All You Wanted to Know About India’s Economic Contraction This Year

The National Statistical Office (NSO) published the first advance estimates of the gross domestic product (GDP) for 2020-21, the current financial year, yesterday.

The NSO expects the Indian GDP to contract by 7.7% to Rs 134.4 lakh crore during the year. The GDP is a measure of the economic size of a country and thus, GDP growth/contraction is a measure of economic growth/contraction. Data from the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) shows that this is the worst performance of the Indian economy since 1951-52.

Let’s take a look at this pointwise.

1) This is the fifth time the Indian economy will contract during the course of a financial year. The last time the Indian economy contracted was in 1979-80, when it contracted by 5.2%, due to the second oil shock.

Before 1979-80, the Indian economy had contracted on three occasions during the course of a year. This was in 1957-58, 1966-67 and 1972-73, with the economy contracting by 0.4%, 0.1% and 0.6%, respectively.


Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

Hence, in the years after independence, the Indian economy has seen two serious economic contractions, the current financial year is the second one.

2) One way the GDP of any country is estimated is by summing the private consumption expenditure, investment, government expenditure and net exports (exports minus imports), during the year.

The government expenditure has always been a small part of the Indian economy. It was at 5.6% of the GDP in 1950-51. It has gradually been going up since then. In 2020-21, it formed 13% of the GDP, the highest it has ever been. This tells you the times that we are living in. The government expenditure as a part of the GDP has been going up since 2013-14, when it was at 10% of the GDP. Hence, the government has had to spend more and more money to keep the growth going over the last five to six years.

Given this, while the spread of the covid-pandemic has created a massive economic mess this year, the Indian economy has been slowing down for a while now. This is the broader message that we shouldn’t miss out on, in all the song and dance around the economic recovery.

3) If we leave out the government expenditure from the overall GDP figure, what we are left with is the non-government GDP. This is expected to contract by 9.5% during this year, the worst since 1951-52. What this also tells us is that the non-government part of the economy which will form 87% of the economy in 2020-21, is in a bigger mess than the overall economy.

4) This isn’t surprising given that investment in the economy is expected to contract by 14.5% during the year. What does this mean? It first means that for all the positivity that  the corporates like to maintain in the public domain about the so-called India growth story, they clearly aren’t betting much money on it.

As the new twist to the old proverb goes, the proof is in the pudding. During the period October to December, the new investment projects announced, by value, fell by 88%, and the investment projects completed, by value, fell by 72%. This is a period when corporates were talking up the economic recovery big time.

5) It is investments into the economy that create jobs. When the investments are contracting there is clearly a problem on that front. It also leads to the question of what happens to India’s so-called demographic dividend. One fallout of a lack of jobs has been the falling labour force participation rate, especially among women, which in December 2020 stood at just 9.28%. This is a trend that has been prevalent for five years now and Covid has only accelerated it. More and more women are opting out of the workforce.

6) Getting back to corporates. The profitability of Indian corporates went through the roof between July and September. This when the broader economy was contracting. How did this happen? The corporates managed to push up profits by driving down costs, in particular employee cost and raw material cost. While this is corporates acting rationally, it hurts the overall economy.

This means that incomes of those working for corporates and those dealing with them (their suppliers/contractors etc.) have come down. Net net this will hurt the overall economy and will eventually hurt the corporates as well, because there is only so much cost-cutting you can do. Ultimately, only higher sales can drive higher profits and for that the incomes of people need to grow.

7) It is hardly surprising that investments are expected to contract during the year, given that private consumption expenditure, the biggest part of the Indian economy, is expected to contract by 9.5% during the year. Ultimately, corporate investment leads to production of goods and services that people buy and consume, and things on the whole don’t look too good on this front.

In fact, even in 2019-20, the last financial year, the private consumption expenditure had grown by just 5.3%, the worst in close to a decade. This again tells us that while covid has been terrible for the economy, things weren’t exactly hunky dory before that.

