The much-awaited rulings of the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague—in response to the Philippines’ 2013 submission over the maritime entitlements and status of features encompassed in China’s expansive South China Sea claims—were released this morning. Taken together, the rulings were clear, crisp, comprehensive, and nothing short of a categorical rejection of Chinese claims.

Among other things, the court ruled China’s nine-dash line claim to the South China Sea invalid because of Beijing’s earlier ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). In a move that surprised many observers, the court also ventured a ruling on the status of every feature in the Spratly Islands, clarifying that none of them were islands and hence do not generate an exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Significantly, it ruled that Mischief Reef, which China has occupied since 1995, and Second Thomas Shoal, where China has blockaded Philippine marines garrisoned on an old vessel that was deliberately run aground there, to be within the EEZ of the Philippines.

In the neighborhood

Now that the rulings have been made, what are the implications and way forward for concerned states?

For the Philippines, the legal victory presents a paradoxical challenge for the new government. Prior to the ruling, newly-elected President Rodrigo Duterte indicated on several occasions that he was prepared to depart from his predecessor’s more hardline position on the South China Sea to engage Beijing in dialogue and possibly even joint development. He even hinted that he would tone down Manila’s claim in exchange for infrastructure investment. Given that the ruling decisively turns things in Manila’s favor, it remains to be seen whether the populist Duterte administration would be able to sell the idea of joint development of what are effectively Philippine resources without risking a popular backlash. This will be difficult but not necessarily impossible, given that the Philippines would likely still require logistical and infrastructural support of some form or other for such development projects. 

Since the submission of the Philippine case in 2013, China has taken the position of “no recognition, no participation, no acceptance, and no execution,” as described by Chinese professor Shen Dingli. Beijing continues to adhere to this position, and is likely to dig in its heels given the comprehensive nature of the court’s rejection of China’s claims. This, in turn, will feed the conspiracy theories swirling around Beijing that the court is nothing but a conspiracy against China. 

[T]he rulings are likely to occasion intense internal discussions and debates within the Chinese leadership as to how best to proceed.

Not surprisingly, in defiance of the ruling, China continues to insist on straight baselines and EEZs in the Spratlys. Away from the glare of the media however, the rulings are likely to occasion intense internal discussions and debates within the Chinese leadership as to how best to proceed. Many analysts have the not-unfounded concern that hawkish perspectives will prevail in this debate, at least in the short term—fed by the deep sensibilities to issues of security and sovereignty, and a (misplaced) sense of injustice. This would doubtless put regional stability at risk. Instead, China should do its part to bring the Code of Conduct it has been discussing with ASEAN to a conclusion as a demonstration of its commitment to regional order and stability, and the peaceful settlement of disputes. Beijing should also continue to engage concerned states in dialogue, but these dialogues cannot be conducted on the premise of Chinese “unalienable ownership” of and “legitimate entitlements” in the South China Sea. 

ASEAN will be hosting several ministerial meetings later this month, and the ruling will doubtless be raised in some form or other, certainly in closed-door discussions. For ASEAN, the key question is whether the organization can and will cobble together a coherent, consensus position in response to the ruling, and how substantive the response will be (they should at least make mention of the importance of international law to which all ASEAN states subscribe). For now though, it is too early to tell. 

U.S. policy

As an Asia-Pacific country, the United States has set great stock in the principle of freedom of navigation, and has articulated this as a national interest with regards to the South China Sea. There are however, three challenges for the United States as it proceeds to refine its policy in the region:

1. First, going by the attention it has commanded in Washington, it appears that the South China Sea issue has already become the definitive point of reference of America’s Southeast Asia policy. Southeast Asian states, on the other hand, have expressed their desire precisely that the South China Sea issue should not overshadow or dominate the regional agenda. Hence, even as the United States continues to be present and engaged on South China Sea issues in the region, equal attention, if not more, should be afforded to broaden the scope of their engagement. 
2. Second, in pushing back Chinese assertiveness in the South China Sea, the United States must be careful not to inadvertently contribute to the militarization of the region. There is talk about the deployment of a second carrier group to the region, and the U.S.S. John C. Stennis and U.S.S. Ronald Reagan are already patrolling the Philippine Sea. On the one hand, this is presumed to enhance the deterrent effect of the American presence in the region. Yet on the other hand, Washington should be mindful of the fact that China’s South China Sea claim is also informed by a deep sense of vulnerability, especially to the military activities that the United States conducts in its vicinity. 
3. Finally, in its desire to reassure the region, the United States has sought to strengthen its relations with regional partners and allies. This is necessary, and it is welcomed. At the same time however, Washington should also ensure that this strengthening and deepening of relations is undergirded by an alignment of interests and shared outlooks. This cannot, and should not, be assumed. 

       

The International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea has ruled on the case that the Philippines brought in 2013, challenging China's claims and behavior in the South China Sea. International lawyers and the policy commentariat has judged the ruling as a sweeping victory for the Philippines and a significant loss for China, which refused to acknowledge the tribunal's jurisdiction or to take part in the proceedings.

The question going forward is how China will respond. Will it double down on the aggressive and coercive activities of the past six years, behavior that has put most of its East Asian neighbors on guard? Will it continue to interpret the Law of the Sea in self-serving ways that very few countries accept? Or, might China recognize that its South China Sea strategy has been an utter failure and that its best response is to take a more restrained and neighborly approach? 

What got us here?

Critical as the next weeks and months will be, it is also useful to take a look back and examine recent events in the broad context of Chinese foreign and security policy over the last four decades. The premise of that reform policy, initiated in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was that a weak China could best ensure its security by engaging and accommodating the international community, in order to gradually build up all aspects of its national power. The most clear-cut feature of this strategy was to join the global economy: China accepted the leadership of the IMF and World Bank; opened the Chinese economy to international trade and investment; carved out critical roles in global supply chains; accepted the liberalization disciplines of the World Trade Organization; and, more recently, began to provide public goods to other developing economies. Not everyone has benefitted from China's economic engagement, but on balance it has been a signal success.

China's reformist leaders also recognized the value of taking an accommodating stance toward its East Asian neighborhood, of which the United States is a part. One side of accommodation was to execute a skillful diplomacy designed to reduce tensions and avoid conflict unless Beijing's fundamental interests were under threat. Accommodation's other side was to delay the modernization of the Chinese military and exercise restraint in the use of those capabilities that it did create. This made sense because China both lacked the power to challenge the United States and Japan militarily and needed the help of those and other countries to grow economically. 

That approach changed in the early 2000s, when Beijing judged that it would only be secure if it expanded its eastern and southern strategic perimeters into the East and South China Seas. That judgment had its own logic, which maritime territorial disputes and reports of maritime energy and mineral resources only intensified. Thus began a program to build the capabilities to project power into the maritime domain and then use them to press its claims. That campaign created frictions with its neighbors. An increasingly overbearing diplomacy didn't help China's reputation either. 

It’s your move, China

Another part of China's grand strategy has been to integrate itself in the system of international institutions, law, norms, and regimes—both global and regional. This step did not signify a fundamental acceptance of the international order that had emerged and evolved after World War II. Rather, it reflected a belief that China could and should use institutions, law, norms, and regimes to protect China's interests against hegemonic behavior by others, particularly the United States. (Conversely, the "West" believed that binding Beijing to "its" order would restrain Chinese bad behavior.)

The tribunal’s decision on the Philippines case was a clear blow to China's long-standing strategy to use international law to advance or protect its interests, prompting feelings of buyer's remorse. The hardy perennial that China has been the victim of humiliation at the hands of Western countries will only add to the resentful reaction. Of course, China rejects the widely-held view that it is bound by the ruling even though it did not participate in the case. Also, this is a court with no enforcement powers, so Beijing could simply ignore the ruling and use its military and law enforcement assets to continue its past pattern of aggressive and coercive actions—essentially increasing the salience of its military power. That course of action would only further push the test of wills between it and Washington, even though neither benefits from a downward spiral of increased competition and conflict.

Beijing could simply ignore the ruling...That course of action would only further push the test of wills between it and Washington, even though neither benefits from a downward spiral of increased competition and conflict.

China could go even further than simply doubling down. Contrary to the tribunal's ruling, it could treat the Spratly Islands as islands under international law; define them as a single unit for purposes of defining maritime boundaries; accordingly draw straight baselines around them; then declare for itself an exclusive economic zone that covered most of the waters of the South China Sea; and finally, over time, challenge the rights of other countries to freedom of navigation and the exploitation of natural resources. For the lay-reader, what is important here is that none of these actions would accord with the widely accepted principles of the Law of the Sea. (Ultimately, China might someday insist to the countries of East Asia that it will no longer tolerate their relying on China for economic prosperity and depending on the United States for security.)

On the other hand, China could conduct a serious assessment of how it has exercised its diplomatic, coercive, and legal power over the last half-decade. Is China really more secure after alienating its East Asian neighbors through heavy-handed diplomacy, stimulating a very public coercive counter-response from the United States (too public in my view), and suffered a significant defeat in the international court of law? Might a tactical retreat at this stage, including a recommitment to international law and institutions, better serve China's strategic interests than more domineering behavior?

A key principle of Chinese diplomatic statecraft beginning in the 1980s was taoguang yanghui, a phrase that basically means to exercise restraint as one steadily builds one's power. The Chinese national security establishment has forgotten that principle as it conducted its recent policy towards the South China Sea. It would do well to revive it.

       

Keeping with tradition, we start the year with a compendium of forecasts for 2016 from our guest bloggers and ourselves.  At the end of the year, we will assess how we did (for last year’s forecasting performance, click here).

The prevailing sentiment about economic developments during 2016 is decidedly mixed. There are positive and negative views, sometimes from the same source. Here is a sampling:

On the negative side, “emerging economies will continue to disappoint;” “ODA will be squeezed by refugee costs (and climate change financing commitments);” “geopolitical tensions will remain;” “the dollar will be stronger with a severe impact on emerging economies;” and a range of idiosyncratic, political risks: weak governance and terrorist threats in Kenya; declining investor confidence and rising social strife in South Africa; corruption scandals in Brazil; and low oil prices coupled with domestic and geopolitical tensions in Russia.

On the positive side, “oil prices will remain low;” “the Islamic State will be defeated;” “the effect of monetary policy normalization will be very limited;” “food prices will remain low or fall, helping reduce global hunger;” “African countries will improve cereal yields;” “OECD countries will accept a record number of refugees and migrants;” “oil exporters will reform their economies;” and “peace agreements to end the wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen will be signed.”

An emerging theme is whether the disappointments in developing country growth in 2015 stem from idiosyncratic factors in specific countries—especially the BRICS, Turkey, and Indonesia—or whether those idiosyncratic factors, often associated with domestic political developments, are symptomatic of a broader issue of a slowing down of global convergence. Indeed, this theme of whether convergence remains a strong force that will continue to dominate developing country prospects, or a weak force that is all too easily offset by other factors, will likely remain one of the critical unknowns of 2016.

In summary, it is fair to say that with views as diverse as those we received, the picture for 2016 is complicated to say the least.

There is no analytical clarity in the global economy, despite forecasts from most major organizations (e.g., the IMF) that growth will be better in 2016 than in 2015 in every region except perhaps East Asia (although Asia will still probably record higher growth than anywhere else).

The fears generated by a slowing of one of the main engines of the global economy over the past decade, namely China, are palpable. The big story of 2016 is perhaps that it is an emerging economy, China, which is the major source of uncertainty over this year’s global outlook. While prospects for the major advanced economies—the USA, Europe, and Japan—are relatively stable, it is the developing world where there is the least clarity over the short- term outlook. Certainly, the volatility in global stock markets in the first days of the year suggests that volatility, risk aversion, and differences of views over short-term developments are all high as 2016 begins.

But there is at least one bright note. Almost certainly, prospects will improve for almost 200 million people who were living in countries that last year remained outside the scope of a normally functioning global economy. In Myanmar, Argentina, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, economic conditions will improve as a result of recent political developments. In addition, in 2016 there will probably be at least 100 million more people joining the global middle class—those living in households with incomes of $10-100 a day (2005 PPP). Good news for them but a reminder that the task of moving towards a world with sustainable consumption and production patterns remains huge.

There was one consensus thread among our bloggers—all the Europeans appear consumed by the Euro 2016 soccer event (“Spain, France, or Germany will win”), while only one blogger dared to comment on the Olympics (that Brazil would do twice as well as in 2012). It seems that sports will be less complicated than economics in 2016.

      

This week, the richest business leaders and investors from around the world will gather in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. In keeping with tradition, a small portion of the agenda will be devoted to global development and the plight of people living at the other end of the global income distribution.

Philanthropy is one way of linking the fortunes of these disparate communities. What if some of the mega-rich could be persuaded to redistribute their wealth to the extreme poor?

This question may feel hackneyed, but it deserves a fresh hearing in light of a dramatic reduction in the global poverty gap over the past several years (Figure 1). The theoretical cost of transfers required to lift all poor people’s income up to the global poverty line of $1.90 a day stood at approximately $80 billion [1] in 2015, down from over $300 billion in 1980. (Values expressed here are in 2015 market dollars.)

Figure 1. Official foreign aid now exceeds the annual cost of closing the poverty gap

Source: Authors’ calculations based on OECD, World Bank

This reduction can be unpacked into two parts. The first is a steep decline in the number of people living below the global poverty line. This is increasingly recognized as one of the defining features of the era. A U.N. goal to halve the poverty rate in the developing world between 1990 and 2015 was nearly achieved twice over. The second and lesser-known factor is the shrinking average distance of the world’s poor from the poverty line. In 1980, the mean daily income of those living below $1.90 was $1.09. In 2012 it was 25 cents higher at $1.34. (Values expressed here in 2011 purchasing power parity dollars.)   

Despite this good news, global poverty still demands attention. Hundreds of millions of people continue to suffer this most acute form of deprivation. In several countries, the prospects for ending poverty over the next generation, in line with a recently endorsed successor U.N. goal, appear challenging at best.

Figure 1 illustrates that in 2006, global aid flows exceeded the cost of the global poverty gap for the first time. This suggests that the elimination of extreme poverty should be possible simply through a more efficient allocation of aid. However, this confuses foreign aid’s goals and functions. The bulk of official foreign aid is used in the provision of public goods, such as physical infrastructure and strengthening institutions. Only 2 percent is directed to social payments and their administration. If the elimination of extreme poverty is to be achieved through targeted transfers, it depends on sources other than foreign aid.

The main source of transfers to the poor is welfare programs run and financed by developing countries themselves. These social safety nets have emerged as an increasingly prominent instrument in the toolkit of developing economy governments. Eighty-three percent of developing economies employ unconditional cash transfer programs, although many are small in scale. Several countries are in the process of building the apparatus for more accurate targeting and authentication through the assembly of beneficiary registries and the rolling out of identity programs. In at least 10 developing countries, social safety nets have succeeded in establishing a social floor by lifting all those people under the poverty line up above the threshold. In the vast majority, however, safety nets are insufficiently targeted or generous for that purpose, reflecting not only resource constraints, but also political choices that can be resistant to change.

A complementary approach is to consider the role of private mechanisms and wealth. NGOs were among the original pioneers of cash transfers in the developing world. More recently, the NGO GiveDirectly has designed a compelling new method of charitable giving that sends money directly to the poor using digital monitoring and payment technology. Its approach has received strong endorsements from independent charity assessors and has been validated by impact evaluations. Yet the scale of its existing donations remains tiny relative to the global poverty gap.

This is where Davos’s global elite could come into play: What difference could a philanthropic donation from the world’s richest people make?

Comparing billionaire wealth with the global poverty gap

To explore this question, we begin by identifying those developing countries that are home to a least one billionaire. (Our analysis is restricted to billionaires by data, not by the potential largesse of the world’s multi-millionaires. We focus our attention on billionaires in the developing world given the traditional focus of philanthropy on domestic causes.) Let’s assume that the richest billionaire in each country agrees to give away half of his or her current wealth among his or her fellow citizens, disbursed evenly over the next 15 years, roughly in accordance with the Giving Pledge promoted by Bill Gates. That money would be used exclusively to finance transfers to poor people based on their current distance from the poverty line. Transfers would be sustained at the same level for the full 15-year period with the aim of providing a modicum of income security that might allow beneficiaries to sustainably escape from poverty by 2030.

Table 1 summarizes the key results. In each of three countries—Colombia, Georgia, and Swaziland—a single individual's act of philanthropy could be sufficient to end extreme poverty with immediate effect. Swaziland is an especially striking case as it is among the world’s poorest countries with 41 percent of its population living under the poverty line. In Brazil, Peru, and the Philippines, poverty could be more than halved, or eliminated altogether if the billionaires could be convinced to match Mark Zuckerberg’s example and increase their donation to 99 percent of their wealth.

Table 1. The potential impact on poverty of individual billionaire giving pledges

Country	Cost per year to close the poverty gap	Wealthiest billionaire	Net worth	Poverty rate pre-transfer	Poverty rate post-transfer
Nigeria	$12,070 m	A. Dangote	$14,700 m	45%	43%
Swaziland	$85 m	N. Kirsh	$3,900 m	41%	0%
Tanzania	$1,645 m	M. Dewji	$1,250 m	40%	39%
Uganda	$1,035 m	S. Ruparelia	$1,100 m	33%	32%
Angola	$1,277 m	I. dos Santos	$3,300 m	28%	25%
S. Africa	$1,068 m	J. Rupert	$7,400 m	18%	14%
Philippines	$648 m	H. Sy	$14,200 m	12%	3%
Nepal	$144 m	B. Chaudhary	$1,300 m	12%	8%
India	$5,839 m	M. Ambani	$21,000 m	12%	10%
Guatemala	$215 m	M. Lopez Estrada	$1,000 m	12%	10%
Venezuela	$870 m	G. Cisneros	$3,600 m	11%	9%
Georgia	$40 m	B. Ivanishvili	$5,200 m	10%	0%
Indonesia	$845 m	R. Budi Hartono	$9,000 m	9%	6%
Colombia	$444 m	L. C. Sarmiento	$13,400 m	7%	0%
Brazil	$1,223 m	J. P. Lemann	$25,000 m	4%	1%
Peru	$95 m	C. Rodriguez-Pastor	$2,100 m	3%	1%
China	$3,072 m	W. Jianlin	$24,200 m	3%	2%

Source: Authors’ calculations based on Forbes, International Monetary Fund, PovcalNet, and the World Bank. Poverty rates post-transfer calculated based on average distance of the poor from the poverty line.  

In other countries—Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, and Angola—the potential impact on poverty is only modest. A number of factors account for differences between countries, but two factors that penalize African countries are especially noteworthy. First, the depth of poverty in Africa remains high, with 15 percent of the population living on less than $1.00 a day; and second, Africa has relatively high prices compared to other poor regions, which means more dollars are required to deliver the same amount of welfare.  

For those nations that have more than one billionaire, an alternative scenario is that the country’s club of billionaires makes the pledge together and combines resources to tackle domestic poverty. This would end poverty in China, India, and Indonesia—countries that rank first, second, and fifth globally in terms of the absolute size of their poor populations. The last two columns of Table 2 describe the results.

