Amitabh Kant, the Indian Middle Class and their Dream of a Benevolent Autocrat

Dekh tere sansar ki halat kya ho gayi bhagwan,
Kitna badal gaya insaan, kitna badal gaya insaan.

— Kavi Pradeep, C Ramachandra, Kavi Pradeep and IS Johar, in Nastik (1954).

Sometime in late December last year I was part of a panel deliberating on where the Indian economy is headed, at a business school in Mumbai.

Towards the end of the discussion, a fund manager sitting towards my right, offered his final reason on why the so-called India growth story was faltering. He said, India has too much democracy.

The room was full of MBA students, just the kind of audience which laps up reasons like the one offered by the fund manager. As soon as he finished speaking, I explained to the audience why the fund manager was wrong, not just because India and the world need democracy, but also from the point of view of economic growth.

Of course, that wasn’t the first time I had heard the too much democracy argument being made in the context of it holding back India’s economic growth. Over the years, I have seen, friends, family members, random acquaintances and men and women I don’t know, make this argument with panache and great confidence.

It seemed, as if, in their minds, they had a picture of this great leader who would come on a white horse, brandishing his sword, and set everything right. They wanted India to be governed by a benevolent autocrat. 

Given this, it is hardly surprising that Amitabh Kant, the CEO of the NITI Aayog, and one of central government’s top bureaucrats, said yesterday (December 8, 2020): “Tough reforms are very difficult in the Indian context, we are too much of a democracy.”

The thinking here is that given that India is a democracy, decision making takes time and effort and you can’t just push through economic reforms which can lead to economic growth. Getting things done needs a collaborative effort and hence, is deemed to be difficult. Hence, it would be great to have less democracy, making it easier for a strong leader to push economic reforms through.

Of course, the mainstream media has largely ignored Kant’s comment. But this is an important issue and needs to be discussed.

The question is where does the thinking of too much democracy come from.

Some of it is remnant from the emergency era of 1975-1977, when trains used to apparently run on time. Trains not running on time was basically a manifestation of the general frustration of dealing with the so-called Indian system.

The logic being that, with the then prime minister Indira Gandhi keeping democracy on a backseat, it essentially ensured that the system (represented by trains) actually worked well (represented by trains running on time).

In the recent years, too much democracy hurting India’s future economic prospects comes from the economic success of China. China doesn’t have democracy. The Chinese Communist Party governs the country. In fact, there is no difference between the Party and the government.

This essentially has ensured they can push economic growth without any resistance from the opposition, different sections of the society or the citizens themselves for that matter.

China is not the only example of this phenomenon. Countries like South Korea under Park Chung-hee, Taiwan under Chiang Kai-shek and Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, made rapid economic surges under leaders who can be categorised as benevolent autocrats.

As economist Vijay Joshi said at the 15th LK Jha memorial lecture at the Reserve Bank of India, Mumbai, in December 2017:

“ Fewer than half-a-dozen of the 200-odd countries in the world have achieved super-fast and inclusive growth for two or more decades on the run, and almost all of them were autocracies during their rapid sprints.”

So, history tells us that most super-fast growing countries at different points of time have been autocracies.

Beyond this, there is the so-called India growth story which also leads to the sort of thinking which concludes that too much democracy hurts economic growth. Ravinder Kaur makes this point beautifully in Brand New Nation—Capitalist Dreams and Nationalist Designs in Twenty-First-Century India.

As she writes:

“What is dubbed a growth story in policy-business circles is essentially an enchanting fairy-tale blueprint of economic reforms along with calls of a strong political leader to implement it… After all, capital has always rooted for strong, decisive leaders and centralized governance that can ensure its swift mobility and put the nation’s resources at the disposal of investors.”

A good part of India’s corporate and non-corporate middle class buys into this kind of thinking. They look at themselves as investor-citizens.

This leads to the firm belief that autocracies lead to faster economic growth. Hence, too much democracy is bad for economic growth. Only if India had a stronger leader. QED. Or so goes the thinking.

Dear Reader, this is nothing but very lazy thinking. While, most super-fast growing countries may have been autocracies with a benevolent autocrat at the top, the real question is, are all autocracies with a benevolent autocrat at the top, or at least most of them, super-fast growing countries.

Economist William Easterly makes this point in a research paper titled Benevolent Autocrats. As he writes: “The probability that you are an autocrat IF you are a growth success is 90 percent. This probability seems to influence the discussion in favour of autocrats.”

But that is the wrong question to ask. The question that needs to be asked should be exactly opposite—if a country is governed by an autocrat what are the chances that it will be a growth success? Or as Easterly puts it: “The relevant probability is whether you are a growth success IF you are an autocrat, which is only 10 percent.”

And this is where things get interesting, if we choose to look at data. Ruchir Sharma offers this data in his book The Ten Rules of Successful Nations. Let’s look at this pointwise.