8) The final entry into the GDP number is net exports. Typically, this tends to be negative in the Indian case, simply because our imports are much more than our exports. But this year that is not the case with net exports being in positive territory, the first time in four decades. This has added to the overall GDP. But is this a good thing? The exports this year are expected to contract by 8.3% to Rs 25.8 lakh crore. In comparison, the imports are expected to contract much more by 20.5% to Rs 24.8 lakh crore.

What does this tell us? It tells us that the demand for Indian goods in foreign countries has fallen because of covid. At the same time, the contraction of Indian imports shows a massive collapse of demand in India. Non-oil, non-gold, non-silver goods imports, are a very good indicator of consumer demand and these are down 25.3% between April and November this year, though the situation has been improving month on month.

9) There is another way of measuring the GDP and that is by looking at the value added by various sectors. If we were to consider this, agriculture growth during the year remains sturdy at 3.4%. While, this is good news on the whole, it doesn’t do anything to change the fact that close to 43-44% of the workforce is employed in agriculture and contributes just 15% of the economic output.

Come what may, people need to move away from agriculture into professions which add more value to the economy. This hasn’t been happening at the pace it should.

10) The non-agriculture part of the economy, which will form around 85% of the economy this year, is expected to contract by 9.4%, This clearly isn’t good news.

11) Industry is expected to contract by 9.6%. Within industry, manufacturing and construction are expected to contract by 9.4% and 12.6%, respectively. The construction sector is a big creator of jobs, especially jobs which can get people to move away from agriculture. With the sector contracting, the importance of agriculture in the economy has gone up.

12) The services sector is expected to contract by 8.8%. Within this, trade, hotels, transport, storage and communication (all lumped into one, don’t ask me why) is expected to contract by 21.4%. This isn’t surprising given that people continue to avoid hotels and travelling, thanks to the fear of the covid pandemic.

13) The GDP during 2020-21 is expected to be at Rs 134.4 lakh crore.  The GDP during 2019-20 was at Rs 145.6 lakh crore. Given this, when it comes to the GDP growth during 2021-22, the next financial year, the low base effect will be at play. Even if the GDP in 2021-22 touches the GDP in 2019-20, we will see a growth of 8.4%. Nevertheless, even with that sort of growth we will be just getting back to where we were two years ago. In that sense, the covid pandemic along with the slow growth seen before that, has put India’s economy back by at least two years.

To conclude, the economy will do much better in the second half of this financial year than the first half. In fact, it already is.

The question is whether this is because of pent up demand or covid induced buying or is a genuine economic recovery already taking place. I guess, there is a little bit of everything happening.

But how strong the economic recovery is, will only become clear in the months to come, as the covid induced buying, and buying because of pent up demand, start to dry out.

Watch this space!

 