Table 2. The potential impact on poverty of collective billionaire giving pledges

Country	Cost per year of closing the poverty gap	No. of Billionnaires	Net Worth	Poverty rate pre-transfer	Poverty rate post-transfer
Nigeria	$12,070 m	5	$22,900 m	45%	42%
Swaziland	$85 m	1	$3,900 m	41%	0%
Tanzania	$1,645 m	2	$2,250 m	40%	38%
Uganda	$1,035 m	1	$1,100 m	33%	32%
Angola	$1,277 m	1	$3,300 m	28%	25%
S. Africa	$1,068 m	7	$28,550 m	18%	2%
Philippines	$648 m	11	$51,300 m	12%	0%
Nepal	$144 m	1	$1,300 m	12%	8%
India	$5,839 m	90	$294,250 m	12%	0%
Guatemala	$215 m	1	$1,000 m	12%	10%
Venezuela	$870 m	3	$9,600 m	11%	7%
Georgia	$40 m	1	$5,200 m	10%	0%
Indonesia	$845 m	23	$56,150 m	9%	0%
Colombia	$444 m	3	$18,500 m	7%	0%
Brazil	$1,223 m	54	$181,050 m	4%	0%
Peru	$95 m	6	$8,750 m	3%	0%
China	$3,072 m	213	$564,700 m	3%	0%

Source: Authors’ calculations based on Forbes, IMF, PovcalNet, and the World Bank. Poverty rates post-transfer calculated based on average distance of the poor from the poverty line.

This exercise is of course laden with simplifying assumptions. [2] It is intended to provoke discussion, not to provide definitive figures. Moreover, it is open to debate whether transfers represent the most cost-effective way of sustainably ending poverty, the extent to which transfers ought to be targeted, the efficacy of building private transfer programs alongside public safety nets, and whether cash transfers represent the most appropriate use of billionaires’ philanthropy.  

What is less contestable is that a falling global poverty gap presents an opportunity for more systematic efforts for poverty reduction. This raises the question: How low does the poverty gap have to fall before we explicitly design programs to bring the remaining poor above the poverty line? We would argue that we are already beyond this point, not least in countries that remain a long way from ending poverty. Were a billionaire at Davos to commit to using his or her wealth in this fashion, it could trigger a powerful demonstration effect of innovative solutions—not just for other billionaires, but for countries that are currently at risk of being left behind.

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[1] The cost of the global poverty gap in 2015 is an overestimate compared with the World Bank’s tentative poverty estimate for the same year. This is due to a different treatment of Nigeria. For this exercise, we rely on data from the 2009/10 Harmonized Nigeria Living Standards Survey reported in PovcalNet, despite its well-documented problems, whereas the Bank draws on the 2010/11 General Household Survey.

[2] Simplifying assumptions include: zero administrative costs in identifying the poor, assessing their income, and administering payments with no leakages, or no portion of those costs being borne by billionaires; the efficacy of administering miniscule transfers to those who stand on the margin of the poverty line; and no change in the cost of closing the poverty gap in a country over time, whether due to population growth, an increase or decrease in poverty, or a change in prices relative to the dollar.   

      

If the vision of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is that Mother Earth is heading for trouble and we must collectively solve global problems, then the underfunding of global public goods (GPGs) must be addressed. As the world becomes increasingly globalized, the need for global public goods increases: from action on climate change, financial stability, limiting the spread of diseases, management of conflicts, responding to natural disasters, terrorism, and cyber-warfare. At some level even the eradication of extreme poverty and more inclusive and sustainable development could be considered a global public good because more poverty and unequal development breeds conflict, increases environmental stress, state failure, terrorism, and piracy, thereby increasing the need for the global public goods required to address these issues.

Missing in the recently agreed Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA) and in the Paris Conference of Parties (COP21) are steps that should be taken at a global level that will positively impact many countries, such as:

• A global set of standards on migration to curb exploitation and human rights standards for the migrant population;
• Better coordination of monetary and fiscal policies so as to avoid huge volatility in financial markets, which have large costs on vulnerable countries;
• Strengthened global disaster response mechanisms to handle increasing climate volatility and natural disasters;
• No agreement on a global tax institution demanded by many developing countries and civil society groups; and,
• No progress on carbon taxation.

There is considerable underfinancing of GPGs as it is difficult to get countries to pay for activities outside their borders. Official Development Assistance (ODA) has fallen well short of the agreed target of 0.7 percent of GDP—and in fact is closer to just 0.2 percent. GPG funding from ODA is estimated at only about 10 percent of the total. This problem even afflicts other sources of financing. Multilateral development bank (MDB) financing also underfunds regional, multi-country projects for addressing regional public goods as countries are unwilling to use their country allocations for multi-country projects even if the return on them is higher than the marginal country project.

Global thematic funds to support specific development challenges—Global Alliance for Vaccination and Inoculation (GAVI), Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), Global Environmental Fund (GEF) and earlier funds like the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR)—have been successful in addressing specific development challenges through projects in specific countries, especially for agriculture, the environment, and health. They have also drawn in private philanthropic financing in addition to public resources. But global funding for global public goods has not had the same success, and systematic and sustained financing for disasters, biodiversity, desertification, and even for Ebola outbreaks has been difficult.

The Green Climate Fund, which will begin its work this year and will devote 50:50 share of funding for adaptation and mitigation has very limited funding so far – despite the commitment to provide $ 100 billion per year over and above ODA. But neither the AAAA, nor the SDG’s address many of the trade-offs involved between climate change and poverty eradication. COP 21 also did not provide greater guidance on these matters – despite high expectations that it would. Given the need for rapid economic growth to eradicate poverty for the LDC’s  as well as their need to deal with huge adaptation costs, it probably makes sense not to focus excessively on mitigation in these countries. These countries would increase their global carbon footprint by at best 2-3 percent of the total carbon emissions. The big tradeoffs will arise in the need for rapid growth in middle-income countries to address poverty and their increased emissions, which will accompany faster growth.

Protection of biodiversity is given specific mention in the AAAA, and the Global Strategic Plan for Biodiversity for 2011-20 is endorsed along with its 20 Aichi biodiversity targets. But progress in meeting these targets is slow and at current trends unlikely to be achieved. The AAAA does not address this slow progress or suggest ways to accelerate it. It does endorse the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification and the African Union Green Wall Initiative; but again with no specificity on how progress on these commitments will be accelerated. The same is true of the attention on oceans and marine resources, where the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea is mentioned but with no concrete steps on how to finance, enforce, and protect vulnerable areas, especially the small island developing states (SIDS).

Private philanthropic foundations have played important catalytic roles, such as efforts by the Ford Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation to help jump-start the Green Revolution in the 1960’s, and the eventual creation of the CGIAR. A somewhat similar role has been played by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for global public health. But no such foundations exist for many underfunded issues, such as disaster relief, peacebuilding, and desertification. These types of activities can be much better funded by more globalized revenue sources. The AAAA does not even mention the need for any such revenue sources.

A key GPG is peacekeeping, international security, and the prevention of conflict. Surprisingly, military spending is also not touched upon in the AAAA but has increased sharply. It dropped in the late 1990s following the end of the Cold War, from $1.5 trillion to around $1 trillion globally, but has increased again to almost $ 2 trillion today. Cutting military expenditure—especially in many developing countries where it exceeds 4 percent of GDP—would be an important step and shifting some of those resources to peacekeeping and conflict prevention would improve public spending.

With the AAAA pushing for new modes of financing, its surprising that for GPG financing more global sources of finance are not considered. At least four such options exist and could go a long way towards financing the SDGs. The first is a carbon tax or auctioning of carbon emissions permits. This is an idea with huge appeal as it will also help dissuade use of fossil fuels and could lower emissions globally, but is opposed by all the major emitters. Carbon taxes have been used in several countries to reduce fossil fuel use without any damage to long-term growth. Emission permits have also been used in some countries to reduce emissions of some harmful chemicals. But they have not been used internationally.

The second is a so-called “Tobin tax,” a tax on all foreign exchange transactions, which might also discourage destabilizing short-term volatile capital movements. The third is to add a pollution tax on all shipping and air travel – whose pollutions costs are not fully captured by existing taxes and fees imposed on them. The fourth is to allow issuance of SDRs to finance GPG’s.

Unfortunately, all these proposals are currently opposed by the major G-20 countries for various reasons. While several European countries—and even some developing ones—have introduced carbon taxes, still more remain opposed to carbon taxation. The Tobin tax idea has been around now for several decades and is considered an anti-globalization proposal even if its revenues were to be used to finance GPGs.  At times in the past, some countries have imposed a tax on foreign exchange transactions, with the explicit purpose of slowing down volatility in capital markets.

Global taxation has the connotation of supra-nationality, which many rich country legislatures—especially in the U.S.—would oppose. One way around this might be to specify how these resources would be used or to use them through MDBs where the richer countries have a controlling vote. To some extent the Global programs—GAVI, GFATM, CGIAR, and now the Green Climate Fund—have done that, but their financing remains much too dependent on national budgets and not on automatic revenue-raising mechanisms. National lotteries have been used in some countries to raise resources for specific causes; global lotteries could be an option for financing some specific global goods. But the world must move to some global means of revenue-raising if it wants to address GPGs seriously. Private financing, innovative financing, and public-private partnerships touted in the AAAA and COP21 can be crowded in, but without more international public financing to address market failure, financing the SDG’s will be difficult.

The world needs to heed Ben Franklin advice in another context “We must hang together or surely we will hang separately.”

      

In the past decade, a remarkable shift has occurred in the development landscape. Specifically, acknowledgment of the central role of the private sector in contributing to, even driving, economic growth and global development has grown rapidly. The data on financial flows are dramatic, indicating reversal of the relative roles of official development assistance and private financial flows. This shift is also reflected in the way development is framed and discussed, never more starkly than in the Addis Abba Action Agenda and the new set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which the SDGs follow, focused on official development assistance. In contrast, while the new set of global goals does not ignore the role of official development assistance, they reorient attention to the role of the business sector (and mobilizing host country resources).

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has been in the vanguard of donors in recognizing the important role of the private sector to development, most notably via the agency’s launch in 2001 of a program targeted on public-private partnerships (PPPs) and the estimated 1,600 USAID PPPs initiated since then. This paper provides a quantitative and qualitative presentation of USAID’s public-private partnerships and business sector participation in those PPPs. The analysis offered here is based on USAID’s PPP data set covering 2001-2014 and interviews with executives of 17 U.S. corporations that have engaged in PPPs with USAID.

The genesis of this paper is the considerable discussion by USAID and the international development community about USAID’s PPPs, but the dearth of information on what these partnerships entail. USAID’s 2014 release (updated in 2015) of a data set describing nearly 1,500 USAID PPPs since 2001 offers an opportunity to analyze the nature of those PPPs.

On a conceptual level, public-private partnerships are a win-win, even a win-win-win, as they often involve three types of organizations: a public agency, a for-profit business, and a nonprofit entity. PPPs use public resources to leverage private resources and expertise to advance a public purpose. In turn, non-public sectors—both businesses and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs)—use their funds and expertise to leverage government resources, clout, and experience to advance their own objectives, consistent with a PPP’s overall public purpose. The data from the USAID data set confirm this conceptual mutual reinforcement of public and private goals.

The goal is to utilize USAID’s recently released data set to draw conclusions on the nature of PPPs, the level of business sector engagement, and, utilizing interviews, to describe corporate perspectives on partnership with USAID.

The arguments regarding “why” PPPs are an important instrument of development are well established. This paper presents data on the “what”: what kinds of PPPs have been implemented and in what countries, sectors, and income contexts. There are other research and publications on the “how” of partnership construction and implementation. What remains missing are hard data and analysis, beyond the anecdotal, as to whether PPPs make a difference—in short, is the trouble of forming these sometimes complex alliances worth the impact that results from them?

The goal of this paper is not to provide commentary on impact since those data are not currently available on a broad scale. Similarly, this paper does not recommend replicable models or case studies (which can be found elsewhere), though these are important and can help new entrants to join and grow the field. Rather, the goal is to utilize USAID’s recently released data set to draw conclusions on the nature of PPPs, the level of business sector engagement, and, utilizing interviews, to describe corporate perspectives on partnership with USAID.

The decision to target this research on business sector partners’ engagement in PPPs—rather than on the civil society, foundation, or public partners—is based on several factors. First, USAID’s references to its PPPs tend to focus on the business sector partners, sometimes to the exclusion of other types of partners; we want to understand the role of the partners that USAID identifies as so important to PPP composition. Second, in recent years much has been written and discussed about corporate shared value, and we want to assess the extent to which shared value plays a role in USAID’s PPPs in practice.

The paper is divided into five sections. Section I is a consolidation of the principal data and findings of the research. Section II provides an in-depth “data picture” of USAID PPPs drawn from quantitative analysis of the USAID PPP data set and is primarily descriptive of PPPs to date. Section III moves beyond description and provides analysis of PPPs and business sector alignment. It contains the results of coding certain relevant fields in the data set to mine for information on the presence of business partners, commercial interests (i.e., shared value), and business sector partner expertise in PPPs. Section IV summarizes findings from a series of interviews of corporate executives on partnering with USAID. Section V presents recommendations for USAID’s partnership-making.

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Brookings today releases a report USAID’s Public-Private Partnerships: A Data Picture and Review of Business Engagement, which will be the subject of a public discussion on March 8 featuring a panel of Jane Nelson (Harvard University), Ann Mei Chang (U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)), Johanna Nesseth Tuttle (Chevron Corp.), and Sarah Thorn (Wal-Mart Stores Inc.).

The report is based on USAID’s database of 1,481 public-private partnerships (PPPs) from 2001 to 2014 and a series of corporate interviews.

The value of those partnerships totals $16.5 billion, two-thirds from non-U.S. government sources – private companies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), foundations, and non-U.S. public institutions. Over 4000 organizations have served as resource partners in these PPPs.  Fifty-three percent are business entities, 32 percent are from the non-profit world, and 25 percent are public institutions. Eighty-five organizations have participated in five or more PPPs, led by Microsoft (62), Coca Cola (36), and Chevron (33).

The partnerships are relatively evenly distributed among three major regions—Africa, Latin American/Caribbean, and Asia—but 36 percent of the value of all PPPs is from partnerships that are global in reach.

In analyzing the data, the researchers found that 77 percent of PPPs included one or more business partner, and that 83 percent of these partnerships are connected to a business partner’s commercial interest (either shared value or more indirect strategic interest). In almost 80 percent of those PPPs, the business partner contributes some form of corporate expertise to the partnership.

The purpose of the March 8 panel discussion is to examine the report but also to go beyond by addressing outstanding questions like: how should the impact of public-private partnerships be identified, measured, and evaluated? Is shared value the Holy Grail linking corporate interest to public goods and achieving sustainable results? Where do public-private partnerships fit in USAID’s strategy for engaging the private sector in development, particularly in light of the emphasis on the role of business in advancing the new set of Sustainable Development Goals?

We hope you can join us for what should prove to be an engaging discussion.

      

A recent article in The Guardian caught my eye: “Report accuses government of increasing inequalities in developing countries by financing academies at the expense of state schools.” The report, conducted by the U.N. Committee on the Rights of the Child, was an attack on U.K. aid money being linked to private education providers since the rapid increase in such schools may be contributing to sub-standard education. In particular, they cited the U.K. government’s investments in the Nairobi-based and for-profit Bridge International Academies.

I’ve worked on private education extensively throughout my career and do not believe there is anything wrong with private schools, but in this particular case I couldn’t agree more. But to be clear, it’s the funding strategy that’s the problem.

Private schooling is on the rise in a number of poor countries, and Pakistan—where my education research is focused—is no exception. The majority of these schools are no longer the elite institutions of yore, but low-cost alternatives fighting for survival in a highly competitive environment. These schools have mushroomed in response to increased parental demand and poor public alternatives, but also to the greater availability of teachers in the local labor market.

More importantly, research increasingly demonstrates that there is absolutely nothing wrong with private schools. There's a summary of this research available here; specific examples on India (more here) and Pakistan are also available.

Some key are takeaways from this research are:

• Private schools charge low fees (about $1 to$2 a month in Pakistan).
• The quality is almost certainly higher compared to government schools in the vicinity.
• At least in Pakistan, there is no significant segregation between public and private schools in terms of parental wealth, education, or caste.
• The most significant barrier to attendance in low-cost private schools is not cost—it’s distance. Put simply, there just aren’t enough of them around.

If there is a cheaper and better alternative to public schooling, shouldn’t we encourage children to shift and thus improve the quality of education for all?

Perhaps. But when the rubber from these well-intentioned aid policies hits the road of rural Pakistan, Kenya, or Ethiopia, a very different sort of model emerges. Instead of supporting private schooling, donors end up supporting private schools (or at best private school chains), which is an entirely different action with little theoretical backing. In fact, economic theory screams that governments and donors should almost never do that.

Donors say the problem is that the low-cost private school market is fragmented with no central authority that can be “contracted with.” No one has a good model on how to work with a competitive schooling sector with multiple small players—ironically, the precise market structure that, according to economics, leads to efficiency.

In reality, I suspect the problem goes deeper. Most low-cost private school owners don’t do well at donor conferences. They don’t know how to tell compelling human-interest stories about the good they do. But what they are excellent at is using local resources to ensure that their schools meet the expectations of demanding parents.

The problems with foreign aid financing private schools

The first is a problem of accountability. Public schools are accountable, through a democratic system, to citizens of the country. Private schools are accountable to the parents. And donor-funded private school chains are account to the donors. While both citizen-led accountability and direct accountability to parents have problems, they are grounded in centuries of experience. It’s unlikely that donors in a foreign land, some of whom can’t visit the schools they fund for security reasons, can do better than either citizens or parents.

The second is a problem of market structure. When one private school or private school chain receives preferential treatment and funding, without allowing other private schools to apply for the same funds, the donor is picking winners (remember Solyndra?). The need for private schools as an alternative to government schools is insufficient justification for donors to put their thumbs on the scale and tilt the balance of power towards a pre-identified entity.

Adjusting the strategy

In a recent experiment, my colleagues and I gathered direct proof for this assertion. We gave untied grants to low-cost private schools with a twist. In certain villages, we randomly selected a single private school for the grant. In others, we gave the grant to every private school in the village. Our preliminary results show that in villages where we gave the grant to a single school, the school benefitted enormously from an increase in enrollment. Where we gave the grant to multiple private schools, the enrollment increase was split among schools. But only in the villages where we gave the grant to every school did test-scores for children increase.

What happened? When a single private school receives the grant, knowing that the other schools cannot react due to a lack of funds, they engage in “customer poaching” to increase their profits at the expense of others. Some have argued that Uber’s recent fundraising is precisely such an effort to starve competitors of funding.

When you equally support all private schools, customer poaching does not work, and the only way to increase profits and generate returns is to increase the size of the market, either through higher overall enrollments or through new quality offerings.

The first strategy supports pre-identified private schools and concentrates market power. The second, by providing opportunities for all private schools, improves education for children.

Sure, some private school chains and schools are making positive impact and deserve the support they can get. But funding such schools creates the wrong institutional structures and are more likely to lead to disasters than successes (Greg Mortensen and 3 cups of tea, anyone?).

