Manufacturing

You Have Heard the Good News About GDP, Here’s the Slightly Better News

The gross domestic product (GDP) figures for the period October to December 2020 were declared earlier in the day today. GDP is a measure of economic size of a country.

The good news is that the Indian economy is back on the growth path. It grew by 0.41% during the period. While the growth rate itself isn’t great, it comes on the back of six months of a covid led economic contraction. And that’s clearly good news.

But this bit most of you who follow the economy closely on the social media, must have already heard by now. So, let me give you some better news than this good news.

The Indian GDP is measured in two ways. One way is by adding up private consumption expenditure (the money you and I spend buying up things), government expenditure, investment and net exports (exports minus imports). If we leave government expenditure out of the GDP, what remains is the non-government GDP, which forms a bulk of the GDP. In the October to December period, it formed around 90.3% of the GDP.

For the GDP to grow on a sustainable basis, this part needs to grow. Given that the government is a small part of the Indian economy, it can only create so much growth by spending more and more money.

The non-government part of the GDP grew by 0.58% during October to December 2020, after contracting significantly during the first six months of the financial year.

What this tells us is that the private part of the economy recovered quite a bit during the period without the government trying to pump up economic growth. The government expenditure during the period was down by 1.13%. This is the slightly better news I was talking about.

The private consumption expenditure, which forms a major part of the non-government part of the GDP contracted by 2.37%, after having contracted much more, during the first six months of the financial year. This tells us that the consumers are gradually coming back to the market even though some apprehension still prevails. This apprehension is probably more towards going out and spending money in the services part of the economy.

The other important part of non-government GDP is investment. It grew by 2.56% during October to December, which is the best in a year’s time. For jobs to be created, this growth needs to be sustained in the months to come.

The other way of looking at size of the economy is to add up the value added by the various sectors. Of this, the services sector, from hotels to real estate to banking to trade to broadcasting to transport to public administration, form nearly half of the economy. And if economy has to get back on track, it is these sectors that need to get back on track. The services sector grew by 0.98% during the period, though this was better than the contraction seen during the first six months of the year.

Agriculture was the standout sector and it grew by 3.92% during the period. In fact, October to December is the biggest period for agriculture during the year and the sector has done well during its biggest quarter. On the other hand, manufacturing grew by 1.65%.

What this tells us is that the economy is gradually coming back to where it was before covid. It is worth remembering here that even before covid the Indian economic growth was slowing down. All in all, the real challenge for the Indian economy will start in the second half of the 2021-22, once the base effects of the covid led economic contraction are over. As I have said in the past, the economic growth rate during the first half of 2021-22 will go through the roof, but that will be more because of base effect than anything else.

Nonetheless, even with this recovery during the second half of the financial year, the Indian economic growth is expected to contract by 8% during 2020-21. This figure has been revised upwards. The Indian GDP was earlier expected to contract by 7.7% during the year.

The main reason for this lies in the revision of the government expenditure expected during the year. As per the first advanced estimate of the GDP for 2020-21 published in early January, the government expenditure for 2020-21 was expected to be at Rs 17.48 lakh crore. In the second advanced estimate published today, it has been revised to Rs 15.87 lakh crore, a cut of 9.2%.

From the looks of it, the central government is trying to cut down on the targeted fiscal deficit of Rs 18.49 lakh crore for 2020-21. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.

Modinomics, meet the industrial slowdown!

narendra modi
The Prime Minister, Shri Narendra Modi addressing the Nation on the occasion of 71st Independence Day from the ramparts of Red Fort, in Delhi on August 15, 2017.

The index of industrial production (IIP) figures declared earlier this week, portray a worrying picture of the overall Indian economy. The IIP is a measure of industrial activity in the country.

For the month of July 2017, the IIP grew by 1.2 per cent in comparison to July 2016. In June 2017, it had contracted by 0.2 per cent. While, there has been some improvement month on month, the overall trend of the IIP growth has been down for a while. Take a look at Figure 1, which basically plots the IIP growth (or contraction for that matter) over the last four years.

Figure 1:


As is clear from Figure 1, for more than a year now, the overall trend of IIP growth in the country has been downward. This is a clear indication of a slowdown in the growth of industrial activity.

One of the ways through which IIP is measured is referred as economic activity based classification. As per this method, manufacturing accounts for 77.6 per cent of the IIP. And if things for overall IIP have been bad, they have been worse for manufacturing. Take a look at Figure 2, which basically plots the growth (and contraction) in manufacturing over the last four years.

Figure 2:

modinomics
Source:  Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation.

What does Figure 2 tell us? The manufacturing scene in the country doesn’t look great. In July 2017, manufacturing grew by just 0.1 per cent, after having contracted by 0.5 per cent in June 2017. This is a trend that was also visible in the gross domestic product (GDP) data released in late August 2017. Let’s take a look at Figure 3, which plots the growth rates of industry and manufacturing using GDP data, over the last four years.