1) In the last three decades, there were 124 cases of a country growing at faster than 5% for a period of ten years. Of these, 64 growth spells came under a democratic regime and 60 under an authoritarian one. Clearly, when it comes to countries growing at a reasonable rate of growth for a period of ten years, democracies do well as well as authoritarian regimes.

2) Let’s up the cut off to an economic growth of 7% or more for a period of ten years. How does the data look in this case? Sharma looked at data of 150 countries going back to 1950. He found 43 cases where a country’s economy grew at an average rate of 7% or more for a period of ten years. Interestingly, 35 of these cases came under authoritarian governments. As mentioned earlier, super-fast growth and autocrats go together. But this just shows one side of things.

3) So, what’s the other side? While super-fast growth in a bulk of cases has happened under authoritarian regimes, so have long economic slumps or economic slowdowns.

As Sharma writes:

“Long slumps are also much more common under authoritarian rule. Since 1950, there have been 138 cases in which, over the course of a full decade, a nation posted an average annual growth rate of less than 3 percent—which feels like a recession in emerging countries. And 100 of those cases unfolded under authoritarian regimes, ranging from Ghana in the 1950s and ’60s to Saudi Arabia and Romania in the 1980s, and Nigeria in the 1990s. The critical flaw of autocracies is this tendency toward extreme, volatile outcomes.”

Also, under authoritarian regimes, economic growth can see wild swings.

So, for every China there is a Zimbabwe as well, which people forget to talk or think about. For every Singapore, there are scores of African dictators who killed thousands of people during their rule and destroyed their respective economies. Hence, while autocracies may lead to super-fast growth, they can also lead to long-term economic stagnation and huge political turmoil.

Also, evidence is clear that steady growth happens best in democracies.

As Sharma writes:

“Together, Sweden, France, Belgium, and Norway have posted only one year of growth faster than 7 percent since 1950. But over that time, these four democracies have all seen their average incomes increase five- to sixfold, to a minimum of more than $30,000, in part because they rarely suffered full years of negative growth.”

Further, if you look at the list of countries with a per-capita income of more than $10,000, all of them are democracies. China, as and when it reaches there, will be the first autocracy, which will make it an exception. An exception, which proves the rule. That is, in the  medium to long-term, democracy and economic growth go hand in hand.

At least, that’s what history and data tell us. But don’t let that come in your way of believing the good story of authoritarian regimes run by benevolent autocrats leading to fast economic growth all the time.

It must be true if you believe in it. I mean, Mr Kant surely does. And so do a whole host of middle class Indian men and women.

Benevolent autocracy: India is drawing the wrong lesson from Lee Kuan Yew

Lee_Kuan_Yew


One of the favourite arguments offered by middle class Indian men (especially when all other arguments fail) is that “India needs a benevolent autocrat,” if the economy has to grow at a fast pace. The word “autocrat” is often used interchangeably with the world “dictator”.
This argument is often made by the corporate types who have made their money in life and are now looking for some intellectual stimulation through what they consider as philosophical musings.
The argument has gained a new life with the death of Lee Kuan Yew (or LKY as he was commonly known as) who was the prime minister of the city-state of Singapore from 1959 to 1990. Between 1990 and 2011, he was the senior minister as well as minister mentor of Singapore. LKY died on March 23, 2015.
Data from the World Bank shows that the per capita income of Singapore in 2013 was $55,182.5. When LKY took over as the prime minister in 1959, the per capita income was $400. What this clearly tells us is that LKY turned around Singapore from a poor country to a developed country in about one generation. When he became the prime minister, Singapore was basically swamp with almost no natural resources. He turned it around into a global financial centre first and now an entertainment destination as well.
His achievements not withstanding, LKY was an autocrat who was honest enough to admit it. As he said in an interview to The Straits Times in April 1987: “
I am often accused of interfering in the private lives of citizens. Yes, if I did not, had I not done that, we wouldn’t be here today. And I say without the slightest remorse, that we wouldn’t be here, we would not have made economic progress, if we had not intervened on very personal matters – who your neighbor is, how you live, the noise you make, how you spit, or what language you use. We decide what is right. Never mind what the people think.”
But as I have said above LKY’s autocratic style of working paid huge dividends for Singapore. It was transformed from a swamp to a developed country in around 50 years. And that was a huge achievement.
This high growth that Singapore achieved has led people to suggest that India also needs a benevolent autocrat to grow at a fast pace. LKY and Singapore are not the only example that is given to buttress this point. There are other examples as well—Chile under Augusto Pinochet. Or countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan, which grew at a very fast rate under autocratic regimes. They moved to a democratic form of government only after having grown fast for a significant period of time.
Then there is the example of China. The country is ruled by one party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).  It has had a generation of fast economic growth without any democracy. All this has led many people to believe that if a country has to grow fast it needs to be under an autocratic regime. Hence, India needs a “benevolent autocrat,” is the argument offered. QED.
But are things as simple as that? Or are people becoming victims of what behavioural economists term as the “availability heuristic”? As John Allen Paulos writes in
A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper: “First described by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, it is nothing more than strong disposition to make judgements or evaluations in light of the first thing that comes to mind (or is “available” to the mind).”
So, Lee Kuan Yew was an autocrat. Under him Singapore grew at a very rapid rate. Hence, India needs a benevolent autocrat as well, if it has to grow at a very fast rate. That’s how it works for those who feel that India needs a “benevolent autocrat”.
Economist William Easterly has done some interesting research in this area, which he summarises in a research paper titled
Benevolent Autocrats. As he writes: “The probability that you are an autocrat IF you are a growth success is 90 percent. This probability seems to influence the discussion in favour of autocrats.”
But that is the wrong question to ask. The question that needs to be asked should be exactly opposite—if a country is governed by an autocrat what are the chances that it will be a growth success? “T
he relevant probability is whether you are a growth success IF you are an autocrat, which is only 10 percent,” writes Easterly. To put it simply—most fast growing nations are ruled by autocrats. Nevertheless, most autocracies do not grow fast.
The thing is that one never knows whether an autocrat will turn out to be benevolent or will he turn out to be an out an out dictator, once he starts to rule. That depends on the luck of the draw. Most autocrats usually end up screwing up the economies they rule. This is a simple point that middle class Indian men who want a “benevolent autocrat” to rule this country, need to understand.