In general, the Government’s responsibility towards the education of children is two-fold:

• Alleviate the market constraints that hold back private schooling without favoring one school over the other—letting parents decide who succeeds and who does not.
• Support and improve public schools to provide an alternative because there will always be children who cannot enroll in private schools, either because they are too expensive or because they are too far away, or because they don’t offer the instruction “basket” that some parents want.

In short, foreign aid should play no part in supporting private schools rather than private schooling.

       

As of last week, it has been a full year since the U.S. Export-Import (Ex-Im) Bank—the government export credit agency which lends money to foreign buyers of American exports—has been unable to approve loans over $10 million. This is because Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, is single-handedly holding up the nomination of a third member to the Ex-Im Bank’s five person board; all transactions over $10 million require board approval, and short of its required quorum of three members, no major loans can get through. Looking beyond the immediate fight over Ex-Im, however, underlying trends in both American and international politics suggest commercial diplomacy is on the rise.

The Ex-Im Bank is but one of many instruments of American commercial diplomacy; there is a wide range of policies the government uses to actively help individual American companies compete abroad. Through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), the U.S. government sells political risk insurance to American firms investing in “risky” developing countries. Moreover, U.S. ambassadors frequently lobby foreign governments to award procurement contracts to American firms. Similarly, officials from the Department of State, Department of Commerce, and Office of the U.S. Trade Representative often advocate for U.S. companies involved in investment disputes with foreign governments. What distinguishes active commercial diplomacy from general foreign economic policy—such as signing trade agreements—is that in involves deploying the resources and reputation of the government to help specific firms in particular transactions, rather than broadly setting the rules of the road for all firms to follow. It represents a significantly greater co-mingling of interests and activities between public and private actors.

While both Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker have placed considerable emphasis on advancing commercial diplomacy, the long running struggle to keep Ex-Im operating underlines the political fault lines that cut through the issue. On the one hand, as highlighted in the Ex-Im fight, commercial diplomacy can be criticized as crony capitalism or corporate welfare. Government resources are being used to support private gains. Thus those who prefer free and unfettered markets may see commercial diplomacy as simply another form of unnecessary government intervention, akin to industrial policy. At the same time, as globalization has come under attack from both the left and the right in this election cycle, it is easy to see how encouraging further globalization through commercial diplomacy could face populist pushback. Those supporting commercial diplomacy tend to favor greater integration in the global economy—a view which has found little support in the 2016 campaigns to date.

And yet, the current trends in American political debates over globalization may ultimately presage more, not less, reliance on commercial diplomacy. If politicians increasingly view the global economy through a zero-sum, mercantilist lens, they may be more eager to use the power and purse of the U.S. government to help American firms “win” abroad. Indeed, Congress, which has historically been more protectionist than the executive branch, has also consistently pushed the State Department to do more to actively defend the interests of U.S. companies operating overseas (see, for example, here and here). Aggressively fighting to help U.S. companies win contracts and compete abroad could be one plank of an “America First” policy. Thus even if America, and the world, becomes more protectionist, foreign economic policy may become even more preoccupied with assertive commercial diplomacy, even as interest in seeking mutual benefits through economic liberalization subsides.

If the U.S. government does start to prioritize more actively helping American firms in their foreign operations, it will still have a ways to go to catch up to many other countries. China, of course, is well known for using state resources to advance the commercial goals of Chinese firms venturing abroad—which should not be surprising, given that many of these firms are state-owned enterprises. But a number of other advanced democracies—including Japan, Korea, Germany, and France—also have closer and more coordinated relationships between big business and government than the U.S. does. And most of these countries show no signs of slowing down. As a recent report (PDF) from the Ex-Im bank notes, “In the wake of slowing global growth, foreign export credit agencies are becoming more aggressive.” In fact, some of these agencies are capitalizing on Ex-Im’s current plight, offering American companies export financing in return for the promise of job creation. General Electric Co., for instance, recently announced it would expand production in France because Coface, the French equivalent of Ex-Im, will finance GE projects in a number of emerging markets—the type of financing that GE used to get from Ex-Im.

Looking forward, unilateral disarmament in the competitive world of commercial diplomacy—as the U.S. is currently doing with the Ex-Im Bank—is likely to become increasingly rare. The ultimate effects of this accelerating international competition, in both economic and political terms, remain to be seen.

       

       

       

       

       

Often the biggest challenge for older cities and close-in suburbs is not a lack of affordable housing but a need to grow, hold, and attract middle-income households and to foster mixed-income neighborhoods. This creates a policy dilemma: While federal policymakers target limited federal housing assistance to persons with the greatest needs, doing so can create concentrations of poverty within already challenged cities and suburbs. This approach also can set limits that hinder efforts to create the middle-income and mixed-income areas needed for revitalization in older communities.

The metro program hosts and participates in a variety of public forums. To view a complete list of these events, please visit the metro program's Research and Commentary page which provides copies of major speeches, PowerPoint presentations, event transcripts, and event summaries.

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With over 16 million people and nearly 8.6 million jobs, America's older industrial cities remain a vital-if undervalued-part of the economy, particularly in states where they are heavily concentrated, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. They also have a range of other physical, economic, and cultural assets that, if fully leveraged, can serve as a platform for their renewal.

Read the Executive Summary  »

Across the country, cities today are becoming more attractive to certain segments of society. Meanwhile, economic trends-globalization, the demand for educated workers, the increasing role of universities-are providing cities with an unprecedented chance to capitalize upon their economic advantages and regain their competitive edge.

Many cities have exploited these assets to their advantage; the moment is ripe for older industrial cities to follow suit. But to do so, these cities need thoughtful and broad-based approaches to foster prosperity.

"Restoring Prosperity" aims to mobilize governors and legislative leaders, as well as local constituencies, behind an asset-oriented agenda for reinvigorating the market in the nation's older industrial cities. The report begins with identifications and descriptions of these cities-and the economic, demographic, and policy "drivers" behind their current condition-then makes a case for why the moment is ripe for advancing urban reform, and offers a five-part agenda and organizing plan to achieve it.

Publications & Presentations
Connecticut State Profile
Connecticut State Presentation 

Michigan State Profile
Michigan State Presentation 

New Jersey State Profile
New Jersey State Presentation 

New York State Profile
New York State Presentation 

Ohio State Profile
Ohio State Presentation
Ohio Revitalization Speech

Pennsylvania State Profile 

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Introduction

During 2006, the United States saw a considerable upswing in the number of new mortgage defaults and foreclosure filings. By 2007, that upswing had become a tidal wave. Today, national homeownership rates are falling, while more than a million American families have already lost their homes to foreclosure. Across the country, boarded houses are appearing on once stable blocks. Some of the hardest hit communities are in older industrial cities, particularly Midwestern cities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis.

Although most media attention has focused on the role of the federal government in stemming this crisis, states have the legal powers, financial resources, and political will to mitigate its impact. Some state governments have taken action, negotiating compacts with mortgage lenders, enacting state laws regulating mortgage lending, and creating so-called “rescue funds.” Governors such as Schwarzenegger in California, Strickland in Ohio, and Patrick in Massachusetts have taken the lead on this issue. State action so far, however, has just begun to address a still unfolding, multidimensional crisis. If the issue is to be addressed successfully and at least some of its damage mitigated, better designed, comprehensive strategies are needed.

This paper describes how state government can tackle both the immediate problems caused by the wave of mortgage foreclosures and prevent the same thing from happening again. After a short overview of the crisis and its effect on America’s towns and cities, the paper outlines options available to state government, and offers ten specific action steps, representing the most appropriate and potentially effective strategies available for coping with the varying dimensions of the problem.

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Event Information

The 2008 Ohio Summit – Restoring Our Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing Ohio’s Core Communities convened more than 1000 government, corporate, civic, neighborhood and academic leaders from around the state, including Governor Ted Strickland, Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher, Senate President Bill Harris and Speaker of the House Jon Husted confirmed as speakers. The Summit was co-convened by the Metropolitan Policy Program at Brookings and GreaterOhio.

The purpose of The Summit was to elicit reaction to a draft set of proposals for state policy reforms that reflect a critique of past policies, aimed at revitalizing communities throughout Ohio. Each of the recommendations was carefully tailored to the unique assets and challenges of Ohio’s 32 core communities whose revitalization is the springboard to a more prosperous and competitive state as a whole. Comments derived from this gathering will help to shape the final report to be released in early 2009.

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Event Presentations:

• Bruce Katz Vice President and Director, Metropolitan Policy Program
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• Scott Bernstein President, Center for Neighborhood Technology 
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• Rob Greenbaum Professor, John Glenn School of Public Affairs, Ohio State University 
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• Mark Partridge Swank Chair in Rural-Urban Policy, The Ohio State University 
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• Jane Dockery Associate Director, Center for Urban and Public Affairs, Wright State University 
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• Alan Mallach Nonresident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution 
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Event Resources:

• Welcome Letter 
• Summit Agenda 
• Sponsor List 
• Biographies of the Speakers 
• Executive Summary- Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing Ohio’s Core Communities 
• A Restoring Prosperity Case Study: Akron, Ohio 
• Working Draft: Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing Ohio’s Core Communities 
• Working Draft: Our Joint Future: Rural-Urban Interdependence in 21st Century Ohio 
• Restoring Prosperity to Ohio: Fact Sheet 
• Ohio Summit in the News

Lavea Brachman and The Honorable Michael Coleman		The audience at Restoring Prosperity
The Honorable Ted Strickland		Douglas Kridler, The Honorable Jon Husted, Nancy Zimpher, Al Ratner, The Honorable David Burger

Video

• The Honorable Michael Coleman
• Lavea Brachman
• Bruce Katz
• The Honorable Ted Strickland

      

Ohio has the assets that matter in growing a prosperous economy, Bruce Katz explains, and that the state's ability to compete globally relies on its 32 core communities.

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• Recommendations to Foster Prosperity in Ohio

       

Executive Summary
Stressed by the catastrophic mortgage foreclosure crisis and the long-run decline of older, industrial regions, communities around the country are becoming increasingly burdened with vacant and abandoned properties. In order to alleviate the pressures on national prosperity caused by these derelict properties, the federal government needs to advance policies that support regional and local land banking for the 21st century.

Land banking is the process or policy by which local governments acquire surplus properties and convert them to productive use or hold them for long term strategic public purposes. By turning vacant and abandoned properties into community assets such as affordable housing, land banking fosters greater metropolitan prosperity and strengthens broader national economic well-being.

America’s Challenge
During the mortgage crisis of the past two years, the nation has seen the number of foreclosures double, and almost 600,000 vacant, for-sale homes added to weak real estate markets. In older industrial regions, chronic economic and population losses have also led to vacancies and abandonment. When left unaddressed, these problem properties impose severe costs on neighborhoods, including reduced property values and tax revenues, increased arson and crime, and greater demands for police surveillance and response. Eight cities in Ohio, for example, were forced to bear $15 million in direct annual costs and over $49 million in cumulative lost property tax revenues due to the abandonment of approximately 25,000 properties. Such negative consequences drain community resources and prevent cities and towns—and the nation—from fully realizing productive, inclusive, and sustainable growth.

Limitations of Existing Federal Policy
The Emergency Assistance Act in the Home and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 is the first to express recognition of land banking in federal legislation, but it has several weaknesses. The act lacks clarity regarding the scope and target for the allocated funding which may hinder effective policy implementation in the short term. Moreover, as an emergency response to the immediate mortgage crisis, it does not sufficiently address the concerns of land banking in the long run. In particular, the act’s $3.92 billion does not come close to meeting the costs associated with the two million foreclosures projected by the end of 2008 and the local revenues lost from vacant and abandoned properties.

A New Federal Approach
Federal policy needs to support effective and efficient land banking. In the short term, the federal government should deploy the Emergency Assistance Act with local and regional flexibility for determining funding priorities. Over the long term, the federal government should implement a new, comprehensive federal land banking program that would:

• Capitalize local and regional land banking by providing sufficient funding to support the several million properties in the process of foreclosure or those that are already vacant and abandoned
• Incentivize local and state code and tax reform to ensure that land banking is not hampered by outdated rules and procedures
• Advance regionalism by encouraging new inter-jurisdictional entities to align the scale of land banking authorities with the scale of metropolitan land issues

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Even in comfortable times, the service cutbacks and fare increases being proposed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would have sparked outrage from New Yorkers. Coming in the depths of the most serious economic crisis since the Great Depression, things seem that much worse.

Not that it's any consolation to frustrated New York transit riders and taxpayers, but you are not alone. Transit agencies like the MTA are reeling nationwide; all are suffering from factors at least some of which they really can't control without some legislative help.

This is not to deny the pain that could occur unless the state comes up with a rescue plan. In its 2009 budget, the agency proposes painful service cutbacks and fare increases to help cover a projected deficit of around $1.5 billion.

No fewer than 51 transit agencies around the country are in the same financial situation. For example, the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority that runs Boston's smaller transit system is chewing over major service cuts and fare increases if the state doesn't help cover its $160 million deficit.

The fact that so many transit agencies are struggling may come as a surprise. After all, didn't Washington just pump a lot of money into infrastructure as part of the $787-billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act? Wasn't public transit a big part of that law?

Yes. The stimulus package provides $8.4 billion to be spent on transit this year. That's a helpful shot in the arm to metropolitan transit agencies that Washington ordinarily relegates to second-class status. And the MTA will receive the largest portion of this money: more than $1 billion. Even by today's standards, that's nothing to sneeze at.

But how much will it really help? Federal rules in effect since 1998 stipulate that this money can be spent only on capital improvement projects and not to finance gaps in day-to-day operating expenses.

Surely there is no transit service without capital - the buses, trains, tracks and other facilities that make the system run. However, operating costs - which are generally about twice as high as capital expenses for the largest transit agencies - cover the salaries of the workers who keep the system running, as well as the debt contracted to pay for capital projects.

So as the federal government aims to put Americans back to work on shovel-ready, temporary construction jobs, transit agencies are looking at the likelihood of laying people off from stable, permanent positions.

Why the disconnect?

The response in Washington is predictably stubborn: Recovery money cannot be used for operating expenses because operating is not a federal role.

You would think that the pressure of this policy would lead to transit agencies that are self-sufficient - where passenger fares pay the full costs of operating the system.

But large metropolitan transit agencies generally "recover" only about one-third of their costs from subway riders and about one-quarter from bus passengers. The MTA has the highest cost-recovery ratio among all subway operators - its fares pay for two-thirds of operating costs.

For large bus systems, the MTA's New York City Transit ranks second only to New Jersey's in terms of the share of operating costs paid for by riders. The Long Island Rail Road is the seventh among the 21 commuter rail systems in the country, recovering from fares close to half of its operating costs.

So what should be done to close the MTA's budget gap?

For one thing, lawmakers in Albany need to recognize that the state contributes a lower proportion of the MTA's budget from its general revenue than other states provide to their transit agencies from general revenue. In New York, about 4 percent of all the MTA operating costs are covered by the state budget; in other states, transit agencies are getting closer to 6 percent.

Raising state general fund support to national levels would be a good place to start helping the MTA.

Another idea is to get Washington to help. Not in doling out more money, but in stepping aside and empowering metropolitan agencies to spend their federal money in ways that best meet their own needs.

Specifically, the federal rules could be changed to allow transit agencies to spend their transit capital stimulus dollars on operating expenses. Certainly, agencies have capital needs as well, but particularly in these stressful economic times they should have the short-term flexibility to use those federal dollars to meet their immediate problems.

Over the long term, some form of federal competitive funding for operating assistance also might provide the right incentive - or reward - to states and localities to commit to funding transit.

Based on their level of commitment, metropolitan agencies, localities and states that legislatively dedicate a stable stream of funds could potentially receive federal operating assistance, perhaps as a matching grant. The federal government would be helping those who help themselves.

The New York metropolitan area cannot afford to have a transit system that is hampered from operating at its fullest and most efficient potential.

An extensive transit network like the MTA provides important transportation alternatives to those who have options and basic mobility for those who don't. It can help mitigate regional air-quality problems by lowering overall automobile emissions and slowing the growth in traffic congestion.

It also can provide economic benefits by creating development opportunities around transit stations and help enhance regional economic competitiveness as an important and attractive metropolitan amenity.

Such a functioning network plays a fundamental role in attracting highly skilled labor and talent, which we know is so important in 21st century metropolitan America.

       

       

On September 8, Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown participated in a Center for International Policy and Washington Office on Latin America event, “Using Militaries as Police in Latin America: A Discussion on Citizen Security and the Way Forward.” Felbab-Brown was joined on the panel by Adam Blackwell, secretary for multidimensional security at the Organization of American States; Richard Downie, executive vice president for global strategies at OMNITRU; and Adam Isacson, senior associate for regional security policy at the Washington Office on Latin America. Sarah Kinosian, lead researcher on Latin America at the Center for International Policy, moderated the event.

Felbab-Brown argued that police reform across Latin America over the past two decades has often been at best deficient or has failed outright. The lack of rule of law characterizes many countries in the region, including continually Mexico. Police forces are often not only corrupt, but highly abusive, and both police forces and military forces deployed for policing engage in major human rights violations. Even assumed exemplary experiments, such as the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora (UPP) approach in Rio, have struggled to execute an effective handover from heavily-armed takeover forces to regular policing.

If governments choose to deploy their militaries in local policing roles, suboptimal as that is, the forces should adopt population-centric strategies, immediately develop concrete handover plans to police forces, and operate under a civilian coordinator. A key requirement for military forces is to respect human rights and due process and diligently prosecute perpetrators. Ultimately both police and military forces need to understand that their role is to protect society.

To some extent, Felbab-Brown argues, the resort to military forces for policing purposes is compounded by the lack of expeditionary police capacity by outside partners and donors, who overwhelmingly tend to deploy military forces for training policing. However, if the United States and outside donors want to make their policing assistance more effective, they should consider developing expeditionary police forces for such training purposes as well as a range of stabilization operations.

The most important factor for security efforts is citizen support. Marginalization, exclusion, and abuse from policing forces—be they police or military ones—have often prevented local populations from cooperating with law enforcement units and buying into rule of law: security or insecurity is co-produced as much as by citizens as by the police or military.

      

Editor’s note: Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown is currently on the ground in Afghanistan and sent over a dispatch on what she’s seeing.

President Barack Obama is about to make crucial decisions about the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan in 2016 and possibly after. His decision will be a vital signal to other U.S. allies in Afghanistan and its neighbors. Recent events in Afghanistan, particularly the Taliban's capture of Kunduz, show how too large a reduction in US military and economic support can hollow out the state-building effort and strengthen the Taliban and many other terrorist groups operating in Afghanistan, including those labeling themselves daesh. In such a case, collapse of the government and indeed a collapse of the entire political order the United States has sought to build since 2001 are high. Maintaining support at something close to the current level of effort does not guarantee military or political success or that peace negotiations with the Taliban will eventually produce any satisfactory peace. But it buys us time. On the cusp of a dire situation, Afghan politicians equally need to put aside their self-interested hoarding, plotting, and back-stabbing, which are once again running high, and being put ahead of the national interest.