Janet Yellen will keep driving up the Sensex

yellen_janet_040512_8x10Vivek Kaul

The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) Sensex, India’s premier stock market index, rose by 517.22 points or 1.88% to close at 27,975.86 points yesterday (i.e. March 30, 2015). On March 27, 2015 (i.e. Friday), Janet Yellen, the Chairperson of the Federal Reserve of the United States, gave a speech (after the stock market in India had closed). In this speech she said: “If conditions do evolve in the manner that most of my FOMC colleagues and I anticipate, I would expect the level of the federal funds rate to be normalized only gradually, reflecting the gradual diminution of headwinds from the financial crisis.” The federal funds rate is the interest rate at which one bank lends funds maintained at the Federal Reserve to another bank on an overnight basis. It acts as a sort of a benchmark for the interest rates that banks charge on their short and medium term loans. What Yellen was basically saying is that even if the Federal Reserve starts raising interest rates, it will do so at a very slow pace. In the aftermath of the financial crisis that started in mid September 2008, when the investment bank Lehman Brothers went bust, central banks in the developing countries have maintained very low rates of interest. The Federal Reserve of the United States, the American central bank , has been leading the way, by maintaining the federal funds rate in the range of 0-0.25%. The hope was that at low interest rates people would borrow and spend more than they were doing at that point of time. This would help businesses grow and in turn help the moribund economies of the developing countries. While people did borrow and spend to some extent, a lot of money was borrowed at low interest rates in the United States and other developed countries where central banks had cut rates, and it found its way into stock markets and other financial markets all over the world. This led to a massive rallies in prices of financial assets. For the rallies in financial markets all over the world to continue, the era of “easy money” initiated by the Federal Reserve needs to continue. And this is precisely what Yellen indicated in her speech yesterday. She said that even if the Fed starts to raise interest rates it would do so at a very slow pace, in order to ensure that it does not end up jeopardizing the expected economic recovery. Yellen went on to add in her speech on Friday that: “Nothing about the course of the Committee’s actions is predetermined except the Committee’s commitment to promote our dual mandate of maximum employment and price stability.” This is where things get interesting. The rate of unemployment in the United States in February 2015 was at 5.5%. This was a significant improvement over February 2014, when the rate of unemployment was at 6.7%. But even with this big fall, the Federal Reserve is unlikely to raise interest rates. Typically, as unemployment falls, wages go up, as employers compete for employees. But that hasn’t happened in the United States. The wage growth has been more or less flat over the last one year (it’s up by 0.1%). The major reason for the same is that more and more jobs are being created at the lower end. As economist John Mauldin writes in his newsletter: “66,000 of the 295,000 new jobs[that were created in February 2015) were in leisure and hospitality, with 58,000 of those being in bars and restaurants…Transportation and warehousing rose by 19,000, but 12,000 of those were messengers, again not exactly high-paying jobs.” Further, in the last few years the energy industry in the United States has seen a big boom on the back of the discovery of shale oil. But with oil prices crashing, the energy industry has started to shed jobs. In January 2015, the energy industry fired 20, 193 individuals. This was 42% higher than the total number of people who were sacked in 2014. As analyst Toni Sangami pointed out in a recent post: “These oil jobs are among some of the highest-paying blue-collar jobs in the country, so losing one oil job is like losing five or eight or ten hospitality-industry jobs.” The labour force participation ratio, which is a measure of the proportion of the working age population in the labour force, in February 2015 was at 62.8%. It has more or less stayed constant from December 2013, when it was at 62.8%. This is the lowest it has been since March 1978. The number was at 66% in December 2007. What this means is that the rate of unemployment has been falling also because of people opting out of the workforce because they haven’t been able to find jobs and, hence, were no longer being counted as unemployed. So, things are nowhere as fine as broader numbers make them appear to be. The overall inflation also remains much lower than the Federal Reserve’s target of 2%. The Federal Reserve’s preferred measure of inflation is personal consumption expenditures(PCE) deflator, ex food and energy. For the month of February 2015, this number was at 1.4% much below the Fed’s target of 2%. The Fed’s forecast for inflation for 2015 is between 0.6% to 0.8%. At such low inflation levels, the interest rates cannot be raised. Yellen summarized the entire situation beautifully when she told the Senate Banking Committee earlier this month that: “Too many Americans remain unemployed or underemployed, wage growth is still sluggish, and inflation remains well below our longer-run objective.” What does not help is the weak durables data that has been coming in. Orders for durable goods or long-lasting manufactured goods from automobiles to aircrafts to machinery, fell by 1.4% in February 2015. The durables data have declined in three out of the last four months. Given this scenario, it is highly unlikely that the Yellen led Federal Reserve will start raising the federal funds rate any time soon. Further, as and when it does start raising rates, it will do so at a very slow pace. What this means is that the era of easy money will continue in the time to come. And given this, more acche din are about to come for the Sensex. Having said that, any escalation of conflict in the Middle East can briefly spoil this party. The article originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on Mar 31, 2015