Figure 3:

Figure 3 clearly tells us that the growth in industry and manufacturing as per the GDP data is at a four-year low. For the period April to June 2017, industry and manufacturing grew at 1.6 per cent and 1.2 per respectively, in comparison to the same period last year.

What does this mean for the overall economy? Industry has formed around 29-31 per cent of the GDP over the years. The fact nearly one-third of the economy is barely growing should be a big reason for worry. This will impact economic growth in both direct and indirect ways. If one-third of the economy barely grows, overall economic growth is bound to slowdown. That is the direct impact.

What about the indirect impact? In order to understand this, we need to figure out how many people actually work for industry. In 2009-2010, the industry as a whole employed around 9.9 crore individuals. Analysts, Nikhil Gupta and Madhurima Chowdhury, who work for stock brokerage Motillal Oswal, in a recent research note using data from the 2014-2015 Annual Survey of Industries, state: “Over the past 35 years, employment in Indian industrial sector has grown at an average of ~2%.” The actual figure is 1.9 per cent per year.

Hence, employment in the industrial sector tends to rise at the rate of 1.9 per year on an average. Using this, we can conclude that by March 2017, the total number of people working in industry would stand at around 11.3 crore. Further, the average Indian family has 5 people. Given this, around 55 crore individuals in a population of 130 crore or around 42 per cent of the population depend on income from industry, in one way or another. An if the industry is barely growing, these people will go slow on their consumption and other expenditure, and in the process slowdown overall economic growth. This is the indirect impact.

Why is this happening? The economic slowdown initiated by demonetisation is basically continuing. It is worth remembering that first and foremost is a medium of exchange. It is a token to carry out economic transactions. When you take 86.4 per cent of the currency in circulation out of an economy, where 80 to 98 per cent of the consumer transactions (in volume, and depending on which data source you take) is carried out in cash, economic transactions are bound to slowdown. And ultimately this is reflecting in the manufacturing data.

If there is slowdown in consumption, there is a bound to be a slowdown in manufacturing. If people are not buying stuff at the same pace as they were in the past, there is no point in companies increasing production like they were in the past.

The irony is that this crisis the Modi government brought upon us. Indeed, this is very worrying in a country where one million individuals are entering the workforce every month. That makes it 1.2 crore, a year. If the growth in industrial sector slows down to the level that it currently has, how will any jobs be created for these youth.

And that is a question worth asking.

The column originally appeared in Newslaundry on September 14, 2017.

 

New IIP Shows Demonetisation Slowed Down Indian Manufacturing Growth Big Time

India_textile_fashion_industry_workers

India has a new Index of Industrial Production (IIP). It is bigger and according to economists who track such things, it is better than the previous one. The IIP basically gives growth estimates of three sectors-manufacturing, mining and electricity. The manufacturing sector forms more than three-fourths of the IIP.

The base year for the new IIP has been changed to 2011-2012 from the earlier 2004-2005. This has been done to capture the changes in the industrial sector that have happened over a period of time and “to also align it with the base year of other macroeconomic indicators like the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), Wholesale Price Index (WPI)”.

Like any other index, the IIP tracks various items that make for the manufacturing, mining and electricity sectors. These items need to be changed or relooked at from time to time in order to ensure that the IIP continues to maintain a representativeness of the manufacturing, mining and electricity sectors in particular and the industry as a whole in general.

The new IIP has a total of 809 items in the manufacturing sector. The earlier one had 620. While, the number of items which constitute the manufacturing part of IIP have gone up, 124 items have been removed as well. These include items like gutka, calculators and colour TV picture tubes. Items like cement clinkers, medical and surgical accessories, refined palm oil etc., have been added. Along similar lines, the electricity sector now includes data from the renewable energy sector as well.

Over and above this, there has been an increase in number of factories in panel for reporting data and closed ones have been removed. All in all, these steps have been taken in order to ensure that the new IIP is a better representation of industry than the old one was.

Given that, items that constitute IIP have change majorly, it is not surprising that the growth figures of IIP have changed as well. Take a look at Figure 1. It plots both the new IIP and the old IIP growth rates over the last half decade, April 2012 onwards.

Figure 1: 

One look at Figure 1 is enough to tell us that the old IIP and new IIP are different beasts altogether, though both are very volatile. Now take at data from March 2013. As per the old IIP series, the growth was at 3.5 per cent. The new IIP series puts the growth at 15.1 per cent. That’s how different the old and the new IIP are.