The Taliban’s recent victory in Kunduz is both highly impactful and different from the previous military efforts and victories of the Taliban over the past several years. For the first time since 2001, the Taliban managed to conquer an entire province and for several days hold its capital. The psychological effect in Afghanistan has been tremendous. For a few days, it looked like the entire provinces of Badakshan, Takhar, and Baghlan would also fall. Many Afghans in those provinces started getting ready to leave or began moving south. If all these northern provinces fell, the chances were high, with whispers and blatant loud talk of political coups intensifying for a number of days, that the Afghan government might fall, and perhaps the entire political system collapse., In short, the dangerous and deleterious political and psychological effects are far bigger than those from the Taliban's push in Musa Qala this year or last year. Particularly detrimental and disheartening was the fact that many Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National Police (ANP) units, led by weak or corrupt commanders, did not fight, and threw down their arms and ran away. Conversely, the boost of morale to the Taliban and the strengthening of its new leader Mullah Akbar Mansour were great. However, the Taliban also discredited itself with its brutality in Kunduz City.

The Taliban operation to take Kuduz was very well-planned and put together over a period of months, perhaps years. Foreign fighters from Central Asia, China, and Pakistan featured prominently among the mix of some 1,000 fighters, adding much heft to local militias that the Taliban mobilized against the militias of the dominant powerbrokers and the United States, as well as the government-sponsored Afghan Local Police. The support of Pakistan's Inter-services Intelligence for the Taliban, which the country has not been able to sever despite a decade of pressure from the United States and more recent engagement from China, significantly augmented the Taliban's capacities.

Kunduz is vital strategic province, with major access roads to various other parts of Afghanistan's north. Those who control the roads—still now the Taliban—also get major revenue from taxing travelers, which is significant along these opium-smuggling routes. It will take time for the Afghan forces to reduce Taliban control and influence along the roads, and large rural areas will be left in the hands of the Taliban for a while. Both in the rural areas and in Kunduz City itself, the Taliban is anchored among local population groups alienated by years of pernicious exclusionary and rapacious politics, which has only intensified since March of this year. Equally, however, many of the local population groups hate the Taliban, have engaged in revenge killings and abuses this week, and are spoiling for more revenge.

Despite the intense drama of the past week, however, Afghanistan has not fallen off the cliff. Takhar and Baghlan have not fallen, nor has all of Badakhshan. The political atmosphere in Kabul is still poisonous, but the various anti-government plots and scheming are dissipating in their intensity and immediacy. On Wednesday, Afghan President Ashraf Ghani reached out to some of those dissatisfied powerbrokers, who have been salivating for a change in political dispensation. The crisis is not over, neither on the battlefield in Kunduz and many other parts of Afghanistan, nor in the Afghan political system. But it is much easier to exhale on Thursday, October 8th.

United States air support was essential in retaking Kunduz and avoiding more of Badakhshan falling into the hands of the Taliban, precipitating a military domino effect in the north and inflaming the political crisis. Despite the terrible and tragic mistake of the U.S. bombing of the Médecins Sans Frontières hospital, maintaining and expanding U.S. air support for the Afghan forces, and allowing for U.S. support beyond in extremis, such as in preventing a similar Taliban offensive, is vital. It is equally important to augment intelligence- assets support. Significant reductions in U.S. assistance, whether that be troops, intelligence, or air support, will greatly increase the chances that another major Taliban success—like that of Kunduz, and perhaps possibly again in Kunduz—will happen again. It would also be accompanied by intensely dangerous political instability.

Equally imperative is that Afghan politicians put aside their self-interested scheming and rally behind the country to enable the government to function, or they will push Afghanistan over the brink into paralysis, intensified insurgency, and outright civil war. In addition to restraining their political and monetary ambitions and their many powerplays in Kabul, they need to recognize that years of abusive, discriminatory, exclusionary governance; extensive corruption; and individual and ethnic patronage and nepotism were the crucial roots of the crisis in Kunduz and elsewhere. These have corroded the Afghan Army and permeate the Afghan Police and anti-Taliban militias. Beyond blaming Pakistan, Afghan politicians and powerbrokers need to take a hard look at their behavior over the recent days and over many years and realize they have much to do to clean their own house to avoid disastrous outcomes for Afghanistan. To satisfy these politicians, many from the north of the country and prominent long-term powerbrokers, President Ghani decided over the past few days to include them more in consultations and power-sharing. Many Afghan people welcome such more inclusive politics, arguing that while the very survival of the country might be at stake, grand governance and anti-corruption ambitions need to be shelved. That may be a necessary bargain, but it is a Faustian one. Not all corruption or nepotism can or will disappear. But unless outright rapacious, exclusionary, and deeply predatory governance is mitigated, the root causes of the insurgency will remain unaddressed and the state-building project will have disappeared into fiefdoms and lasting conflict. At that point, even negotiations with the Taliban will not bring peace.

      

In this interview, Vanda Felbab-Brown addresses issues of terrorism, organized crime, and state responses within the context of Boko Haram’s terrorism, insurgency, and militancy in the Niger Delta. She was interviewed by Jide Akintunde, Managing Editor of Financial Nigeria magazine.

Q: The Boko Haram menace has been with Nigeria for seven years. Why is it that the group does not appear to have run out of resources?

A: Boko Haram has been able to sufficiently plunder resources in the north to keep going. It has accumulated weapons and ammunition from seized stocks. It also taxes smuggling in the north. But its resources are not unlimited. And unlike other militant and terrorist groups, such as ISIS or the Taliban, Boko Haram faces far more acute resource constraints.

Q: Boko Haram is both an insurgent and a terrorist group. Does this explain why it is arguably the deadliest non-state actor in the world and the group that has used women for suicide bombings the most in history?

A: Boko Haram’s record in 2015 of being the deadliest group is a coincidence. Very many other militant groups have combined characteristics of an insurgency and a terrorist group. Its violence belies its weaknesses as much as its capacities.

Boko Haram’s resort to terrorism, often unrestrained terrorism and unrestrained plunder, reflect its loss of territory and most limited strategy calibration and governance skills. Its terrorist attacks, including by female suicide bombers, also reflect the limitation of the military COIN (counter-insurgency) strategy. For instance, after the international clearing, little effective control and “holding” is still exercised by the Nigerian military or its international partners.

Q: Although many views have rejected economic deprivation or poverty as the root cause of the insurgency, almost everyone agrees that military victory over the group would not help much if economic improvement is not brought to bear in the Northeastern Nigeria – the theatre of the insurgent activities. Is this necessarily contradictory?

A: Economic deprivation is hardly ever the sole factor stimulating militancy. There are many poor places, even those in relative decline compared to other parts of the country, where an insurgency does not emerge. But relative economic deprivation often becomes an important rallying cause. And indeed, there are many reasons for focusing on the economic development of the north, including effectively suppressing militancy but it also goes beyond that. Improving agriculture, including by investing in infrastructure and eliminating problematic and distortive subsidies in other sectors, would help combat insurgency and prevent its reemergence.

Q: While Nigerians remain befuddled about the grievances of Boko Haram, we are clear about the gripes of the militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta: they want resource control, since the Nigerian state has been unable to develop the area that produces 70 per cent of the federal government’s revenue. So, is the state always just and right in suppressing militant groups?

A: Indeed not; the state is hardly always just in suppressing militancy, even as suppressing militancy is its key imperative. Economic grievances, discriminations, and lack of equity and access are serious problems that any society should want to tackle. Even if there are “no legitimate grievances,” the state does not have a license to combat militancy in any way it chooses. Its own brutality will be discrediting and can be deeply counterproductive.

The Nigerian state’s approach to MEND (Movement for the Emancipation of Niger Delta) is fascinating: essentially the cooptation of MEND leaders through payoffs, but without addressing the underlying root causes. The insurgency quieted down, but the state’s approach is hardly normatively satisfactory nor necessarily sustainable unless new buyoffs to MEND leaders are again handed over. But that compounds problems of corruption, accountability, transparency, and inclusion.

Q: We can raise the same issue about economic justice in the way criminal and terrorist organizations operate their underground economies. How flawed have you found the alternative social orders that the leaders of criminal and terrorist organizations claim to foster?

A: The governance – the normative, political, and economic orders -- that militant groups provide are often highly flawed. They often underdeliver economically and they lack accountability mechanisms, even when they outperform the state in being less corrupt and providing swifter justice.

However, the choice that populations face is not whether the order that militants provide is optimal or satisfactory. The choice that matters to people is whether that order is stable and better than that provided by the state. So the vast majority of people in Afghanistan, for example, say they don’t like the Taliban. But they don’t like corrupt warlords or corrupt government officials even. It’s not the absolute ideal but the relative realities that determine allegiances or at least the (lack of) willingness to support one or the other.

Moreover, the worst outcome is constant contestation and military instability. A stable brutality is easier to adjust to and develop coping mechanisms for than capriciousness and unstable military contestation.

Q: The Nigerian amnesty programme seemed to be a model in resolving issues between the state and the non-state actors in the Niger Delta, given the quiet in that region in the past few years of the programme. But since the political power changed at the federal level, we are seeing signs of the return of sabotage of oil installations. What models, say in Latin America or elsewhere, can help foster more sustainable peace between governments and non-state actor militant groups?

A: I don’t think that the MEND programme is a model, precisely because of the narrow cooptation I alluded to. Many of the middle-level MEND commanders as well as foot soldiers are dissatisfied with the deal. And much of the population in the Delta still suffers the same level of deprivation and exclusion as before. The deal was a bandage without healing the wounds underneath. It’s a question how long it will continue sticking. Despite its many urgent and burning tasks and a real need to focus on the north, the Nigerian government should use the relative peace in the Delta to move beyond the plaster and start addressing the root causes of militancy and dissatisfaction there. 

This interview was originally published by Financial Nigeria.

       

       

       

       

       

Over 30 years ago, the World Bank began to develop policies to safeguard the rights of those displaced by Bank-financed development projects. The safeguard policy on involuntary resettlement initiated in turn a series of follow up policies designed to safeguard other groups and sectors affected by Bank investments, including the environment and indigenous people. Since its adoption in 1980, the Bank’s operational policy on involuntary resettlement has been revised and strengthened in several stages, most recently in 2001. The regional development banks – African Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, InterAmerican Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) – have all followed the World Bank’s lead and developed policies for involuntary resettlement cause by development projects financed by these multilateral banks.

While the policies are complex, the basic thrust of these safeguard policies on involuntary resettlement has been to affirm:

• Involuntary resettlement should be avoided where feasible.
• Where it is not feasible to avoid resettlement, the scale of displacement should be minimized and resettlement activities should be conceived and executed as full-fledged sustainable development programs on their own relying on commensurate financing l and informed participation with the populations to be displaced.
• Displaced persons should be assisted to improve, or at least restore their livelihoods and living standards to levels they enjoyed before the displacement.^[1]

Even with these safeguards policies, people displaced by development projects risk – and very large numbers have actually experienced – a sharp decline in their standards of living.^[2] Michael Cernea’s Impoverishment Risks and Reconstruction model identifies the most common and fundamental risks of such displacement and resettlement processes: landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, marginalization, food insecurity, increased morbidity and mortality, loss of access to common property, and social disintegration.^[3] If insufficiently addressed, these embedded risks convert into actual processes of massive impoverishment. And particular groups may be especially affected, as noted in the World Bank’s Operational Policy: “Bank experience has shown that resettlement of indigenous people with traditional land-based modes of production is particularly complex and may have significant adverse impacts on their identity and cultural survival.” (OP 4.12, para.9)

These safeguards policies are an important instrument to minimize and overcome the harm suffered by those displaced by development projects. It should be noted, however, that there have always been problems in the implementation of these policies due to the evasive implementation by borrowers or the incomplete application by World Bank staff. The Bank’s interest in researching the impacts of compulsory resettlement triggered by its projects has been sporadic. In particular, World Bank has not carried out and published a comprehensive evaluation of the displacements caused by its massive project portfolio for the last 20 years. The last full resettlement portfolio review was conducted two decades ago, in 1993-1994. In2010, with the approval of the Bank’s Board, the Bank’s Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) undertook a broad review on how not only the policy on involuntary resettlement, but all social safeguards policies have or have not been implemented. Reporting on its findings, the Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) publicly faulted World Bank management for not even keeping basic statistics of the number of people displaced and not making such statistics available for evaluation.^[4] Similar analytical syntheses are missing from other multilateral development agencies, such as, IADB and EBRD. There is a strong sense within the community of resettlement specialists that successful cases are the exception, not the norm. In sum, projects that are predicated on land expropriation and involuntary resettlement are not only forcibly uprooted large numbers of people, but leaving them impoverished, disenfranchised, disempowered, and in many other aspects worse off than before the Bank-financed project.

While the Bank’s safeguard policies were in need of review and many argued for a more explicit incorporation of human rights language into the policies, the Bank took a different approach. The Bank’s team tasked with “reviewing and updating” eliminated many robust and indispensable parts of the revised existing safeguards, watered down other parts, and failed to incorporate important lessons from the Bank’s own experiences as well as relevant and important new knowledge from social, economic, and environmental sciences.

At the end of July 2014, the Bank published a “draft” of the revised safeguards’ policies which were not based on consultation with civil society organizations (CSOs) as had been promised. Rather the newly proposed policies were held close and stamped “strictly confidential.” The numerous CSOs and NGOs involved for two years in what they thought was a consultative process learned only from a leak about plans by Bank management for proposals to the Bank’s Board and its Committee for Development Effectiveness (CODE). Because of this secrecy, the Bank’s Board and the CODE itself were not made aware of the civil society’s views about the Environmental and Social Safeguards draft policy, before CODE had to decide about endorsing and releasing it for a new round of “consultation.”

As is well known, the process shapes the product. These bizarre distortions in the way the World Bank conducted what should have been a transparent process of genuine consultation resulted in some deep flaws of the product as manifest in the current draft ESS.

The backlash was inevitable, strong, and broad, coming from an extensive array of constituencies:’ from CSOs, NGOs, and various other groups representing populations adversely affected by Bank financed projects, professional communities , all the way to various organisms of the United Nations. More than 300 civil society organizations issued a statement opposing the Bank’s plans and at World Bank meetings in mid-October 2014, civil society organizations walked out of a World Bank ‘consultative meeting’ on the revised policies. The statement argued that the consultative process had been inadequate and that the safeguards were being undercut even at a time when the Bank is seeking to expand its lending to riskier infrastructure and mega-project schemes. While the Review and Update exercise was expected to strengthen the provisions of existing policies, instead the policies themselves were redrafted in a way that weakened them. The civil society statement notes that the revised draft “eliminates the fundamental development objective of the resettlement policy and the key measures essential to preventing impoverishment and protecting the rights of people uprooted from their homes, lands, productive activities and jobs to make way for Bank projects.”^[5] Not only did the revised policy not strengthen protections for displaced people, but each of its “standards” represents a backwards step in comparison to existing policies. According to the draft revised policies the Bank could now finance projects which would displace people without requiring a sound reconstruction plan and budget to “ensure adequate compensation, sound physical resettlement, economic recovery and improvement.” Moreover, the application of some safeguards policies would now become optional. Although the regional development banks have not – so far – begun to take actions to weaken their own safeguard policies, there is fear that they will follow the Bank’s lead.

Just as humanitarian response to internally displaced persons seems to be sliding backward, so too the actions of development agencies – or at least the World Bank – seem to be reversing gains made over the past three decades.

      

During his address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy graduation this week, President Obama highlighted climate change as “a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to (U.S.) national security.” Is President Obama right? Are the national security threats from climate change real?

When I listen to the “know-nothing” crowd and their front men in Congress who actively ignore ever-stronger scientific evidence about the pace of climate change, I want to quit my day job and organize civic action to close them down. The celebration of anti-knowledge, the denial of science, the treatment of advanced education as a mark of ignominy rather than the building block of American innovation and citizenship—these are as grave a threat to America’s future as any I can identify. So I’m sympathetic to the Obama administration’s desire to take a bludgeon to climate deniers. But is “national security” the right stick to move the naysayers forward? 

The Danger of Overstating for Effect

The White House’s report on the national security implications of climate change is actually pretty measured and largely avoids waving red flags, but it overstates for effect, as do the President’s remarks to the Coast Guard Academy. 

The report gets right the notion that climate change will hit hardest where governance is weakest and that this will exacerbate the challenge of weak states; but it’s a pre-existing challenge and almost all weak states are already embroiled in forms of internal war—climate change may exacerbate this problem, but it certainly won’t create it. The White House report also asserts a link to terrorist havens, and of course there are risks here—but it’s far from a 1:1 relationship, and there’s little evidence that the countries where climate will hit governance worst are the places where the terrorism problem is most serious. 

The report also highlights the Arctic as a region most dramatically effected by climate change, and that is true—but so far what we’re seeing in the Arctic is that receding ice is triggering commercial competition and governance cooperation; not conflict. The security challenge from the Arctic is modest: the climate challenge of melting ice caps and potential release of trapped greenhouse gases is potential very serious indeed. 

Then there are the domestic effects. The report highlights that the armed services may be drawn in more to dealing with coastal flooding and similar crises, and that’s a fair point—though it’s a National Guard point more than its an armed forces point. That is to say, it’s about the question of whether we have enough domestic disaster response capacity: an important question, not obviously a national security question. And it oddly passes over what’s likely to be the most important consequence of climate change in the United States, namely declining agricultural productivity in the American heartland. America’s farmers, not just its coastal cities, are in the front lines here. 

All of these are real issues and the U.S. government will have to plan for lots of them, including in the armed services; all fair. But is national security really the right way to frame this? Is linking it directly to the capacities needed for America’s armed services the right way to mobilize support for more serious action on climate change? 

Of course the term “security” has been evolving, and has long since extended beyond the limited purview of nuclear risks and great power conflict. Civil wars and weak governance and rising sea leaves are certainly a security issue to somebody, and we’re sure to be involved—whether it’s in dealing with refugee flows, or more acute crises where severe impacts overlay on pre-existing tensions. These are global security issues for someone, to be sure; I’m not sure they are “immediate risks to our national security.

Words Matter

Why does the rhetoric matter? Am I glad that we have a President who cares about climate change? Yes. Do I want the Obama administration to be focusing on mobilizing the American public on this? Yes. So why does it bother me if they use a national security lens? A national security framework implicitly does several things: it invokes a sense of direct threat, which I think distorts the nature of the challenge; it puts military responses front forward, which is the wrong emphasis; and although the report doesn’t get into this question, if the President highlights the immediate national security risk from climate, it displaces other security threats that we confront and truly require U.S. strategic planning, preparedness, and resources. None of this is totally wrong, but surely there are other ways to mobilize the American public to an erosion of our natural and agricultural environment than to invoke the security frame? 

Every piece of evidence I’ve seen about the state of temperature change; the real pathway we are on in terms of carbon-based fuels consumption (despite optimistic pledges in the lead up to the Paris climate conference); realistic projections of growth in renewable energies; and demand growth in the developing world (especially India) tells me that we’re rapidly blowing past the two degree target for limiting the rise in average global temperatures, and we’re well on our way to a four degree shift. 