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

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on Mar 30, 2015

Would India have grown faster if it wasn’t a democracy?


in-lgflag

Vivek Kaul
The India growth story as it was originally envisaged to be, is more or less over. Days when 8-9% growth was taken for a given are gone. The gross domestic product (GDP) for the period July 1 to September 30, 2012, grew by 5.3%. GDP growth is a measure of economic growth.
Further, what is true about India, is also true about China. As Ruchir Sharma head of Emerging Market Equities and Global Macro at Morgan Stanley Investment Management told me in a recent interaction “As far as China was concerned the growth expectations were too high out of China. People kept expecting China to grow at 9-10%. But there has been a reset of expectations. This year the growth rate is going to be 7.5% officially. Some suggestions have been made that the actual number would be lower than that if you look at the corresponding data.”
As was the case in the past, expectations are that China will continue to grow at a much faster rate than India. To me this raises the question whether countries with authoritarian governments, or countries with lower levels of democracy or even countries run by dictators, do better during the initial few decades of economic growth than countries which are democracies?
Or to put it simply is India’s democratic form of government slowing down its economic growth? This is a question that makes for engaging discussion in the business circles of Mumbai and the power circles of Delhi. Would have done better if we were more like China or Singapore, than the way we actually are, is a question which is often asked?
Vivek Dehejia and Rupa Subramanya discuss this question in some detail in their new book 
Indianomix – Making Sense of Modern India(Random House India, Rs 399).
As they write “When you look back on the history of the twentieth century – in fact through human history – you notice periods of very high economic growth are associated with autocratic, not democratic regimes. Just think of Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet or the ‘miracle’ economies of East Asia – Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan. Starting in the 1960s these four economies went from being poor to being rich in just over a generation. The first one was a British colony, the second an oligarchy, and the latter two essentially one-party states. It’s true that Chile, Taiwan and South Korea democratised – but that was 
after they’d experienced a generation of rapid growth, not before.”
As Dehejia told me in an earlier interview “You need to have some sort of political control, you cannot have a free for all, and get marshalling of resources and savings rate and investment rate, that high growth demands.” And this is more possible in an authoritarian regime than in a democracy. 
The same stands true for China now. It has had a generation of fast economic growth without any democracy. The country is ruled by one party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). As Richard McGregor, the author of 
The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers told me in an earlier interview “The CCP is basically a political machine, as well as being a permanent governing party. As a political machine, it does not consider that its internal mechanisms should be open to public view. The top leaders are unveiled to the country at the end of five years and very little is revealed in the process. After the 2007 Congress, the nine men – and they are all men – walk out onto the stage, all wearing dark suits and all but one wearing a red tie; they all displayed slick, jet-black pompadours (a style of haircut), a product of the uniform addiction to regular hair dyeing of senior Chinese politicians; and they had all worked their up through the same system for all their lives.” Conformity is the name of the game. 
The Western nations which grew at a very fast rate towards the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century also had very little democracy back then. As Dehejia and Subramanya point out “All of the rich countries of the West achieved rapid growth and economic development when they weren’t democracies. Just think of Britain during the Industrial Revolution. While it’s true that Britain was a parliamentary democracy it came with one catch, the fact that most people couldn’t vote. Franchise restrictions based on property ownership meant that the poor and the lower middle class were prevented from voting.”
The same stands true about the United States of America as well, the biggest economy in the world right now. “Britain was really an oligarchy, not a democracy, and so too was the US and every other Western country that industrialised and got rich.. The US, for example, legally enfranchised the African-Americans after their emancipation from slavery, but this was ‘offset’ by franchise restrictions that meant most Southern blacks couldn’t participate in the political process until the civil write movement of the 1960s. And let’s not forget that women didn’t get the vote in all of these Western countries till very late – well into the twentieth century in many cases,” the authors point out.
India on the other hand was a unique case. As Dehejia told me in an 
earlier interview “The India story is unique. We are the only large emerging economy to have emerged as a fully fledged democracy the moment we were born as a post-colonial state and that is an incredibly daring thing to do.” 
This despite the fact that the Constituent Assembly which drafted the Indian Constitution had been elected under a very limited franchise by 5 to 10% of the Indians at the top of social and the So has Indian economic growth suffered because we are a democracy? Dehejia and Subramanya point out the research of William Easterly, an economics professor at the New York University. “The historical data on growth over time in many different countries that Easterly has analysed show that 
if you’re a fast growing country then there’s a 90 per cent chance that you’re an autocracy. The problem is that you should be asking the reverse question: if you’re an autocracy, what’s the chance that you’ll be a growth success? The answer to that question is an underwhelming 10 per cent?”
What that means is that fast growing countries are almost inevitably autocracies but not all autocracies are fast growing countries. An excellent recent example is Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe who now functions like a dictator. “What was once a break basket has now become a basket case,” write the authors. The continent of Africa is full of authoritarian regimes which have made a mess of their respective economies.
Closer to home under General Zia-Ul-Haq, Pakistan first turned into an Islamic state and now has turned into a full fledged terrorist state. The horrors that Pol Pot perpetuated as the dictator of Cambodia are well known.
And the biggest example of an authoritarian regime gone wrong was Adolf Hitler. Hitler first rode to power on popular discontent and then used a lot of Keynesian economics ( which John Maynard Keynes was still in the process of formulating) to create economic growth by building roads and then lead his country into a disastrous World War.
So yes, fast growing countries are authoritarian regimes but as explained above things can go terribly wrong as well under these regimes. Hence, we really don’t know which way will the authoritarian regimes go, towards economic growth or towards social disaster.
But then why does the myth of authoritarian regimes always creating economic growth prevail? This is because of what is known as the ‘availability heuristic’. “This refers to the fact that human beings tend to attach too high a probability to an event that’s very vivid in our minds. A classic example is natural disasters like earthquakes and tornadoes. Because they’re splashed all over the news on the rare occasions they do occur, people always think they’re far more likely than they really are,” write the authors. “Compiling data from news stories in the 
New York Times from 1960 to 2008, Easterly shows that successful autocracies are heavily over-reported compared to failed autocracies. Compared to a little under 6,000 stories on failed autocracies and about 15,000 on those in the middle, there were a staggering number of stories – more than 40,000 on autocratic successes. So if China has been on your mind rather than Zimbabwe you’re not entirely to blame,” they add.
Hence, India’s democratic form of government may impact its economic growth to some extent but it saves us from other problems as well. “What the data do show is that autocracies have many more highs and lows than democracies: they tend to be spectacularly successful or unmitigated disasters. Democracies generally are found somewhere in the middle. India, for example, hasn’t yet achieved Chinese-style double digit growth rates, but nor has it ever had negative double-digit growth as in Zimbabwe,” write Dehejia and Subramanya.