In fact, as per the new IIP, the industrial growth stood at 3.3 per cent in 2014-2015, the last year of the Congress led UPA government. As per the old IIP the growth had stood at – 0.1 per cent. Hence, we can conclude that the state of the industry in the last year of the Congress government wasn’t as bad as it seemed at that point of time. It’s just that the old IIP may have no longer remained a good representation of the Indian industry.

In fact, the new IIP shows that industrial growth picked up in 2016-2017, the last financial year. The growth stood at 5.1 per cent. As per the old IIP the industrial growth was at 0.6 per cent, during the course of the year. What this also tells us is that the two IIPs are as different as chalk and cheese.

There is an interesting trend that the new IIP catches on to in the manufacturing sector. Manufacturing makes up for 77.6 per cent of the new IIP as against the 75.5 per cent in the old one. Take a look at Table 1.

Table 1: Manufacturing Growth

PeriodManufacturing Growth(in %)
Dec 2012 to Mar 20139.4
Dec 2013 to Mar 20143.7
Dec 2014 to Mar 20153.2
Dec 2015 to Mar 20164.9
Dec 2016 to Mar 20171.6

Source: Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy.

The manufacturing growth between December 2016 and March 2017 stood at 1.6 per cent. This has been the slowest in comparison to the same period in previous years. Why is this the case? The one word answer to this is demonetisation. The Modi government announced demonetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes on November 8, 2016, and sent the economy into a tailspin. The interesting thing is that the average manufacturing growth between April 2016 and October 2016 had stood at 6.9 per cent. This signalled the revival of the manufacturing sector after having grown by around 3 per cent in 2015-2016 and 3.8 per cent in 2013-2014.

Demonetisation managed to scuttle that revival in this growth. Also, it is worth pointing out here that the IIP data is collected from “entities in the organised sector units registered under the Factories Act, 1948”. This means that the unorganised sector is not covered. And as I have often written in the past, the impact of demonetisation on the unorganised sector has been far greater.

Up until now, the government has refused to admit that demonetisation has had a negative impact on the economy (Subscription Required). I guess it’s time it looked at the new IIP numbers to realise the obvious.

(The column was originally published in Equitymaster on May 16, 2017)

Problem with Robots is…

Sony_Qrio_RobototIn the recent past, there have been a spate of news-reports talking about robots taking over manufacturing. A recent news-report talked about the German shoemaker Adidas manufacturing shoes in its home country after more than two decades.

But instead of using human beings it has decided to use robots. Another news-report points out that Foxconn, a company which manufactures mobile phones for both Samsung and Apple, is replacing 60,000 workers with robots. Closer to home, information technology companies have also talked about robots taking over low-end activities.

On the face of it, it makes immense sense for a company to replace a human being with a robot. Robots can work all the time. They don’t sleep. They are not moody and there are no days when they don’t feel like working. They don’t need lunch and dinner breaks. They don’t need to go to the loo. And they don’t need to be paid every month or given an increment every year, either.

As Rutger Bergman writes in Utopia for Realists: “Scholars at Oxford University estimate that no less than 47% of all American jobs and 54% of those in Europe are at the high risk of being usurped by machines. And not in a hundred years or so, but in next twenty years.”

He then quotes a New York university professor as saying: “The only real difference between enthusiasts and skeptics is a time frame.”

The idea that machines will take over human jobs is nothing new. It has been around for the past two centuries. But nothing of that sort has happened as productivity levels (or output for every unit of input) have gone up. Nevertheless, it takes fewer and fewer employees now to create a successful business than it did in the past.

Take the case of the Indian manufacturing sector and the share of population it employs in various states. As Amit Amirapu and Arvind Subramanian write in a 2015 research paper titled Manufacturing or Services? An Indian Illustration of a Development Dilemma: “No major India state has achieved more than 6.2% of employment from registered manufacturing in the last 30 years, and many major states peaked at less than half that… most states have not been experiencing secular growth in employment shares over time (the only exceptions are Himachal Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and – possibly – Karnataka).”

What this basically means is that even though the absolute size of the manufacturing sector in India has gone up over the years, the proportion of the population working for it, hasn’t. This is primarily because more and more manufacturing now is carried out by machines rather than human beings. In the Indian case, one of the major reasons are the hare-brained labour laws that companies need to follow.

But globally the basic reason is different. As Bergman writes: “The reality is that it takes fewer and fewer people to create successful businesses, meaning when a business succeeds, fewer and fewer people benefit.”

Take the case of Kodak, the company that invented the digital camera. In the 1980s, it employed 1.45 lakh people. It filed for bankruptcy in 2012. On the other hand, Instagram, the Kodak of this era, had just thirteen employees on its rolls, and was sold to Facebook for a billion dollars.