We need urgently to pivot our scientific establishment away from the now well-trod field of predicting temperature shift to getting a much more granular understanding about the ways in which changing temperature will affect water sources, agricultural productivity, biodiversity, and dramatic weather events. And we need to treat those who willfully deny science—in climate and other areas—as a serious threat to our nation’s  future. I’m just not convinced that national security is the right or best way to frame the arguments and mobilize the America public’s will around this critically important issue.

       

President Obama should be congratulated for highlighting the growing links between U.S. national security and climate change in his address before the U.S. Coast Guard Academy’s graduation ceremony earlier this week. The president’s speech drew upon earlier administration documents (the Third National Climate Assessment, the White House’s 2015 National Security Strategy, the Department of Defense’s 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, and the 2014 Department of Homeland Security’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review) to highlight the numerous challenges posed to our nation and the world by climate change, including:

• Threats to the world’s coastal infrastructure
• Rising temperatures and extreme weather
• Creation of failed states
• Degradation to the marine environment and critical ecological regions around the globe
• Threats to our energy production and delivery systems
• The devastating impact on native Arctic inhabitants

While these issues are important and deserve attention, the president was singularly silent on how best to manage threats, posed to the Arctic and the global environment by the rush to develop or utilize its resources (including energy, minerals, fish, and tourism) as the region opens with the melting of sea ice. I raise none of these issues to disagree with the president’s policies, or to suggest we should not develop the region’s resources or allow enhanced international maritime trade through our waters. In fact, I have often called for the economic development of Alaska with high safety standards for oil and gas production. If we allow these activities to proceed, we must be willing to provide the resources for infrastructure of all kinds: pipelines, onshore and offshore, and including ports, airfields, housing, etc., in order to be prepared for all contingencies.

Additionally, the president did not make any mention of the financial demands posed to the country to even meet the challenges in our own Arctic region of Alaska, let alone the many commitments we have already made in the Arctic Council, vis-à-vis instituting a true search and rescue capability and an oil spill prevention and response mechanism. The sad reality is that for all intents and purposes the United States has one heavy icebreaker to patrol our entire Arctic region. With cruise ships now sailing into very dangerous areas without adequate sea mapping, the prospect of a disaster occurring at least 800 miles from our nearest port in the Aleutians looms large. Were a cruise ship to run into ice, there is no logistical infrastructure in Northwest Alaska even to off lift passengers to on shore by helicopter. With icebreakers likely to cost at least $800 million to $1.5 billion each and take many years to build, where is the president's clarion call to the Congress on the need for more revenue for our Coast Guard to deal with the challenges highlighted in his speech?

Likewise, with many Asian nations interested in the fish resources of the Arctic, where are the funds both to determine what fish exist in Arctic waters including fish migrating from the Pacific as well as their volumes and assessments of how to insure their sustainability? If the president is serious about the threat of climate change on America’s front door to the Arctic, where are the U.S. Coast Guard and the State of Alaska as well as the myriad of federal agencies responsible for various activities in Alaska going to get the requisite resources to carry out their mandates?

Lacking preparedness and response

As a result of the administration’s commendable recent decision, Shell will be allowed to proceed with drilling several wells in the Chukchi Sea, allowing for development that benefits not only Alaskans but also the entire United States. While Shell will be subject to stringent regulatory oversight, Russia also plans to drill in its area of the Chukchi as well. What would happen if the Russians had an accident and the current brought oil into Alaskan waters? Would the United States, in concert with the Russians have the capability to contain it? Similarly, if there were a major maritime disaster in the Bering Strait where a South Korean ship literally disappeared several years ago, what response capability would we have if a ship containing hazardous cargo sank? While I applaud the decision of the administration to allow Shell to drill in the Chukchi, I am apprehensive of the U.S. commitment and ability to respond to any matter of national security in the Arctic, in part due to the severe lack of federal funds going to support this region.

Consequently, while recognizing that the American and broader Arctic is only a small part of the myriad of issues you identified in your Coast Guard address, I would urge that you begin to inform Congress and the American people of the large costs we may have to incur to protect ourselves against the forthcoming economic and social ravages of climate change.

Recommendations for Arctic funding

As a first step to begin to prepare for the direct “existential” challenges posed to Alaska and our broader responsibilities as chair of the Arctic Council, I would recommend the following:

1. A request to Congress for $1.2 billion dollars a year for 10 years to build a new fleet of ice worthy ships to deal with various contingencies in the Arctic (as defined by the Coast Guard) financed by an overall increase in the gasoline tax of $0.20/gallon of which $0.02 would go for Arctic infrastructure development;
2. As an interim step before these ships can be built, the appropriation of funds for the leasing of two Arctic worthy vessels per year;
3. An increase in alcohol and tobacco taxes (or perhaps a tax alongside the legalization of marijuana at the federal level) totaling $500 million dollars a year for 10 years for ancillary infrastructure development of ports, airfields, roads, etc. in Alaska to improve our ability to responds to climate contingencies both in  Alaska and throughout the circumpolar north;
4. A surcharge of one percent on all adjusted federal taxable incomes in excess of $200,000 and two percent on incomes above $500,000.

While there will be hews and cries by climate deniers and other opponents of any tax increase if as the president says the changing climate poses graves threat to our own and other nations security, these are modest proposals (particularly in comparison to an outright price on carbon) and should be passed with the greatest urgency.

       

In the summer of 1978, my grandfather George Washington Timmons, my cousin George, and I took the train from the Midwest across Canada and the ferry up the Pacific coast to Alaska. There we met up with my brother Steve, who was living in Anchorage. It was the trip of a lifetime: hiking, and fishing for grayling, salmon and halibut in Denali park, on the Kenai peninsula, Glacier Bay, and above the Arctic Circle in a frontier town called Fort Yukon, camping everywhere, and cooking on the back gate of my brother’s pickup truck. 

That Gramps had a Teddy Roosevelt moustache and a gruff demeanor gave the adventure a “Rough Riders” flavor. Like Teddy, the almost-indomitable GWT had given me a view of how experiencing a majestic land was a crucial part of becoming a robust American man. When we got home, he was diagnosed with lung cancer and died just a few months later.

We project all kinds of cultural images and values on the green screen of the American landscape. Those endless late June sunsets in the Crazy Mountains and the sun on the ragged peaks of the Wrangell Mountains represent for me a sense of the vastness of the state of Alaska and the need to balance preservation there with the needs of its people for resources and income. Certainly there is enough space in Alaska to drill for oil and protect large swaths in wildlife refuges and national parks. As leaders of the Inupiat Eskimo corporation put it in a letter to Obama, “History has shown us that the responsible energy development, which is the lifeblood of our economy, can exist in tandem with and significantly enhance our traditional way of life.”

Unfortunately, this view is outdated: that was the case in Alaska, but there is a new, global problem that changes the calculus. As President Obama wraps up his historic visit to Alaska and meeting with the Arctic climate resilience summit (GLACIER Conference), he is walking a razor’s edge, delivering a delicately crafted missive for two audiences. Each view is coherent by itself, but together they create a contradictory message that reflects the cognitive dissonance of this administration on climate change.

Balancing a way of life with the future

For the majority of Alaska and for businesses and more conservative audiences, Obama is proclaiming that Alaskan resources are part of our energy future. With oil providing 90 percent of state government revenues, that’s the message many Alaskans most ardently want to hear.

For environmentalists and to the nations of the world, Obama is making another argument. His stops were chosen to provide compelling visual evidence now written across Alaska’s landscape that climate change is real, it is here, Alaskans are already suffering, and we must act aggressively to address it. “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now … We’re not acting fast enough.”

This is a razor’s edge to walk: the Obama administration is criticized by both sides for favoring the other. Those favoring development of “all of the above” energy sources say that Obama’s Clean Power Plan has restricted coal use in America and that future stages will make fossil fuel development even tougher in future years.  These critics believe Obama is driving up energy costs and hurting America’s economic development, even as oil prices drop to their lowest prices in years.

“Climate hawks” on the other hand worry that we are already venturing into perilous territory in dumping gigatons of carbon dioxide and other gases causing the greenhouse effect into the atmosphere. The scientific consensus has shown for a decade that raising global concentrations of CO2 over 450 parts per million would send us over 3.6 degrees F of warming (2 degrees C) and into “dangerous climate change.” The arctic is warming twice as fast as this global average, and though we are still below 1.8 degrees F of warming, many systems may be reaching tipping points already.

Already melting permafrost in Alaska releases the potent greenhouse gas methane, and wreaks havoc for communities adapted to that cold. Foundations collapse and roads can sink and crumble. The melting of offshore ice makes coastal communities more vulnerable to coastal erosion, and allows sunbeams to warm the darker water below, leading to further warming.

The difficulty is that we have a limit to how much greenhouse gases we can pump into the atmosphere before we surpass the “carbon budget” and push the system over 3.6 degrees F. Which fossil reserves can be exploited and how much of which ones must be kept in the ground if we are to stay within that budget? Realistic and credible plans have to be advanced to limit extraction and combustion of fossil fuels until we have legitimate means of capturing and sequestering all that surplus carbon somewhere safe. It is a dubious and risky proposition to say that we can continue to expand production here in America, and that only other countries and regions should cap their extraction.

Obama got elected partly due to his not rejecting natural gas and even coal development. He kept quiet about climate change during his entire first term and he and Mitt Romney had a virtual compact of silence on the issue during the 2012 campaign. But in his second term, Obama has become a global leader on the issue, seeking to inspire other countries to make and keep commitments to sharply reduce emissions. This work has yielded fruit, with major joint announcements with China last November, with Mexico in March, and a series of other nations coming in with pledges. The administration has been seeking to push the pledging process to keep our global total emissions below 3.6 degrees F.

However a just-released UNEP report shows that all the pledges so far—representing 60 percent of all global emissions—add up to 4-8 gigatons of carbon reduction in what would have been emitted. That’s progress, but the report goes on to show that we are still 14 gigatons short of where we need to be to stay under 3.6 degrees F. Indeed, Climateactiontracker.org reports that we are still headed to 5.5 degrees F of warming (3.1 C) with these pledges, down from 7 degrees without the pledges.

Each on their climate change razor

This puts the administration and U.N. officials in the position of having to decide which message to put out there—the hopeful message that emissions are being reduced, or the more frustrating one that they are not being reduced nearly enough. Environmentalists are in a similar position with Obama in Alaska—do they criticize him for allowing Shell to drill in the Arctic, or praise him for being generally constructive in this year’s effort to reach a meaningful treaty in Paris in December? Is it possible to kiss Obama on one cheek while slapping him on the other?

This is the delicate political moment in which we find ourselves. Fossil fuel projects continue to be built that will lock us in to carbon emissions for decades to come. They will certainly push us over the “carbon budget” we know exists and beyond which human civilization may be untenable on this planet. But these projects are advanced by extremely strong economic actors with mighty lobbying and public relations machines, and flatly opposing them is likely to lead to one’s portrayal as a Luddite seeking to send humanity back to the stone age. Clean energy alternatives exist, and they are increasingly affordable and reliable. Logically, we need to be spending the remaining carbon budget to make the transition to a net zero emissions economy, not to continuing the wasteful one we have now.

Players on both sides of this debate will seek to deploy Alaska’s majestic landscape to win their case. I’m fairly sure on which side my grandfather George Washington Timmons would have stood: he was a building contractor and would sometimes estimate the number of 2x4s one could harvest from a giant tree. But he didn’t know about the global carbon budget—he loved his children and grandchildren, and I think he would have supported living within our means if he was fully aware of this problem. The original Rough Rider Teddy Roosevelt himself went from avid hunter to devoted conservationist as he learned of the damage over-cutting was causing American forests. As Obama said in Alaska, “Let’s be honest; there’s always been an argument against taking action … We don’t want our lifestyles disrupted. The irony, of course, is that few things will disrupt our lives as profoundly as climate change.”

That is the political razor’s edge the president—and all of us—have to walk today, as we make the inevitable transition away from fossil fuel development.

       

This week, Royal Dutch Shell announced that it would postpone oil drilling in the Chukchi Sea and the broader American Arctic indefinitely. The decision came in the wake of disappointing output from its Burger field, the high costs associated with the project (already nearing $7 billion), the “challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska,” and a growing public relations problem with environmental groups opposed to Arctic drilling.

This decision is a momentous one—both for the future of the U.S. energy policy and the ability of the international oil industry to balance global oil supply and demand. The announcement came only days after Hillary Clinton spoke out against the Keystone Pipeline, not only because it would lead to the consumption of more fossil fuels but also because much of the oil might be exported. With broader opposition to lifting the ban on crude oil exports gaining momentum in the White House, it is clear that at least part of the nation’s political leadership is moving in a nationalistic direction. This means that the United States—with its vast resources—is unwilling to help meet the burgeoning energy needs of the world’s population: especially the 1.2 billion people who have no access to commercial energy.

Shell’s decision highlights four significant and diverse areas of concern for the future of energy globally and energy policy here in the United States.

Mapping supply and demand

Shell and much of the rest of the international petroleum industry had viewed the Chukchi Sea as one of the last great oil frontiers. The Chukchi and adjoining Beaufort Seas are vital for meeting the estimated 12 to 15 million barrels per day (mmbd) of additional oil demand projected by almost all oil forecasts (both inside and outside the industry) needed between 2035 and 2040. 

Without the U.S. Arctic, the other areas projected to make major contributions by this time are Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, shale oil around the world (including North America), the Orinoco region of Venezuela, and the pre-salt offshore Brazil. Needless to say, given the political turmoil in Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Brazil—as well as concerns about the long term stability of Saudi Arabia—one has to wonder: Where will the world discover additional, reliable crude oil supplies without a major contribution from the Arctic?

Many in the environmental community argue that we will not need fossil fuels in the future, predicting a turn to renewables, enhanced energy efficiency, large scale battery storage, and electric vehicles. Unfortunately, this has no basis in fact. Clearly renewables will grow exponentially as their prices fall, new technologies will increase energy efficiency, large scale battery storage will commence, and many electric vehicles will hit the road. But there are currently more than 260 million gas and diesel vehicles running on U.S. roads alone, with less than 1 percent of these running on electricity. With transportation fuel demand mushrooming globally, it’s unlikely that oil consumption in the transportation sector will die or even decline significantly. 

Fossil fuels for development

Drilling in the Arctic poses unique environmental risks which must be managed through state-of–the-art technology and accompanied by the most stringent regulatory enforcement. A recent National Petroleum Council examination of all possible challenges involved in Arctic offshore drilling found that drilling can be done safely. Yet despite these findings, most major national environmental groups have opposed any drilling in the Arctic and have even asserted that Shell’s decision is a vindication of their position. But these groups don’t seem concerned or even thoughtful about the long-term implications of the U.S. energy industry’s abandonment of the Arctic.

With the world’s population forecast to rise by 1.6 billion people by 2035, do we really think global oil demand won’t continue to rise? While I recognize that we must do everything to limit the growing use of fossil fuels to attack climate change, do we really have no moral obligation to help countries emerge from poverty, which will almost certainly involve continued use of fossil fuels? 

During his recent visit to America, Pope Francis called for the world to make a renewed commitment to help the “poorest of the poor,” and the United Nations has also put forward new sustainable development goals that include an expansion of energy access to those who are either unserved or underserved. Focusing our policies exclusively on shutting down U.S. fossil fuel development, as some environmental groups advocate, takes away resources that can be used to improve global health, education, clean water, and women’s empowerment—all of which are all directly related to energy access. In looking at girl’s education, for example, increasing energy availability allows water to be pumped up from the river, obviating the need for arduous, tedious work for the women and girls that would otherwise have to carry this water by hand to their communities, limiting time for education. The availability of energy allows vaccines to be safely stored, crops to be refrigerated, and children to have the electricity available to study at night. 

All of these benefits—and many others—cannot happen without improving electricity access, which still involves fossil fuel. The United States can and should play a role in this effort.

Jostling for Arctic access

Shell is not the only company to experience setbacks in the Arctic. Italy’s ENI SpA and Norway’s Statoil ASA just yesterday had another regulatory setback due to delays in obtaining permission from Norway to commence production. In June, a consortium including Exxon and BP PLC suspended its Canadian Arctic exploration, noting insufficient time to begin test drilling before the expiration of its lease in 2020. In addition, Exxon had to curtail its plans to drill in the Russian Arctic after the United States imposed sanctions on Moscow and its energy industry following the annexation of Crimea. 

Russia, though, remains active in the Arctic, and it can be assumed that once sanctions are lifted, many oil companies will try to gain a toehold. China, Korea, India, and Singapore, among other countries, have expressed interest in gaining access to the region’s mineral, energy, and/or marine resources. In several cases, they are building ice-worthy vessels to give them the capability to do so. The Bering Strait is emerging as a significant new maritime route in desperate need of enhanced regulation.

In a report last year, my colleagues and I looked at key recommendations for offshore oil and gas governance as the United States assumed chairmanship of the Arctic Council. Beyond highlighting the resource potential of the region, our work looked at increasing needs for safety and security as a result of increasing transportation across the Arctic. Even as the United States stands to be less involved in Arctic energy development, it is our duty as chair of the Arctic Council to lead in region. 

Alaska is a state, not a park

The promise of the Arctic has inspired adventurers, explorers, geographers, scientists, and entrepreneurs for generations and will continue to do so in the future. The United States should be actively involved in helping to ensure that Arctic resources are developed and used prudently—rather than sit on the sidelines with myopic dreams of leaving the region a pristine wilderness. Arctic inhabitants—both natives and others—of course want to keep the Arctic safe, but they do not want to make it a museum. 

Development of the region’s resources accounts for nearly 95 percent of Alaska’s revenues. If we deny its development, are we prepared to make a line item in the federal budget to pay for Alaska to remain a park? 

       

As expected, the latest data from the Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey (ACS) confirm that the worst U.S. economic downturn in decades exacerbated trends set in motion years before, by multiplying the ranks of America’s poor. Between 2007 and 2009, the national poverty rate rose from 13 percent to 14.3 percent, and the number of people below the poverty line jumped by 4.9 million. Yet because the economic impact of the Great Recession was highly uneven across the nation, the map of U.S. poverty shifted in important ways over the past couple of years, with implications for both national and local efforts to alleviate poverty.

An analysis of poverty in the nation’s 100 largest metro areas, based on recently released data from the 2009 American Community Survey, indicates that:

The number of poor people in large metro areas grew by 5.5 million from 1999 to 2009, and more than two-thirds of that growth occurred in suburbs.  By 2009, 1.6 million more poor lived in the suburbs of the nation’s largest metro areas compared to the cities.

Between 2007 and 2009, the poverty rate increased in 57 of the 100 largest metro areas, with the largest increases clustered in the Sun Belt.  Florida metro areas like Bradenton and Lakeland, and California metro areas like Bakersfield, Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, and Modesto, each experienced increases in their poverty rates of more than 3.5 percentage points.

Poverty increased by much greater margins in 2009 than 2008, with cities and suburbs experiencing comparable rates of growth in the recession’s second year.  Between 2008 and 2009, cities and suburbs gained 1.2 million poor people, together accounting for about two-thirds of the national increase in the poor population that year.