The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on December 3, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected]
 
 

Reform by stealth, the original sin of 1991, has come back to haunt us


India badly needs a second generation of economic reforms in the days and months to come. But that doesn’t seem to be happening. “What makes reforms more difficult now is what I call the original sin of 1991. What happened from 1991 and thereon was reform by stealth. There was never an attempt made to sort of articulate to the Indian voter why are we doing this? What is the sort of the intellectual or the real rationale for this? Why is it that we must open up?” says Vivek Dehejia an economics professor at Carleton University in Ottawa,Canada. He is also a regular economic commentator on India for the New York Times India Ink. In this interview he speaks to Vivek Kaul.
How do you see overall Indian economy right now?
The way I would put it Vivek is, if I take a long term view, a generational view, I am pretty optimistic. The fundamentals of savings and investments are strong.
What about a more short term view?
If you take a shorter view of between six months to a year or even two years ahead, then everything that we have been reading about in the news is worrisome. The foreign direct investment is drying up. The savings rate seems to have been dropping. The economic growth we know has dropped. The next fiscal year we would lucky if we get 6.5% economic growth.
How do we account for the failure of this particular government to deliver sort of crucially needed second generation economic reforms?
The India story is a glass half empty or a glass half full. If you look at the media’s treatment of the India story, particularly international media they tend to overshoot. So two years ago we were being overhyped. I remember that the Economist had a famous cover where they said that India will overtake China’s growth rate in the next couple of years. They made that bold prediction. And then about a year later they were saying that India is a disaster. What has happened to the India story? The international media tends to overshoot. And then they overdo it in the negative direction as well. A balanced view would say that original hype was excessive. We cannot do nor would we want to do what China is doing. With our democratic system, our pluralistic democracy, the India that we have, we cannot marshal resources like the way the Chinese do, or like the way Singapore did.
Could you discuss that in detail?
If you take a step back, historically, many of the East Asian growth miracles, the Latin American growth miracles, were done under brutal dictatorial regimes. I mean whether it was Pinochet’s Chile, whether it was Taiwan or Singapore or Hong Kong, they all did it under authoritarian regimes. So the India story is unique. We are the only large emerging economy to have emerged as a fully fledged democracy the moment we were born as a post colonial state and that is an incredibly daring thing to do. At the time when the Constituent Assembly was figuring out what are we going to do now post independence a lot of conservative voices were saying don’t go in for full fledged democracy where every person man or a woman gets a vote because you will descend down into pluralism and identity based politics and so on. Of course to some extent it’s true. A country with a large number of poor people which is a fully fledged democracy, the centre of gravity politically is going to be towards redistribution and not towards growth. So any government has to reckon with the fact that where are your votes. In other words the market for votes and the market for economic reform do not always correlate.
You talk about authoritarian regimes and growth going together…
This is one of the oldest debates in social sciences. It is a very unsettled and a very controversial one. For any theory you can give on one side of it there is an equally compelling argument on the other side. So the orthodox view in political science particularly more than economics was put forward by Samuel Huntington. The view was that you need to have some sort of political control, you cannot have a free for all, and get marshalling of resources and savings rate and investment rate, that high growth demands.
So Huntington was supportive of the Chinese model of growth?
Yes. Huntington famously was supportive of the Chinese model and suggested that was what you had to do at an early stage of economic development. But there are equally compelling arguments on the other side as well. The idea is that democracy gives a safety valve for a discontent or unhappiness or for popular expression to disapproval of whatever the government or the regime in power is doing. We read about the growing number of mysterious incidents in China where you can infer that people are rioting. But we are not exactly sure because the Chinese system also does not allow for a free media. Also let’s not forget that China has had growing inequalities of income and growth, and massive corruption scandals. The point being that China too for its much wanted economic efficiency also has kinds of problems which are not much different from the once we face.
That’s an interesting point you make…
