and political power of certain people.”

Acemoglu and Robison take the example of the Roman Emperor Vespasian, who ruled between AD 69 and 79. The Emperor was approached by a man who had invented a device to cheaply transport heavy columns to the Capitol, the citadel of Rome. This cost the government a lot of money. By adopting the new invention, the government could have saved a lot of money.

The Emperor rejected the invention and declared: “How will it be possible for me to feed the populace?” The invention was rejected because it would have disturbed the way things stood at that point of time. The new device would have put many people out of work. As Acemoglu and Robinson explain: “The innovation was turned down because of the threat of creative destruction, not so much because of its economic impact…Vespian was concerned that unless he kept people happy and under control it would be politically destabilizing.”

A similar logic was used to put many inventions in the cold storage, including few in the textile industry, in the pre-industrial revolution era. The industrial revolution started in Great Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century and gradually spread to other parts of the Europe and the United States.
A major reason why the Industrial Revolution flourished was because governments no longer tried to stop creative destruction. They took it in their stride.  Further, as people and governments saw the benefits of economic growth that new inventions and creative destruction brought in, their approach towards economic activity changed as well. As Plender writes: “Economic activity was no longer perceived as a zero-sum game in which one man’s profit was another’s loss and thus morally questionable. It became easier to make great fortunes from industry and commerce than from land.”

To conclude, there is a lesson in this for Indian government. The only way sustained economic growth can be unleashed is by encouraging new ideas and inventions. This will only happen if the ease of doing business in this country improves. And on that front, there is a lot that still needs to be done.
The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on August 26, 2015

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)