Several metro areas saw city poverty rates increase by more than 5 percentage points, while many suburban areas experienced increases of 2 to 4 percentage points between 2007 and 2009.  The city of Allentown, PA saw a 10.2 percentage-point increase in its poverty rate, followed by Chattanooga, TN with an increase of 8.0 percentage points.  Sun Belt metro areas were among those with the largest increases in suburban poverty, including Lakeland, FL and Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA.

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• Full Paper
• Appendix A
• Appendix B

       

The United States exported and imported $4.0 trillion worth of international goods in 2014, making it the world’s second-largest trader, after China. The responsibility for moving all those products falls to the country’s 400-plus seaports, airports, and border-crossing facilities, though a smaller group does most of the country’s heavy lifting. In fact, ports in just 10 metropolitan areas move 60 percent of all international goods by value.

This level of concentrated port activity creates a spatial mismatch in the country’s trade flows. While a few ports handle a majority of international trade, few of the goods leaving or entering those ports start or end their journey in that port’s local market: 96 percent actually move to or from other parts of the United States. As a result, problems within and outside certain port facilities—whether a labor dispute like the recent West Coast port strike or congestion near Philadelphia’s seaport or airport—quickly become logistical costs borne by the entire country.

The 10 largest metropolitan port complexes represent a wide range of U.S. geographies, modal specialties, and international connections. Total volumes for these port complexes, listed below, are based on an aggregation of imports and exports across all sea, air, truck, rail, and pipeline facilities in each region. All data are from 2010, and you can find more detailed metrics within the Metro Freight interactive.

10. Chicago-Joliet-Naperville, IL-IN-WI

Total Value: $92.8 billion
Local Share: 4.6 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($41.5 billion)

A traditional Midwest powerhouse of production, metropolitan Chicago is home to a variety of industries and infrastructure assets that connect it to the Midwest and global marketplace. The proximity of factories, warehouses, and rail lines to its major port facilities, particularly O'Hare International Airport, places Chicago at a strategic crossroads for goods distribution.

9. San Francisco-Oakland-Fremont, CA

Total Value: $103.9 billion
Local Share: 4.4 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($77.6 billion)

The San Francisco metro area—and the Bay Area as a whole—may be more well-known as a center for tech innovation, but it also contains some of the largest port facilities in the country. The Port of Oakland and the Port of San Francisco  account for the bulk of water traffic ($55.3 billion overall) moving through the area, while Oakland International Airport and San Francisco International Airport help transport nearly $48.6 billion in electronics, precision instruments, and other high-value goods.

8. Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue, WA

Total Value: $116.9 billion
Local Share: 8.2 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($89.4 billion)

The Seattle metro area plays a critical role cycling goods throughout the Pacific Northwest and the rest of the country, largely owing to the key connections its port facilities have forged with China ($47.9 billion) and Japan ($22.0 billion). Valuable transportation equipment and electronics represent a large chunk of these port volumes ($52.7 billion), although sizable amounts of machinery, textiles, and agricultural products are also processed through area facilities. The Port of Seattle and the Port of Tacoma are especially important in this respect, as they look to partner more closely in years to come.

7. Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL

Total Value: $123.7 billion
Local Share: 2.0 percent
Top Trade Region: Latin America ($97.2 billion)

Miami is the country’s primary gateway to Latin America, especially when excluding petroleum-related trade moving through Gulf Coast ports. And while the region and state have made impressive investments at the Port Miami seaport, it is actually Miami International Airport that generates the most regional trade ($74.8 billion). Miami’s facilities are a key component of Florida’s statewide strategy to use trade and logistics to grow local industries.

6. Laredo, TX

Total Value: $124.4 billion
Local Share: 0.0 percent
Top Trade Region: NAFTA ($121.0 billion)

Laredo may only house 250,000 people, but it might be the most important Texas metro area you’ve never heard of, considering that virtually every international good passing through it heads somewhere else in the U.S. The border town is the southernmost point of Interstate 35—the so-called NAFTA superhighway—and handles almost half of U.S./Mexican surface trade. With automotive and other supply chains continuing to stretch across the binational border, Laredo is poised to grow in importance over the coming years.

5. Anchorage, AK

Total Value: $137.4 billion
Local Share: 0.2 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($136.0 billion)

Anchorage may be thousands of miles from the closest U.S. market, but it has a long legacy as a major connector to the Pacific marketplace, resting less than 9.5 hours by air from 90 percent of the industrialized world. In particular, Ted Stevens International Airport was the cargo hub for Northwest Airlines Cargo, once the country’s largest carrier, and still has a vibrant freight business led by FedEx Express and UPS hubs. Continued growth in high-value, low-weight goods trade with Asia can only benefit Anchorage’s cargo business.

4. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX

Total Value: $168.1 billion
Local Share: 10.6 percent
Top Trade Region: Latin America ($48.3 billion)

As one of the world’s leading centers for energy and chemical production, the Houston metro area—along with other parts of the Gulf Coast region—depends on an enormous set of seaport facilities to transport these goods. Collectively, $100.6 billion of energy products and chemicals/plastics pass through these ports annually, accounting for about 60 percent of all their international goods. Stretching more than 25 miles in length and situated close to the Gulf of Mexico, the Port of Houston houses many of the area’s marine terminals.

3. Detroit-Warren-Livonia, MI

Total Value: $206.7 billion
Local Share: 4.9 percent
Top Trade Region: NAFTA ($186.6 billion)

Although the Detroit metro area contains a number of freight facilities, such as the Port of Detroit, that unite the Great Lakes region, its land border crossings to Canada make it one of the busiest sites of commerce in North America and beyond. Each year, nearly $175.8 billion in international goods travel by truck and rail between Detroit and Canada—relying almost exclusively on the aging Ambassador Bridge and the Michigan Central Railway Tunnel. The planned New International Trade Crossing (NITC), however, holds promise for expanding capacity at this crucial junction.

2. New York-Northern New Jersey-Long Island, NY-NJ-PA

Total Value: $349.2 billion
Local Share: 9.7 percent
Top Trade Region: Europe ($153.9 billion)

The Port of New York and New Jersey, which spans several marine facilities including the Port Newark-Elizabeth Marine Terminal, is one of the biggest freight assets in the country, cementing the New York metro area’s role as the chief East Coast seaport complex ($185.0 billion). Remarkably, almost the same value of goods ($162.7 billion) flows through the area’s expansive air cargo facilities, including John F. Kennedy International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport. Combined with New York’s enormous amount of global corporate headquarters, New York is the country’s most globally fluent metro area.

1. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Santa Ana, CA

Total Value: $417.5 billion
Local Share: 6.0 percent
Top Trade Region: Asia Pacific ($362.2 billion)

The Los Angeles metropolitan area not only boasts two of the largest seaports in the Western Hemisphere—the Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach—but also has one of the busiest cargo airports nationally, Los Angeles International Airport (LAX). Together, these port facilities channel a wide range of international goods like electronics, machinery, and textiles across the country, many of which come from Asian trade partners like China ($211.3 billion) and Japan ($58.5 billion). Still, only a fraction of these goods actually start or end locally (6 percent), speaking to the port complex’s extensive geographic reach in the U.S.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

This inaugural issue of the India Policy Forum, edited by Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya, includes papers on the trade policies that would do the most to enhance India’s future growth prospects, analyses of recent developments in India’s balance of payments and an examination of the performance of the Indian banking system. The editors' summary appears below, and you can download a PDF version of the volume, purchase a printed copy, or access individual articles by clicking on the following links:

Download India Policy Forum 2004 - Volume 1 (PDF) »
Purchase a printed copy of India Policy Forum 2004 - Volume 1 »

Download individual articles:

• India's Trade Reform, by Arvind Panagariya
• Should a U.S.-India FTA Be Part of India's Trade Strategy, by Robert Z. Lawrence and Rajesh Chadha
• Foreign Inflows and Macroeconomic Policy in India, by Vijay Joshi and Sanjeev Sanyal
• India's Experience with a Pegged Exchange Rate, by Ila Patnaik
• Liberalizing Capital Flows in India: Financial Repression, Macroeconomic Policy, and Gradual Reforms, by Kenneth Kletzer
• Banking Reform in India, by Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole and Ester Duflo

 

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EDITORS' SUMMARY

The India Policy Forum (IPF) is a new journal, jointly promoted by the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi, and the Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., that aims to present high-quality empirical analysis on the major economic policy issues that confront contemporary India. The journal is based on papers commissioned by the editors and presented at an annual conference. The forum is supported by a distinguished advisory panel and a panel of active researchers who provide suggestions to the editors and participate in the review and discussion process. The need for such real-time quantitative analysis is particularly pressing for an economy like India’s, which is in the process of rapid growth, structural change, and increased involvement in the global economy. The founders of the IPF hope it will contribute to enhancing the quality of policy analysis in the country and stimulate empirically informed decisionmaking. The style of the papers, this editors’ summary, and the discussants’ comments and general discussions are all intended to make these debates accessible to a broad nonspecialist audience, inside and outside India, and to present diverse views on the issues. The IPF is also intended to help build a bridge between researchers inside India and researchers abroad, nurturing a global network of scholars interested in India’s economic transformation.

The first India Policy Forum conference took place at the NCAER in Delhi on March 26–27, 2004. In addition to the working sessions, the occasion was marked by a public address given by Stanley Fischer, vice chairman with Citigroup International and a member of the IPF advisory panel. This inaugural issue of the IPF includes the papers and discussions presented at that conference. The papers focus on several contemporary policy issues. The first two papers provide alternative perspectives on the trade policies that would do the most to enhance India’s future growth prospects in the context of ongoing developments in the global trading system. The three papers that follow are devoted to an analysis of recent developments in India’s balance of payments and their implications for the future exchange rate regime, the integration of exchange rate policy with other aspects of macroeconomic policy, and capital account convertibility, respectively. The sixth paper is devoted to an examination of the performance of the Indian banking system and the implications of the dominant role of government-run banks.

India's Trade Reform, by Arvind Panagariya

The first paper, by Arvind Panagariya, provides a broad review of India’s external sector policies; the impact of these policies on trade flows, efficiency, and growth; and the future direction trade policies should take. Since trade policies are a means to an end, namely faster growth and improved efficiency, and since trade policies support other domestic policies, Panagariya’s review necessarily ranges into these areas as well. Finally, to place India’s performance in perspective, Panagariya makes extensive comparisons throughout between Indian and Chinese outcomes over the past two decades (1980–2000), a period when both economies have chosen to reintegrate into the world economy.

India’s growth experience since 1950 falls in two phases. The first thirty years were characterized by steady growth of around 3.5 percent; thereafter growth has tended to stay in the 5 to 6 percent range. Panagariya links this differential growth performance with the imposition and subsequent relaxation of microeconomic controls, particularly in the external sector. In turn he divides these external sector policies into three phases. Between 1950 and 1975 the trend was toward virtual autarky, particularly after a balance of payments crisis in 1956–57. This was succeeded by a period of “ad hoc liberalization” starting around 1976, when reform of quantitative restrictions on trade was complemented by deregulation of industrial licensing in certain sectors. A further balance-of-payments crisis in the period from late 1990 to early 1991, concurrent with a general election, provided the background for a switch to deeper and more systematic liberalization, which, in fits and starts, continues today.

In the merchandise trade area the focus of reform has been to reduce tariff levels, particularly on nonagricultural goods. This has been done by gradually reducing the peak rate and reducing the number of tariff bands. In 1990–91 the peak rate stood at 355 percent, while the simple average of all tariff rates was 113 percent. By early 2004 the peak rate on individual goods was down to 20 percent, though there were notable exceptions, such as chemicals and transport equipment. Similarly, there has been less than ideal progress in reducing end-user and other exemptions. In nonindustrial areas there has been substantial liberalization of trade (and investment) in services, but following the OECD example, less in agriculture.

Panagariya next reviews the impact of this liberalization on trade flows, on efficiency, and on growth, in many cases using China as a benchmark. India’s share in world exports of goods and services—which had declined from 2 percent at Indian independence in 1947 to 0.5 percent in the mid-1980s—bounced back to 0.8 percent in 2002, implying that for roughly twenty years India’s trade has grown more rapidly than world trade. In addition, the deeper reforms of the 1990s yielded a pick-up of almost 50 percent over the previous decade, from 7.4 percent to 10.7 percent. Encouraging though these numbers are in light of India’s past performance, they pale in comparison with the Chinese record over the same period. Aside from any issues that may arise in the measurement of Chinese GDP at a time of rapid institutional and economic change, the combined share of exports and imports of both goods and services rose in China from 18.9 percent in 1980 to 49.3 percent in 2000, according to World Bank data. For India, the comparable numbers were 15.9 percent (in 1980) and 30.6 percent (in 2000).

The increase in India’s trade intensity has been accompanied by significant shifts in composition. The most dramatic has been the increased share of service exports in the 1990s. Within industry, exporting sectors with above-average growth tended to be skill- or capital-intensive rather than labor-intensive, while on the import side the share of capital goods imports declined sharply. In the area of services, rapid growth was exhibited by software exports and recorded remittances from overseas Indians. However, tourism receipts remain below potential. With regard to trade partners, the main shift over the 1990s was a move away from Russia toward Asia, particularly developing Asia. An interesting recent development has been the rapid expansion of India’s trade with China.

Panagariya then reviews the evidence on the impact of liberalization on static efficiency and on growth. One common approach is to use a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model to estimate the effects of the removal of trade distortions. The one study cited estimates the impact as raising GDP permanently by 2 percentage points. Additional domestic liberalization could raise this figure to 5 percentage points. Panagariya argues, however, that such models miss some key sources of gains. He cites two in particular: the disappearance of inefficient sectors and improvements in product quality. In addition, disaggregated analysis at the five-digit SITC level reveals far more dynamism in product composition of both exports and imports than is revealed at the two-digit level. This suggests greater gains from trade and improved welfare from enhanced choice than is captured in more aggregate models.

The links between liberalization and aggregate growth—or growth in total factor productivity (TFP)—have been controversial both in India and elsewhere in the emerging economies of Asia. In the case of India, the focus has been almost exclusively on manufacturing. After reviewing several studies, which admittedly differ in methodology and data quality, Panagariya judges that the weight of the evidence indicates that trade liberalization has led to productivity gains. Notwithstanding this reasonably positive assessment, Panagariya reminds us that overall, Indian industry’s performance in the 1980s and 1990s has been pedestrian, particularly compared with that of services.

The poor performance of Indian industry and the stronger growth performance of Chinese industry form the backdrop for Panagariya’s final section, on future policy. He discusses four issues: domestic policies bearing on trade; autonomous liberalization; regional trade agreements; and India’s participation in multilateral negotiations. With regard to the first, the central question for Panagariya is why Indian industry’s response to liberalization has been more sluggish than China’s. Panagariya attributes this in part to differences in economic structure but also to differences in the two countries’ domestic policies. He argues that it is easiest to expand trade in industrial products, and it is easier to do so if the industrial sector represents a large share of national value added. As far back as 1980, the share of industry in China was 48.5 percent, while in India it was half that, at 24.2 percent. Two decades later things are not very different. Panagariya makes a further interesting point: a relatively small industrial sector also reduces the capacity of the economy to absorb imports, leading to a tendency toward exchange rate appreciation (although even China has not been immune from this tendency). He concludes that it is imperative to stimulate industrial growth and cites reform in three areas as being essential: reduction of the fiscal deficit; reduction and ultimately elimination of the list of manufactured products “reserved” for small-scale industry; and reform of the country’s labor laws, which make reassignment or retrenchment of workers prohibitively difficult in the so-called formal or organized sector.

Turning next to autonomous trade reform, Panagariya is critical of the view, widely held in India, that the tariff structure ought to favor final goods over intermediates. He also notes that the current tariff structure remains riddled with complexity. He urges the authorities to move quickly to a single uniform tariff of 15 percent for nonagricultural goods and to move to a uniform tariff of 5 percent by the end of the decade. With regard to agriculture, Panagariya points out that India stands to gain from autonomous tariff liberalization given its potential as an agricultural exporter. He also addresses the issue of “contingent protection,” wherein India’s liberal use of antidumping regulations has clearly had protectionist intent. Panagariya urges changes in the antidumping procedures currently in place and also greater use of safeguard measures, as they are applied on a nondiscriminatory basis to all trading partners.

While India has traditionally taken comfort in a multilateral rule-based system of international trade, it has more recently embarked on an ambitious program of regional trade negotiations. It has signed free trade area (FTA) agreements with Sri Lanka and Thailand and is in the advanced stages of negotiating an FTA with Singapore. Panagariya analyzes the global, regional, and domestic factors that have brought about this shift in strategy—essentially the weakening of the U.S. commitment to multilateral negotiations, together with political imperatives. Panagariya observes that for a relatively protected economy, trade diversion and the associated revenue loss should be important concerns. He is also concerned that preoccupation with FTAs diverts attention from both unilateral liberalization and multilateral negotiations, each of which yields greater return for the effort expended. However, Panagariya concedes that there is a strategic case for FTAs, both to exert leverage in the multilateral sphere and to create a template that reflects India’s interests in future bilateral and multilateral negotiations. In this context he is critical of the template developed in the agreement on the South Asian Free Trade Area (SAFTA), which, in his view, is cluttered with many nontrade issues. In the specific case of a U.S.-India FTA, he believes that there is a strong case for an agreement in services, with mutually beneficial exchange of market access.

The paper ends with a discussion of India’s interests in ongoing multilateral trade negotiations. Panagariya’s main point is that India has a strong interest in successful conclusion of the Doha Round and could agree to the U.S. proposal aimed at eliminating tariffs on industrial goods by 2015. As noted before, India also has interests in improved market access in agriculture; given the considerable water in its bound tariffs, some concessions should be possible, particularly if accompanied by reductions in subsidies by rich countries.

Should a U.S.-India FTA Be Part of India's Trade Strategy, by Robert Z. Lawrence and Rajesh Chadha

The 1990s and the new millennium have seen a massive proliferation of preferential trade arrangements (PTAs), which typically lead to free trade among two or more countries, as, for example, under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Until recently, Asian countries had more or less stayed away from these arrangements, but this is changing rapidly, with many countries in the region now forging free trade areas. In their paper, Robert Lawrence and Rajesh Chadha assess the likelihood and benefits of the negotiation of a free trade area between India and the United States. Like Panagariya, Lawrence also embeds his discussion of India’s trade policy within the framework of the larger Indian reform effort.^[1] Following Ahluwalia, he characterizes Indian reform since 1991 as incremental, not radical.^[2] While there has been deepening consensus about the broad direction of reform within the policy elite, excessive clarity on endpoints and on the pace of transition is seen to be politically risky. Trade policy reform has been an important part of this liberalization effort, and it has been similarly characterized by a clear direction but fitful implementation and shifting promises as to endpoints.

Lawrence accepts that this strategy has been relatively successful in producing steady growth without major policy reversals or financial crises over the last decade. Yet, like Panagariya, he notes that trade reform is a job only half done. India’s tariff rates remain among the world’s highest, and there remain significant barriers to foreign investment. Within India, there continues to be political resistance to liberalization. Lawrence asks what the best trade and reform strategy for India is now, given the tasks yet to be accomplished.