Here again another theory or another idea which can help us interpret what is going on. When you have a period of rapid economic growth and structural transformation of an economy, you are almost invariably going to have massive corruption. It is almost impossible to imagine that you have this huge amount of growth taking place in a relatively weak regulatory environment where there isn’t going to be an opportunity for corruption. It doesn’t mean that it is okay or it doesn’t mean that one condones it, but if you look throughout history it’s always been the case that in the first phase of rapid growth and rapid transformation there has been corruption, rising inequalities and so on.
Can you give us an example?
The famous example is the so called American gilded age. In the United States after the end of the Civil War (in the 1860s) came the era of the Robber Barons. These people who are now household names the Vanderbilts, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Mellons, were basically Robber Barons. They were called that of course because how they operated was pretty shady even according to the rules of that time.
Why are the second generation of reforms not happening?
What makes reforms more difficult now is what I call the original sin of 1991. We had a first phase of the economic reforms in 1991 where we swept away the worst excesses of the license permit raj. We opened up the product markets. But what happened from 1991 and thereon was reform by stealth. Reform by the stroke of the pen reform and reform in a mode of crisis, where there was never an attempt made to sort of articulate to the Indian voter why are we doing this? What is the sort of the intellectual or the real rationale for this? Why is it that we must open up? It wasn’t good enough to say that look we are in a crisis. Our gold reserves have been mortgaged. Our foreign exchange reserves are dwindling. Again India’s is hardly unique on this. Wherever you look whether it is Latin America or Eastern Europe, it generally takes an economic crisis to usher in a period of major economic reform.
So the original sin is still haunting us?
The original sin has come back to haunt us because the intellectual basis of further reform is not even on anyone’s agenda. Discussions and debates on reform are more focused on issues like the FDI is falling, the rupee is falling, the current account deficit is going up etc. Those are all symptoms of a problem. The two bursts of reform that we had first were first under Rao/Manmohan Singh and then under NDA. If a case had been made to build a constituency for economic reform, then I think we would have been in a different political economy than we are now. But the fact that didn’t happen and things were going well, the economy was growing, that led to a situation where everybody said let’s carry on. But now we don’t have that luxury. Now whichever government whoever comes to power in 2014 is going to have to make some tough decisions that their electoral base, isn’t going to like necessarily. So how are they going to make their case?
So are you suggesting that the next generation of reforms in India will happen only if there is an economic crisis?
I don’t want to say that. Again that could be one interpretation from the arguments I am making of the history. It will require a change in the political equilibrium and certainly a crisis is one thing that can do that. But a more benign way the same thing can happen that without a crisis is the realization of the political actors that look I can make economic reform and economic growth electorally a winning policy for me. But India is a land of so many paradoxes. A norm of the democratic political theory in the rich countries i.e. the US, Canada, Great Britain etc, is that other things being equal, the richer you are, the more educated you are, the more likely you are to vote. In India it is the opposite. The urban middle class is the more disengaged politically. They feel cynical. They feel powerless. Until they become more politically engaged that change in the equilibrium cannot happen.
What about the rural voter?
The rural voter at least in the short run might benefit from a NREGA and will say that you are giving me money and I will keep voting for you. We have all heard people say they are uneducated and they are ignorant, no it’s not like that. He is in a very liquidity constrained situation. He is looking to the next crop, the next harvest, the next I got to pay my bills. If someone gave him 100 days of employment and gives him a subsidy, he will take it.
How do explain the dichotomy between Manmohan Singh’s so called reformist credentials and his failure to carry out economic reforms?
One of the misconceptions that crops up when we look at poor economic performance or failure to carry out economic reform is what cognitive psychologists call fundamental attribution bias. Fundamentally attribution bias says that we are more likely to attribute to the other person a subjective basis for their behaviour and tend to neglect the situational factors. Looking at our own actions we look more at the situational factors and less at the idiosyncratic individual subjective factors. So what am I trying to say? What I am saying is that it has become almost a refrain to say that Dr Manmohan Singh should be an economic reformer. He was at least the instrument if not the architect of the 1991 reforms. There are speculations being in made in what you can call the Delhi and Mumbai cocktail party circuit, about whether he is really a reformer? Was it Narsimha Rao who was really the real architect of the reform? Is he a frustrated reformer? What does he really want to do? What’s going on his head? That in my view is a fundamental attribution bias because we are attributing to him or whoever is around him a subjective basis for the inaction and the policy paralysis of the government.