Nevertheless, there is a basic problem with all this, best explained through this example. As Bergman writes: “When Henry Ford’s grandson gave labour union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory, he jokingly asked, “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues?” Without missing a beat, Reuther answered, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”

The point being if people don’t have a job, they don’t have any income or not much income. And in that situation they are going to buy only the most basic stuff that they require for survival. They will not have money to spend on all the goods being manufactured by companies which use robots.

And therein lies the basic problem with robots.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He can be reached at [email protected])

The column originally appeared in the Bangalore Mirror on June 1, 2016

The success of Make in India will lead to more jobs in services and not manufacturing

make in india
This column is essentially an extension of the column Devanshu Sampat wrote for The 5 Minute Wrapup on November 13, 2015. In this column Sampat talks about the challenge automation will create for the Make in India programme.

As he writes: “The costs of robots fall every year. At the same time, their complexity is on the rise. It won’t be long before cheap robots will be catering to the needs of a wide range of manufacturing firms.”

This Sampat believes “will prove to be major challenge to the government.” “Will ‘Make in India’ be successful if a large number of people remain unemployed despite a manufacturing revolution?” he asks.

As I have said in several previous columns, nearly 13 million Indians are expected to join the workforce every year. This trend will continue up to 2030. Given this, the government needs to create an environment in which jobs are created, in order to accommodate this workforce at a fast speed.

With automation and robots taking over manufacturing the number of new jobs being created will come down. And this will mean trouble for the Make in India programme given that ultimately it’s a job creation programme.

So what is the way out? The socialist mind-set of India’s politicians will look at it in a way where they may want to make it mandatory for businesses to hire and employ a certain number of people depending on the size of a firm.

To be honest I haven’t heard of such suggestions being made up until now but I won’t be surprised if such suggestions are made in the years to come, if the Make in India programme starts to fail due to automation and various other reasons.

Also, it is worth remembering here that any businessmen will automate if he can. A businessman is a capitalist and he works for ‘more’ profit and if there is an opportunity to make more profit he will try to cash in on it. And stopping that behaviour isn’t the best possible way to operate.

Further, given India’s surfeit of labour laws which make the business environment even more challenging, automation may be the best way out for any businessman.

Having said this, the question that arises here is that why should we expect the manufacturing industry to solve India’s employment problem? This is a fair question to ask. A straightforward answer for this lies in the fact that every country that has gone from being a developing country to becoming a developed one, has gone through a manufacturing revolution. India is possibly an exception to this, given that we have had a services revolution before a manufacturing one.

Nevertheless, even with automation we should not be so worried. TN Ninan in his book The Turn of the Tortoise—The Challenge and Promise of India’s Future offers a very interesting perspective on the basis of his interactions with some leading industrialists.

Take the case of RC Bhargava, the chairman of Maruti Suzuki, India’s leading car maker. As Ninan writes: “The chairman of Maruti Suzuki says, in response to a question on the greater automation that exists in newer car plants, that car factories should not be expected to solve India’s employment problem.”

So what about job growth? “If job growth is to come, according to Bhargava, it will have to be in associated areas—manning petrol pumps or maintaining and repairing vehicles, which are service sector jobs and don’t compare with high paying factory jobs.”

Bhargava also points out that every third car bought in India is not driven by the owner but a hired driver. Data from the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM) points out that 2.6 million cars were sold in India in 2014-2015. If every third car is being driven by a driver as Bhargava talks about, then that means 8.5 lakh new jobs for drivers were created just in 2014-2015. And that is a substantial number.

The broader point is that even though manufacturing jobs may not grow, the setting up of new factories will lead to an increase in jobs in services. As Ninan writes: “The ratio of non-factory to factory jobs in the car industry is said to be 7:1. The head of another car company puts the figure at 16:1. Other manufacturers of engineering goods endorse the view that shop-floor employment in the engineering goods sector is unlikely to grow rapidly because of steadily increasing automation as well as gains in productivity.”

Ninan also recounts an interaction with Jamshyd Godrej, chairman and managing director of Godrej & Boyce, the diversified engineering company. Godrej “recalls a time early on when the majority of his company’s employees worked in the factory.” Now, the number of employees working outside the factory are four to five time the number of employees working in the factory.

The moral of the story, as Ninan puts it is “Success in quite a lot of manufacturing sectors, therefore, leads to employment growth in services, not manufacturing. Not that it should matter, since incomes will be better in both than in agriculture.”

In this scenario, it is important that the government realises that the success of Make in India, should not depend on the number of manufacturing jobs it ends up creating. Even if it does not create manufacturing jobs, it will create jobs in services.

Hence, the government should keep working towards a better ease of doing business environment. The labour laws need to be simplified. The physical infrastructure needs to improve. The roads, railways and ports need to improve. The contracts need to be honoured. A bankruptcy law needs to be in place. The courts need to function well.

The simple things need to be done well.

(The column originally appeared on The Daily Reckoning on November 17, 2015)