Lawrence articulates three options available to India at this time: continued incremental unilateralism dictated, as in the past, by domestic concerns and feasibility; more active engagement with multilateral negotiations through the World Trade Organization (WTO); and what he calls a multitrack approach, whereby deeper bilateral free trade agreements complement the first two channels. Within this larger context the specific question he explores in depth is what role might be played by an FTA between India and the United States. He recognizes that consideration of such an FTA is at best at a nascent stage in official circles and that it is far from being an idea whose time has come. Nonetheless, his core thesis is that given India’s domestic reform goals, a multitrack approach centered on a U.S.-India FTA would be superior to excessive reliance on the WTO, given likely outcomes under the ongoing Doha Round. This is the argument that the paper attempts to substantiate.

Lawrence first considers a purely defensive motive for such a FTA. From this perspective, the key issue is to establish a legal and institutional framework for keeping trade in information technology (IT) services free. Noting the rapid growth in India’s export of such services, Lawrence cites studies that suggest that this trade is still in its infancy. Given that the United States is currently the destination of two-thirds of India’s IT services exports—and that this share could well be maintained—trade between the United States and India has the potential to become one of the most dynamic examples of trade in global commerce.

Will this growth be allowed to take place? Protectionist pressures in the United States already are strong. Outsourcing is headline news in the United States, and federal and state governments are taking politically visible stands to restrict the practice under government contracts. While some of this is undoubtedly election year politics, preserving access for India in the U.S. market is a genuine challenge. Lawrence explores various options available to India to preserve its access, including through the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) agreement within the WTO. He notes that GATS operates on a positive list approach, which can create some ambiguity as to what forms of market access have been bound. By contrast, services liberalization in U.S. bilateral agreements already uses a negative list approach: trade is allowed unless it has specifically been prohibited.

Lawrence then explores the possibility, from the U.S. perspective, of an FTA with India. He notes that the United States first moved away from exclusive reliance on multilateral negotiations as far back as the 1980s, when it signed FTAs with Canada and Israel, followed by NAFTA in 1993. Under the Bush administration the pace of negotiation of bilateral agreements has accelerated dramatically. Agreements with Chile, Singapore, and Jordan have been implemented; those involving the Central American Free Trade Area (CAFTA), Morocco, and Australia have been completed; and numerous others are either under active negotiation or planned.

In this environment Lawrence believes that an FTA with India would be seen by the U.S. authorities as being of great strategic interest in the larger U.S. negotiating strategy but also politically difficult to achieve, given the current mood in Congress. But he is skeptical of the possibility that such an agreement could be restricted to services alone—as proposed, for example, by Panagariya and by a recent task force of the Council on Foreign Relations. The United States is unlikely to forgo the opportunity of obtaining preferential access for the exports of its goods to the Indian market. In addition, dropping all goods trade in an agreement with India would create a difficult precedent for the United States in its other FTA negotiations, in which, with few exceptions, there have not been sectoral opt-outs.

Accordingly, in his discussion Lawrence deals with the case for a comprehensive U.S.-India FTA with most of the features of those that the United States already has concluded. These include a negative list for services; investment provisions with a few sectoral exclusions; full national treatment for U.S. companies; intellectual property rules that might be more comprehensive than those in the WTO; and additional provisions relating to labor, environmental standards, technical barriers, and government procurement. While the phase-in periods may differ for the two sides, once the agreement was fully implemented (generally in fifteen years), the obligations would be symmetric.

Lawrence readily concedes that willingness to sign an FTA agreement of this scope with the United States would be a radical departure for India in a number of respects. While much Indian trade liberalization has been unilateral, India has so far been a strong advocate of multilateral trading rules, but there too its efforts have concentrated on obtaining special and differential treatment for developing countries. As Panagariya has also noted, India has only lately entered the game of bilateral FTAs, so far with countries in Asia, but even in terms of goods trade these have not been comprehensive. A U.S.-India FTA would have major implications for India’s trade and domestic policies. It is the positive (or offensive) case for such a radical shift that Lawrence next examines.

He starts by offering some hypotheses on the political economy of liberalization. At the beginning, an opportunistic and piecemeal approach may be necessary to create constituencies for liberalization. But unilateralism carries the risk of reversal, and such policy uncertainty can inhibit the private investment decisions needed to shift the economy in the direction of its comparative advantage. Trade agreements, whether bilateral, regional, or multilateral, can impart credibility to commitments by the home government, making it more likely that liberalization will be successful. Such enhanced credibility is not costless, however. In contrast to an incremental approach, a comprehensive agreement means that many political battles have to be conducted simultaneously. This drawback can be offset by the fact of reciprocity, which can be used to develop coalitions of exporters who favor the trade reform. A further set of allies is provided by proponents of domestic reform, who can argue that the domestic reforms necessary for domestic growth can also deliver improved access to international markets. Lawrence believes that such a strategy was followed by the Chinese in connection with their accession to the WTO.

If these are some of the benefits of comprehensive reciprocal agreements, the question of what type of reciprocal agreements, multilateral or bilateral, remains. This is the choice addressed by Lawrence in the remainder of the paper. In making his assessment, Lawrence uses as a yardstick the impact of each of the two routes in assisting India to undertake changes in its own interest while avoiding constraints that have the potential to damage its welfare.

In order to assess the impact of a U.S.-India FTA, Lawrence examines some of the FTAs that the United States has recently negotiated. His review makes it clear that the institutional changes needed in the Indian economy would indeed be deep but in most areas they would prod Indian policymakers to move in directions that are inherently desirable. A particular concern of Indian policymakers is the introduction of labor and environmental standards through an FTA, and Lawrence clears up several misconceptions in this area. Recent bilateral agreements place the emphasis on each government enforcing its own domestic environmental and labor laws and not weakening those laws or reducing protections to encourage trade or investment. While these obligations are backed by the dispute settlement provisions of the agreements, trade measures may not be used to retaliate. On balance, implementing a U.S.-India FTA at this time would probably help to bolster and accelerate many dimensions of economic reform, but Lawrence notes that the benefits depend crucially on taking a range of complementary actions. Failure to do so could lead to conditions that were worse than before.

Lawrence then examines whether a successful conclusion to the Doha Round could deliver equivalent benefits to the cause of Indian reform. In so doing he notes that those who argue for exclusive reliance on multilateral liberalization compare actual FTAs with an idealized version of multilateral liberalization. But actual achievement under multilateral liberalization is heavily conditioned by the specific rules of trade negotiations, which may not actually result in significant domestic liberalization at all. As a developing country, India benefits from the “special and differential treatment” provisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), while benefiting from the most-favored nation provisions of the multilateral system. An additional institutional feature is the gap between applied and bound tariffs, which is particularly large where agricultural goods are concerned. A final feature is what Lawrence (following Jagdish Bhagwati) calls “first difference” reciprocity, where the offers made by each nation are measured against their protection levels at the beginning of the round.

Taking these elements into account and reviewing the actual performance of past rounds in reducing industrial tariffs, Lawrence comes to the strong conclusion that the current WTO system actually impedes a developing country like India from using WTO agreements to support meaningful liberalization; he also believes that the diffuse reciprocity involved in the most-favored nation system is not a strong catalyst for rallying exporter interests in favor of import liberalization.

Having provisionally concluded that an FTA would be of greater assistance than exclusive reliance on multilateral negotiations, Lawrence then explores the benefits to India of blending the two approaches in what he calls a multitrack approach. In his view, a U.S.-India FTA would certainly make India a more attractive negotiating partner for third countries hoping to match the access obtained by U.S. firms. Equally, assuming that it preceded the conclusion of the Doha Round, willingness to sign an FTA with the United States would also improve India’s negotiating credibility in the multilateral sphere. India could then challenge developed countries to improve their own offers dramatically by indicating a willingness to engage in extensive multilateral liberalization itself. A comprehensive FTA with India would also be of strategic importance to the United States in its current policy of competitive liberalization. This would strengthen India’s hand in its negotiations with the United States, while strengthening the U.S. hand in negotiating with other significant but reluctant partners.

The paper ends with some quantitative welfare simulations undertaken by Lawrence’s coauthor, Rajesh Chadha of the NCAER, using a computable general equilibrium model of world production and trade developed by the NCAER and the University of Michigan. The simulations deal only with the impact of liberalization on trade in goods. The model is designed to capture the long-run impact of an agreement. More crucially, it is a real model that holds employment and the trade balance constant; as such it captures the second-round adjustments needed to restore full employment in the economy following an initial trade shock.

A U.S.-India FTA is compared first with the current situation and then with a number of counterfactuals. The results reveal that aggregate welfare gains are greatest under multilateral liberalization, next greatest under unilateral liberalization in each country, and least under a bilateral FTA, but they note that even in the last case the effects are positive. The results also point out asymmetries between the United States and India in unilateral and multilateral liberalization, given the differences in the openness of the two economies. Indian and world welfare both rise significantly when India liberalizes unilaterally, while for the United States the greatest welfare gains flow from multilateral liberalization.

Lawrence concludes that the more difficult decision facing India today is whether to opt for reciprocal approaches in lieu of the unilateral approach that it has traditionally pursued. There are gains in credibility to be achieved, but these could entail reduced policy space and require a significant agenda of complementary reform to achieve their full effect. Should India choose to pursue the reciprocal route, he suggests a U.S.-India FTA as worthy of serious consideration, precisely because of its comprehensive and deep character.

Foreign Inflows and Macroeconomic Policy in India, by Vijay Joshi and Sanjeev Sanyal

India has had a turnaround in its balance of payments in recent years, with a swing in the current account from a deficit to a surplus and rapid growth in the capital account surplus. It has used those inflows to build up substantial holdings of foreign exchange reserves that now stand at $120 billion. While the initial reserve accumulation was welcome insurance against the risk of unanticipated future outflows, the current level is adequate to meet any foreseeable challenge, and policymakers need to develop an exchange policy that goes beyond simple reserve accumulation. Should India accelerate the process of capital account liberalization, perhaps allowing the export of capital by residents? Should it allow an appreciation of the exchange rate or speed up the liberalization of the trade regime? Above all, how should the exchange policy be integrated with the broader concerns of domestic economic policy?

In their paper, Vijay Joshi and Sanjeev Sanyal provide a broad review of the external aspects of Indian macroeconomic policy over the past decade. They use that review as the backdrop for a discussion of the policy options open to India in the future, posing the question of how economic policy should respond to the continuation of the strong balance-of-payments position of recent years. In their answer, they argue in favor of a combination of accelerated import liberalization on the external side and domestic fiscal consolidation. In particular, they view trade liberalization, which provides a means of absorbing continued capital inflows without constraining the competitiveness of the export sector, as an alternative to exchange rate appreciation.

In reviewing the economic events of the 1990s, they emphasize the degree to which India relied on an extensive system of capital controls. Foreign direct investment and portfolio investment inflows were gradually liberalized and foreign investors could freely repatriate their investments, but capital outflows by residents were prohibited. Offshore borrowing and lending by Indian companies and banks were also strictly limited. The capital controls allowed Indian monetary policy to maintain a relatively fixed exchange rate regime with minimal conflict with domestic economic policy. India’s restrictive measures on the capital account, reluctance to permit short-term foreign borrowing, and strong accumulation of foreign exchange reserves allowed it to escape any serious consequences from the Asian financial crises.

By accumulating foreign reserves over the decade, India passed up the opportunity to use capital inflows to finance a larger current account deficit. Joshi and Sanyal argue that this policy imposed relatively small costs in terms of forgone investment and growth. The reserve accumulation averaged 1.2 percent of GDP annually, and even if all of the accumulation had been used alternatively to purchase investment goods, the incremental impact on economic growth would have been small. This conclusion is in sharp contrast to the claims of others that foreign reserve accumulation imposed large costs in terms of forgone growth.

Overall, Joshi and Sanyal believe that the external aspects of Indian economic policy were well executed during the 1990s. However, the ample level of foreign exchange reserves and the continuation of strong capital inflows present a more difficult policy choice going forward. The current policy of sterilized intervention in exchange markets has outlived its usefulness, and further additions to reserves will impose rising fiscal costs with few benefits. At the same time, the authors oppose exchange rate appreciation because of its negative impact on export competitiveness. An intermediate policy of continued intervention in the foreign exchange market but without any attempt at sterilization would translate into an easing of domestic monetary policy and higher growth in the short run. However, they fear that it would quickly lead to increased inflationary pressures, and the resulting rise in the real exchange rate would be as unattractive from the export perspective as outright nominal appreciation.

Instead, Joshi and Sanyal argue for a mixed strategy that combines a faster rate of import liberalization on the external side with domestic fiscal consolidation. A rise in imports would provide a means of absorbing the excess capital inflows with no loss of export competitiveness. Since India’s tariff structure is among the world’s highest, the policy would also intensify the competitive pressures on the import-competing industries and strengthen incentives to raise productivity. The constraining factor is the negative public revenue impact of reductions in tariffs, but that is consistent with greater reliance on an expanded value-added tax to meet the revenue needs of both the central government and the states.

They stress the importance of action on the fiscal side because of fear that maintaining the large deficit will crowd out investment and slow the pace of growth in future years. A combination of fiscal contraction and monetary expansion would produce lower interest rates with strong incentives for growth. The greater foreign and public saving would provide the resources necessary to support the higher rate of investment and growth.

Finally, Joshi and Sanyal reflect a strong shift in professional sentiment in their lack of enthusiasm for further liberalization of the capital account. They argue against liberalization of the restrictions on capital outflows by residents, based on the risks they pose in the event of adverse future shocks. In fact, they conclude with a willingness to use Chilean-type taxes in the event that inflows of foreign capital should intensify.

India's Experience with a Pegged Exchange Rate, by Ila Patnaik

In a paper that is largely devoted to a positive analysis of the experience with exchange rate management in India, Ila Patnaik examines the reactions of the monetary authority to the changing external environment. The exchange rate plays a central role in the economic policy of most emerging economies, as monetary policy is torn between a focus on stabilizing the domestic economy and maintaining an exchange rate that is consistent with export competitiveness. In a world of capital controls, it is possible to manage both of these goals simultaneously, but once the economy is fully open to the free inflow and outflow of capital, monetary policy must choose between the external and the internal balance. Over the 1990s, Indian monetary policy operated in a transitional phase, as it only gradually reduced its restrictions on capital account transactions. Since 1993, the external value of the rupee has been determined by market forces, but the central bank intervenes extensively to maintain a stable rate vis-à-vis the U.S. dollar. The continuation of partial controls on capital flows provides some room for an independent monetary policy.

Patnaik focuses on two periods of substantial net capital inflows that necessitated large-scale intervention by the central bank to prevent currency appreciation. The first was a relatively short episode extending from June 1993 to November 1994; the second lasted from August 2001 until at least the middle of 2004. Despite official protestations to the contrary, Patnaik’s empirical analysis demonstrates that India is best characterized as operating a tightly pegged exchange rate over the full period. Her paper explores the extent to which the focus on the exchange rate limited the operation of a monetary policy directed at stabilizing the domestic economy.

The first period began with an easing of the restrictions on inflows of portfolio capital in early 1993. The result was a sharp surge of capital inflows and private expectations of a rise in the exchange rate. However, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) chose to purchase a large portion of the inflow to prevent appreciation. The bank also acted to sterilize a portion of the inflow, financing some purchases through the sale of government debt. However, the lack of liquidity in the bond market restricted the efforts at sterilization and led the bank to finance much of its purchases through an expansion of reserve money. It attempted to offset the inflationary effects of a rapid growth in the monetary base through a series of increases in the cash reserve ratio. However, the net result was still a significant acceleration of growth in the money supply and, at least in the early months, a decline in interest rates. Despite the small size of the external sector and the limited openness of the capital account, the episode represented India’s first experience with the partial loss of monetary policy autonomy, dictated by the need to intervene in the currency market.

The second episode, beginning in the summer of 2001, was triggered by a swing in the current account from deficit to surplus. Increased capital inflows played a significant role only in later years. Again, the RBI intervened to prevent appreciation, and the exchange rate actually depreciated slightly up to mid-2002. This time around, the market for debt was considerably more developed. The bank was able to finance nearly all of its purchases of foreign currency through the sale of government debt instruments, avoiding use of the currency reserve ratio. There was little or no acceleration of growth in reserve money, and the growth of a broad-based measure of the money supply (M3) actually slowed. However, the RBI did not attempt to hold the exchange rate completely fixed after the summer of 2002, opting instead for a small but steady appreciation. Capital inflows also began to accelerate at the same time, perhaps motivated by currency speculation.

The two episodes differ in the extent to which the RBI was able to engage in sterilizing interventions to avoid any conflict with its policies for domestic stabilization. Patnaik’s review suggests that controls on the capital account are still sufficient to permit considerable discretion in the conduct of domestic monetary policy. To date, Indian policymakers have opted to prevent the capital inflow from translating into a current account deficit. However, the sustainability of the bank’s interventions in future years is debatable because the fiscal costs of accumulating additional reserves are rising.

Liberalizing Capital Flows in India: Financial Repression, Macroeconomic Policy, and Gradual Reforms, by Kenneth Kletzer

The paper by Kenneth Kletzer offers a third perspective on India’s exchange rate regime, focusing on the issue of capital account convertibility. Should India accelerate the pace of its liberalization of capital account transactions? Kletzer views this as a particularly critical decision in light of a history of severe repression of domestic financial markets. He points to numerous international examples in which liberalization led to large financial inflows followed by equally abrupt outflows and financial crisis. In his paper, he lays out the conditions necessary to achieve a successful policy for capital account liberalization.

Kletzer begins with a review of the potential benefits and costs of capital mobility. On the benefits side, he points to five factors. First, there are gains from trade in commodities across time, just as there are gains from contemporaneous trade in goods and services. Second, international financial integration, which brings direct foreign investment, may raise the growth rate by raising productivity growth. Third, such integration allows the sharing of risk between savers and investors. Domestic residents are able to diversify risk, which may raise the saving rate. Fourth, the presence of these flows may reduce output and consumption volatility. Finally, capital account liberalization may provide a means for forcing an end to financially repressive policies. The ability of resources to move across borders in response to unsustainable fiscal or financial policies may impose discipline on public authorities.

The principal cost of an open capital account is the possibility that a crisis may occur in the form of capital flight, leading to large depreciation, large-scale bank failures, or both. For example, under a pegged exchange rate regime, a realization or expectation of monetization of public sector budget deficits that is inconsistent with the pegged rate of currency depreciation forces its abandonment sooner or later in a sudden outflow of international reserves. Such depreciations may then spill over into bank failures if the banks have large, unhedged foreign currency–denominated liabilities and home currency–denominated assets.

To date, the international empirical evidence on the growth effects of capital account liberalization for emerging markets is inconclusive. The bottom line is that countries tend to benefit from liberalization when they can better absorb capital inflows by having higher levels of human capital, more developed domestic financial markets, and greater transparency in financial and corporate governance and regulation. On the other hand, the opening of the capital account in the presence of significant macroeconomic imbalances reduces net gains and raises the prospects of subsequent crisis.