So the government more than the individual at the helm of it is to be blamed?
Traditionally the electoral base of the Congress party has been the rural voter, the minority voters and so on, people who are at the lower end of the economic spectrum. So they are the beneficiaries just roughly speaking of the redistributive policies. Political scientists have a fancy name for it. They call it the median voter theorem. What does it mean? It means that all political parties will tend to gravitate towards the preferred policy of the guy in the middle, the median voter.
Was Narsimha Rao who was really the real architect of the reform?
Narsimha Rao must be given a lot of credit for taking what was then a very bold decision. He was at the top of a very weak government as you know. And he gave the political backing to Manmohan Singh to push this first wave of reforms more than that would have been necessary just to avert a foreign exchange crisis. And then he paid a price for it electorally in the next election. This again the intangible element in the political economy that short of a crisis it often takes someone of stature to really take that long term generation view. IT means that you are not just looking at narrow electoral calculus but you are looking beyond the next election. That’s what seems to be missing right now. Among all the political parties right now, one doesn’t seem to see that vision of look at this is where we want to be in a generation and here is our roadmap of how we are going to get there.
Going back to Manmohan Singh you called him an overachiever recently, after the Time magazine called him an “underachiever”. What was the logic there?
The traditional view and certainly that was widely in the West at least till very recently has been that it was Manmohan Singh who was the architect of the India’s economic reforms. But then how do you explain the inaction in the last five, six, seven years? The revisionist perspective would say no in fact the real reformer was Narsimha Rao to begin with. The real political weight behind the reform was his. And Manmohan Singh that any good technocratic economist should have been able to do which is to implement a series of reforms that we all knew about. My teacher Jagdish Bhagwati had been writing about it for years. In that sense maybe Manmohan Singh was given too much credit in the first instance for implementing a set of reforms. If you look at his career since then he has never really been a politically savvy actor. We have this peculiar situation in India since 2004 where the Prime Minister sits in the Rajya Sabha, the upper house. That kind of thing is not barred by our constitution but I don’t think that the framers of the constitution envisaged this would be a long term situation. It is a little like the British prime minister sitting in the House of Lords. I mean that practice disappeared in the nineteenth century. He has not shown from the evidence that we can see any ability to get a political base of his own to be a counterweight to the more redistributive tendencies of the Nehru Gandhi dynasty. And that’s the sense that in somewhat cheeky way I was using the term overachiever.
Do you think he is just keeping the seat warm for Rahul Gandhi?
It increasingly appears to be that way. If that is true then it suggests that we shouldn’t really expect much to happen in the next two years.
Does the fiscal deficit of India worry you?
If you look at some shorter to medium term challenges, then things like fiscal deficit and the current account deficit are things to worry about. Again other things like the weak rupee, the weak FDI data, things that people tend to fixate at, but those at best are symptoms of a deeper structural problem. The deeper concern is the kind of reform that will require a major legislative agenda such as labour law reform for example to unlock our manufacturing sector. And managing the huge demographic dividend that we are going to get in the form of 300-400 million young people. They will have to be educated.
But is there a demographic dividend?
That’s the question. Will it become a demographic nightmare? Can you imagine the social chaos if you have all these kids just wandering around, not educated enough to get a job, what are they going to do? It’s a recipe for social disaster. That according to me is going to be real litmus test. If we are able to navigate that then I don’t see why we won’t be on track to again go back to 8- 9% economic growth. I want to remain optimistic at the end of the day.
(The interview originally appeared in the Daily News and Analysis on August 6,2012. http://www.dnaindia.com/money/interview_reform-by-stealth-the-originalsin-of-1991-has-come-back-to-haunt-us_1724348)
(Interviewer Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])

Sonia’s UPA is taking us to new ‘Hindu’ rate of growth


Vivek Kaul

Raj Krishna, a professor at the Delhi School of Economics, came up with the term “Hindu rate of growth” to refer to Indian economy’s sluggish gross domestic product (GDP) growth of 3.5% per year between the 1950s and the 1980s. The phrase has been much used and abused since then.
A misinterpretation that is often made is that Krishna used the term to infer that India grew slowly because it was a nation dominated by Hindus. In fact he never meant anything like that. Krishna was a believer in free markets and wasn’t a big fan of the socialistic model of development put forward by Jawahar Lal Nehru and the Congress party.
In fact he realised over the years looking at the slow economic growth of India that the Nehruvian model of socialism wasn’t really working. This was visible in the India’s secular or long term economic growth rate which averaged around 3.5% during those days.
The word to mark here is “secular”. The word in its common every day usage refers to something that is not specifically related to a particular religion. Like our country India. One of the fundamental rights Indians have is the right to freedom of religion which allows us to practice and propagate any religion.
But the world “secular” has another meaning. It also means a long term trend. Hence when economists like Krishna talk about the secular rate of growth they are talking about the rate at which a country like India has grown year on year, over an extended period of time. And this secular rate of growth in India’s case was 3.5%. This could hardly be called a rate of growth for a country like India which was growing from a very low base and needed to grow at a much faster pace to pull its millions out of poverty.
So Krishna came up with the word “Hindu” which was the direct opposite of the word “secular” to take a dig at Jawahar Lal Nehru and his model of development. Nehru was a big believer in secularism. Hence by using the word “Hindu” Krishna was essentially taking a dig on Nehru and his brand of economic development, and not Hindus.
The policies of socialism and the license quota raj followed by Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi and grandson Rajiv ensured that India grew at a very slow rate of growth. While India was growing at a sub 4% rate of growth, South Korea grew at 9%, Taiwan at 8% and Indonesia at 6%. These were countries which were more or less at a similar point where India was in the late 1940s.
The Indian economic revolution stared in late July 1991, when a certain Manmohan Singh, with the blessings of PV Narsimha Rao, initiated the economic reform process. The country since then has largely grown at the rates of 7-8% per year, even crossing 9% over the last few years.
Over the years this economic growth has largely been taken for granted by the Congress led UPA politicians, bureaucrats and others in decision making positions. Come what may, we will grow by at least 9%. When the growth slipped below 9%, the attitude was that whatever happens we will grow by 8%. When it slipped further, we can’t go below 7% was what those in decision making positions constantly said. On a recent TV show Montek Singh Ahulwalia, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, kept insisting that a 7% economic growth rate was a given. Turns out it’s not.
The latest GDP growth rate, which is a measure of economic growth, for the period of January to March 2012 has fallen to 5.3%. I wonder, what is the new number, Mr Ahulwalia and his ilk will come up with now. “Come what may we will grow at least by 4%!” is something not worth saying on a public forum.
But chances are that’s where we are headed. As Ruchir Sharma writes in his recent book Breakout Nations – In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles “India is already showing some of the warning signs of failed growth stories, including early-onset of confidence.”
The history of economic growth
Sharma’s basic point is that economic growth should never be taken for granted. History has proven otherwise. Only six countries which are classified as emerging markets by the western world have grown at the rate of 5% or more over the last forty years. These countries are Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand and Hong Kong. Of these two, Hong Kong and Taiwan are city states with a very small area and population. Hence only four emerging market countries have grown at a rate of 5% or more over the last forty years. Only two of these countries i.e. Taiwan and South Korea have managed to grow at 5% or more for the last fifty years.
“In many ways “mortality rate” of countries is as high as that of stocks. Only four companies – Procter & gamble, General Electric, AT&T, and DuPont- have survived on the Dow Jones index of the top-thirty U.S. industrial stocks since the 1960s. Few front-runners stay in the lead for a decade, much less many decades,” writes Sharma.
The history of economic growth is filled with examples of countries which have flattered to deceive. In the 1950s and 1960s, India and China, the two biggest emerging markets now, were struggling to grow. The bet then was on Iraq, Iran and Yemen. In the 1960s, the bet was Philippines, Burma and Sri Lanka to become the next East Asian tigers. But that as we all know that never really happened.
India is going the Brazil way
Brazil was to the world what China is to it now in the 1960s and the 1970s. It was one of the fastest growing economies in the world. But in the seventies it invested in what Sharma calls a “premature construction of a welfare state”, rather than build road and other infrastructure important to create a viable and modern industrial economy. What followed was excessive government spending and regular bouts of hyperinflation, destroying economic growth.
India is in a similar situation now. Over the last five years the Congress party led United Progressive Alliance is trying to gain ground which it has lost to a score of regional parties. And for that it has been very aggressively giving out “freebies” to the population. The development of infrastructure like roads, bridges, ports, airports, education etc, has all taken a backseat.
But the distribution of “freebies” has led to a burgeoning fiscal deficit. Fiscal deficit is the difference between what a government earns and what it spends.
For the financial year 2007-2008 the fiscal deficit stood at Rs 1,26,912 crore against Rs 5,21,980 crore for the current financial year. In a time frame of five years the fiscal deficit has shot up by nearly 312%. During the same period the income earned by the government has gone up by only 36% to Rs 7,96,740 crore. The huge increase in fiscal deficit has primarily happened because of the subsidy on food, fertilizer and petroleum.
This has meant that the government has had to borrow more and this in turn has pushed up interest rates leading to higher EMIs. It has also led to businesses postponing expansion because higher interest rates mean that projects may not be financially viable. It has also led to people borrowing lesser to buy homes, cars and other things, leading to a further slowdown in a lot of sectors. And with the government borrowing so much there is no way the interest rate can come down.
As Sharma points out: “It was easy enough for India to increase spending in the midst of a global boom, but the spending has continued to rise in the post-crisis period…If the government continues down this path India, may meet the same fate as Brazil in the late 1970s, when excessive government spending set off hyperinflation and crowded out private investment, ending the country’s economic boom.”
Where are the big ticket reforms?
India reaped a lot of benefits because of the reforms of 1991. But it’s been 21 years since then. A new set of reforms is needed. Countries which have constantly grown over the years have shown to be very reform oriented. “In countries like South Korea, China and Taiwan, they consistently had a plan which was about how do you keep reforming. How do you keep opening up the economy? How do you keep liberalizing the economy in terms of how you grow and how you make use of every crisis as an opportunity?” says Sharma.
India has hardly seen any economic reform in the recent past. The Direct Taxes Code was initiated a few years back has still not seen the light of day, but even if it does see the light of day, it’s not going to be of much use. In its original form it was a treat to read with almost anyone with a basic understanding of English being able to read and understand it. The most recent version has gone back to being the “Greek” that the current Income Tax Act is.
It has been proven the world over that simpler tax systems lead to greater tax revenues. Then the question is why have such complicated income tax rules? The only people who benefit are CAs and the Indian Revenue Service officers.
Opening up the retail sector for foreign direct investment has not gone anywhere for a long time. This is a sector which is extremely labour intensive and can create a lot of employment.
What about opening up the aviation sector to foreigners instead of pumping more and more money into Air India? As Warren Buffett wrote in a letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, the company whose chairman he is, a few years back “The worst sort of business is one that grows rapidly, requires significant capital to engender the growth, and then earns little or no money. Think airlines. Here a durable competitive advantage has proven elusive ever since the days of the Wright Brothers. Indeed, if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down…The airline industry’s demand for capital ever since that first flight has been insatiable. Investors have poured money into a bottomless pit, attracted by growth when they should have been repelled by it.”
If foreigners want to burn their money running airlines in India why should we have a problem with it?
The insurance sector is bleeding and needs more foreign money, but there is a cap of 26% on foreign investment in an insurance company. Again this limit needs to go up. The sector very labour intensive and has potential to create employment. The same is true about the print media in India.
The list of pending economic reforms is endless. But in short India needs much more economic reform in the days to come if we hope to grow at the rates of growth we were growing.
To conclude
Raj Krishna was a far sighted economist. He knew that the Nehruvian brand of socialism was not working. It never has. It never did. And it never will. But somehow the Congress party’s fascination for it continues. And in continuance of that, the party is now distributing money to the citizens of India through the various so called “social-sector” schemes. If economic growth could be created by just distributing money to everyone, then India would have been a developed nation by now. But that’s not how economic growth is created. The distribution of money creates is higher inflation which leads to higher interest rates and in turn lower economic growth. Also India is hardly in a position to become a welfare state. The government just doesn’t earn enough to support the kind of money it’s been spending and plans to spend.
Its time the mandarins who run the Congress party and effectively the country realize that. Or rate of growth of India’s economy (measured by the growth in GDP) will continue to fall. And soon it will be time to welcome the new “Hindu” rate of economic growth. And how much shall that be? Let’s say around 3.5%.
(The article originally appeared at www.firstpost.com on June 1,2012. http://www.firstpost.com/politics/sonias-upa-is-taking-us-to-new-hindu-rate-of-growth-328428.html)
(Vivek Kaul is a writer and can be reached at [email protected])