Turning to India, Kletzer notes that India had a relatively unrestricted financial system until the 1960s. Starting in the 1960s, interest rate restrictions and liquidity requirements were adopted and progressively tightened. The government established the State Bank of India, a public sector commercial bank, and went on to nationalize the largest private commercial banks toward the end of the decade. Through the 1970s and into the 1980s, credit directed to “priority” sectors constituted a rising share of domestic lending and interest rate subsidies became common for targeted industries. With the start of economic reforms in 1985, steps were taken toward internal financial liberalization, mainly in banking. The government began to reduce financial controls by partially deregulating bank deposit rates, though that step was partially reversed in 1988. However, in later years the government simultaneously began to relax ceilings on lending rates of interest. Progressive relaxation of restrictions on both bank deposit and lending rates of interest and the reduction of directed lending was under way by 1990.

Liberalization accelerated after the 1991 crisis, when important steps were taken toward external liberalization. Specifically, both direct foreign investment and portfolio investment were progressively opened. A major development was full current account convertibility of the rupee under IMF Article 8 in August 1994. In the subsequent years, sectoral caps on direct foreign investment and restrictions on portfolio borrowing and foreign equity ownership were relaxed. Currently, foreign investment income is fully convertible to foreign currency for repatriation. External commercial borrowing has been relaxed, but it is regulated with respect to maturities and interest rate spreads. Effective restrictions continue on the acquisition of foreign financial assets by residents and on currency convertibility for capital account transactions.

According to Kletzer, there remain four macro-cum-financial vulnerabilities that must be considered in evaluating the case for full capital account convertibility: high public debt and fiscal deficit; financial repression; weakness in the banking sector; and a tendency to peg the exchange rate. India’s external debt is low in relation to its foreign exchange reserves, so there is less to fear on that front.

Using two alternative measures of the real interest rate, Kletzer evaluates the sustainability of the current public debt as a proportion of GDP and concludes that without a major reduction in the primary deficit (fiscal deficit minus interest payment on the debt) it cannot be stabilized at its current level of 82 percent. Based on one measure, the current primary deficit of 3.6 percent must be turned into a primary surplus of 0.8 percent for the debt to be sustained at its current level. On the deficit, Kletzer points out that the combined central and state government budget balances understate total public sector liabilities. Unfunded pension liabilities, various contingent liabilities, and guarantees on the debt issued by loss-making public enterprises (most notably state electricity boards) must also be taken into account.

High levels of public debt and deficits have been sustained partially through financial repression, which has been a central aspect of the Indian fiscal system for decades. Capital controls provide the public sector with a captive capital market and allow lower-than-opportunity rates of interest for government debt. Kletzer estimates that the implicit subsidy to the government averaged 8.2 percent of GDP from 1980 to 1993 and 1.6 percent from 1994 to 2002. Thus the liberalization of the 1990s is clearly reflected in the substantial reversal, though not elimination, of financial repression. In the same vein, the government collected seignorage revenues that averaged 2 percent over the entire 1980–2002 period, but 1.4 percent from 1997 to 2002. The decrease in public sector revenue from financial repression is large, indicating some significant progress in financial policy reform.

Policies of financial repression hamper domestic financial intermediation and raise the vulnerability of the banking system to crisis as international financial integration increases. At the end of March 2003, according to the Reserve Bank of India, the gross nonperforming assets of the commercial banks were 9.5 percent of bank advances; taking provisions into account, this figure drops to around 4.5 percent. Directed credit to priority sectors accounted for 31 percent of commercial bank assets but about 40 percent of nonperforming assets of the banks. At 2 percent of GDP, nonprovisioned and nonperforming assets are not large. But some researchers estimate that the actual figure may be twice as large as the official one. Banks also suffer from unhedged interest rate exposure arising from the large holdings of government debt (currently 40 percent of their total assets) and the liberalization of deposit rates.

Finally, capital controls allow policymakers to manage the nominal exchange rate and influence domestic rates of interest as independent objectives of monetary policy. Past exchange rate management in India displays resistance to currency appreciation. The adoption of a floating exchange rate, albeit managed relatively tightly, reduces crisis vulnerability. The government can resist exchange rate movements while not offering any exchange parity guarantee, as under a pegged exchange rate (or crawling peg or narrow target zone). The uncertainty that is induced, especially for short-term rates of change in the exchange rate, could lead to private sector hedging against currency risk. A possible source of concern is the revealed tendency of the government to lean against exchange rate movements that could result in sudden losses of reserves and capital account reversals under an open capital account.

Kletzer concludes that the initial conditions for capital account convertibility in India are strong, with the exception of public finance. India’s very low short-maturity foreign debt exposure, low overall foreign debt, large stock of foreign reserves, and flexible exchange rate place the Indian economy in a strong position by international standards. The average maturities of foreign and public debt could be expected to fall with international financial integration, but a prospective rise in short-term debt does not in itself justify capital controls. The stock of foreign reserves exceeds the current level of short-term external debt several fold. Liberalization and further opening of the banking system requires regulatory improvement, but the present level of nonperforming assets in the banking system is not excessive in comparison with the emerging markets.

In concluding, Kletzer notes two aspects of fiscal vulnerability relevant to financial integration. First, the primary deficit and the need to amortize public debt constitute the government borrowing requirement that would need to be financed on international terms under an open capital account. Second, the banking system holds the overwhelming majority of the public debt; with international financial integration, these become risky assets. Any gain to the government from currency depreciation or rising interest spreads on public debt would be matched by losses by the banks. These holdings pose a threat to the banking system, and a capital account crisis could begin with the exit of domestic depositors. In this case, deposit insurance could reduce the exposure of the banking system to crisis. Limiting the contingent liability of the government created by deposit insurance so that it just offsets public sector capital gains requires institutional reform to ensure successful prudential regulation.

Banking Reform in India, by Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole and Ester Duflo

The final paper, by Abhijit Banerjee, Shawn Cole, and Esther Duflo, addresses some of the concerns raised above about India’s domestic financial system. In comparison with its peers at similar stages of development, India has an advanced and extensive banking system, with branches throughout rural and urban areas, providing credit not only to industry but also to a significant number of farmers. As in many other developing countries, publicly held banks are by far the largest players, and financial sector reforms have become major policy goals. The authors evaluate the performance of India’s banking sector in terms of its provision of financial intermediation and its contribution to the achievement of a variety of “social goals.” They also offer a comparison of the performance of public and private sector banks.

The paper begins with an overview of banking in India, including the two episodes of bank nationalization in 1969 and 1980. Because the Indian government used a strict policy rule (based on the asset base of banks) to determine which banks were nationalized and which were left in the private sector, India offers an ideal case study in the relative performance and behavior of public and private sector banks.

A primary rationale for bank nationalization was to increase the flow of credit, both in general and to targeted “priority sectors” such as agriculture and small-scale industry. In the first section of the analysis, Banerjee and colleagues use detailed records from a public sector bank to determine whether there is “under-lending” to priority sector firms in the Indian financial system. They define under-lending as a situation in which the marginal product of capital for a firm is higher than the rate of interest it is currently paying. A change in lending regulations that increased the amount of credit issued by banks to one group of firms but not another allowed them to estimate the effect of additional credit on output and profits. They find a strong, positive effect of the change, suggesting that the firms are indeed credit constrained.

Enhancing credit supply was a primary goal of nationalization: while the performance of this public sector bank was not impressive, perhaps private sector banks fared worse? Using a regression discontinuity approach, the authors compared the propensity of public and private banks to lend to borrowers in several sectors of the economy: agriculture, small-scale industry, and the composite sector called trade, transport, and finance. They find that public sector banks did lend substantially more to agricultural borrowers than did private sector banks. Contrary to popular wisdom, however, they find that once bank size is taken into account, public sector banks lend no more to small-scale industry than do private sector banks.

Nor does bank nationalization appear to have increased the overall speed of financial development. The authors find that in the period 1980–91, nationalized and private banks of similar asset size grew at about the same rate. However, in the more liberalized period of 1992–2000, old private sector banks grew 8 percent more than public sector banks. (The lack of attention to new private sector banks is explained by the fact that there are simply not enough data at this stage to allow meaningful analysis.)

To gain further insight into under-lending and a low level of financial development, the authors again study the loan information from the same public sector bank. Under government regulations, loan officers are required to calculate credit limits on the basis of firm size (as measured by turnover) rather than profitability; though the rules do allow for some flexibility on the part of the loan officer, the authors find that in most cases loan officers simply reapproved the previous year’s limit. Because of inflation, real credit thus typically shrinks. Firms that are growing rapidly or that have profitable opportunities are not rewarded with additional credit, nor are poorly performing firms cut off.

The authors then turn to potential explanations for the reluctance of loan officers to lend. Public employees are subject to strict anticorruption legislation, and bank officers have expressed concern that if they issue a new loan that subsequently goes bad, they could be charged with corruption, denied promotion, fired, or even put in jail. The authors test this hypothesis by examining whether a corruption charge against a bank employee in a specific bank led to a reduction in overall lending by all loan officers in that bank. They find that it did: corruption charges led to a reduction in lending of approximately 3 percent compared with lending of other banks. That decline lasted approximately twenty-four months.

Critics of public enterprises are quick to point out that since employees tend not to have a stake in the performance of the enterprise, they may tend to exert less effort. For public bankers, this may mean making guaranteed safe loans to the government rather than spending time and energy on screening new clients and monitoring existing ones. To test this possibility, the authors compare how public sector banks in low- and high-growth states responded to a change in spread between lending rates and the rate at which the government was willing to borrow. They find that banks in lowgrowth states were more inclined to make “low-effort” loans to the government when the spread increased.

The final exercise was to examine the contentious issue of nonperforming assets, bank failures, and bailouts. The official rates of nonperforming loans in public sector banks tend to be higher than those in private sector banks, but because those numbers are notoriously unreliable, the authors instead compare the fiscal costs of bailing out failed private banks with the costs of recapitalizing poorly performing public sector banks. Using data starting from the first nationalization, they identify twenty-one cases of bank failure between 1969 and 2000 and compute the costs imposed on the government in rupees at 2000 prices. That sum is compared with the substantial cost of recapitalization of public sector banks in the 1990s. Controlling for size, the cost of the bank failures appears to be slightly higher than recapitalization, implying a small advantage for public sector banks. However, since recapitalization expenses are recurring, in all likelihood the public sector banks represent a greater cost to the treasury.

The authors conclude by arguing that the evidence suggests a tentative case for privatizing public sector banks. Privatization is not a panacea, however, and both public and private sector banks could benefit from significant internal reform. Liberalization and privatization should be accompanied by strong regulation to ensure the continued existence of social banking. But in net terms, the reduction in agency problems, the increased flexibility, and the reliance on private rather than public incentives to limit corruption and NPAs should make for a more dynamic banking system that is more responsive to borrowers’ needs.

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FOOTNOTES

^[1] As indicated in the paper, Rajesh Chadha is responsible primarily for measuring the quantitative aspects of a possible India-China free trade arrangement and is not responsible for the qualitative views expressed in the paper. Accordingly, in this summary only Lawrence is referred to, except when the simulations are discussed.
^[2] M. S. Ahluwalia. “Economic Reforms in India since 1991: Has Gradualism Worked?” Journal of Economic Perspectives 16, no. 3 (2002): 67–88.

 

The second volume of the India Policy Forum, edited by Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya, addresses issues of government fiscal and monetary policy, reviews developments in labor markets and the distribution of income since the initiation of large-scale economic reforms in 1991 and contains a critical assessment of policies aimed at promoting universal access to telecommunications services.The editors' summary appears below, and you can download the IPF conference agenda, a PDF version of the volume, purchase a printed copy, or access individual articles by clicking on the following links:

Download the 2005 India Policy Forum conference agenda (PDF) »
Download The India Policy Forum 2005-06 - Volume 2 (PDF) »
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Download individual articles:

• Excessive Budget Deficits, a Government-Abused Financial System, and Fiscal Rules by Willem H. Buiter and Urjit R. Patel
• Trends and Issues in Tax Policy and Reform in India by M. Govinda Rao and R. Kavita Rao
• How Applicable Is the Inflation-Targeting Framework for India? by Sheetal K. Chand and Kanhaiya Singh
• Pre- and Post-Reform India: A Revised Look at Employment, Wages, and Inequality by Surjit S. Bhalla and Tirthatanmoy Das
• Universal Telecommunications Service in India by Roger G. Noll and Scott J. Wallsten

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EDITORS' SUMMARY

This is the second volume of the India Policy Forum. The journal is jointly promoted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in New Delhi and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., with the objective of presenting high-quality empirical research on the major economic policy issues that confront contemporary India. The forum is supported by a distinguished advisory panel and a group of active researchers who participate in the review and discussion process and offer suggestions to the editors and the authors. Our objective is to make the policy discussion accessible to a broad nonspecialist audience inside and outside India. We also hope that it will assist in the development of a global network of scholars interested in India’s economic transformation.

The five individual papers included in this volume were selected by the editors and presented at a conference in Delhi on July 25–26, 2005. In addition to the working sessions, John Williamson, a member of the advisory panel, gave a public address on the topic “What Follows the Era of the USA as the World’s Growth Engine?” The papers focus on several issues of great relevance to India’s current economic situation. The first three papers involve issues of government fiscal and monetary policy: the implications of a large and sustained fiscal budget deficit, India’s experience with tax reform, and the relevance of the inflation-targeting framework for Indian monetary policy. The fourth paper provides a detailed review of developments in labor markets and the distribution of income since the initiation of large-scale economic reforms in 1991. The last paper provides a critical assessment of policies aimed at promoting universal access to telecommunications services.

Excessive Budget Deficits, a Government-Abused Financial System, and Fiscal Rules, by Willem H. Buiter and Urjit R. Patel

In their paper, Willem Buiter and Urjit Patel explore the mechanisms by which India’s continuing high fiscal deficits (at both the federal and state levels) affect the sustainable growth of the economy. In their view, the abuse of a financial system heavily dominated by the government represents a key channel by which the fiscal position influences economic growth and vulnerability; accordingly, their paper also extends to an examination of the financial system.

Following a crisis in 1991, India has witnessed a turnaround on many indicators of macroeconomic performance. It has transited from an onerous trade regime to a market-friendly system encompassing both trade and current payments. The sum of external current payments and receipts as a ratio to gross domestic product (GDP) has doubled from about 19 percent in 1990–91 to around 40 percent currently. There has also been some liberalization of cross-border capital account transactions, although significant constraints remain in place on cross-border intertemporal trade and risk trading.

Although average annual real GDP growth over the postreform period has been only modestly higher than in the previous decade (6.2 percent from 1992–93 to 2004–05 compared with 5.7 percent from 1981–82 to 1990–91), India continues to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. India’s balance of payments has been strong and inflation has been moderate.

After a sharp initial adjustment in the early 1990s, India’s net public debt has risen steadily as a share of GDP, although at about 70 percent of GDP, it remains below the levels recorded at the time of the 1991 crisis. Following custom, Buiter and Patel consolidate the central bank into these estimates, but not the publicly owned commercial banks, on the grounds that to do so would be to assume that the (implicit) guarantee of liabilities in such banks is certain to be called. In addition to public debt of this magnitude, recognized and explicit guarantees in 2003 amounted to a further 11.3 percent of GDP.

By the standard of most emerging markets, including several that have experienced crisis, India’s public and publicly guaranteed debt is very high. The composition of this debt has changed significantly in the fifteen years since the crisis of 1991. Net external debt has declined sharply, shifting the burden of public debt onto the domestic market. This domestic debt is rupeedenominated. In addition, India continues to maintain selective (discretionary) capital controls, particularly those that keep arbitrage-type flows (external borrowing by domestic financial intermediaries, investment by foreign institutional investors in fixed-income securities, and short-term borrowing by practically anyone) in check. While India faced a combined internal (fiscal) and external (foreign exchange) transfer problem during the years leading up to the crisis of 1991, the weakening of the fiscal position since the late 1990s represents an exclusively internal resource transfer problem.

Given repeated and costly crises in several emerging markets associated with possible public debt default, Buiter and Patel first conduct formal fiscal sustainability tests, revisiting an analysis they undertook a decade earlier. Although their fiscal sustainability tests are not conclusive, they find that government solvency may not be a pressing issue at this juncture. The reason India has been able to remain solvent despite the sustained fiscal deficits of the past twenty years is the combination of fast GDP growth and financial repression.

They note that globally, the level of risk-free interest rates at all maturities and credit-risk spreads are extraordinarily low at present. Continuation of the pattern of recent years—a steady increase in the debt–GDP ratio—will sooner or later raise the public debt to unsustainable levels. Political pressure to enhance government expenditure on social sectors and improve public (infrastructure or utility) services has increased in the aftermath of the 2004 general election.

Buiter and Patel then examine two potential channels for the impact of the government on the quantity and quality of capital formation in India. The first is financial crowding out—the negative effect of public borrowing on aggregate (private and public) saving. The second is the effect of government institutions, policies, actions, and interventions, including public ownership, regulation, taxes, subsidies, and other forms of public influence on private savers, private investors, and the financial markets and institutions that intermediate between them. A simple growth accounting framework is constructed to compare India’s investment efficiency with that of selected large countries. They find Indian investment inefficiency to be relatively high, China’s to be even higher.

Across the world, from the European Union’s (ill-fated) Stability and Growth Pact to the United Kingdom’s Golden Rule and Sustainable Investment Rule, there have been attempts to bind governments to fiscal rectitude through formal legal or constitutional devices. In September 1994 an agreement was reached between the Reserve Bank of India and the Central Exchequer to phase out ad hoc treasury bills, which hitherto facilitated automatic monetization of the budget deficit. The Indian Parliament, in August 2003, voted for the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBMA), which required that the central government’s fiscal deficit not exceed 3 percent of GDP and that the deficit on the revenue (current) account be eliminated.

The fiscal rules that India has embraced—perhaps in recognition of the serious systemic inefficiency that the fiscal stance has engendered—are evaluated. The requirement that the revenue budget be in balance or surplus is very likely to be the binding constraint on the central government. Even if the gross investment version of the golden rule (limiting debt issues to capital financing) is the operative one, the Indian central government’s gross capital formation program amounted to no more than 1.5 percent of GDP in 2003–04. Net central government capital formation is even less than that and may well be negative in years that economic depreciation is high. The authors judge that a great deal of current expenditure will be reclassified as capital expenditure if the golden rule were ever to be enforced seriously. Regarding the likelihood of the rules being enforced, they point to the absence of any features of the FRBMA that compel governments to act countercyclically during periods of above-normal economic activity or (as in India during these past three to four years) exceptionally low interest rates. Furthermore, the fiscal rules under the FRBMA do not address the key distortions imposed by the Indian state on the private sector through financial repression, misguided regulations, and inefficient ownership and incentive structures.

Trends and Issues in Tax Policy and Reform in India, by M. Govinda Rao and R. Kavita Rao

Tax reform has been a major component of the economic reform agenda in India during the last twenty years. In their contribution on this subject, Govinda Rao and Kavita Rao offer a comprehensive treatment of the evolution of the direct and indirect taxes in India, their shortcomings relative to an ideal tax system, the reforms undertaken so far, and their future course. They note that according to the theory of optimal taxation, revenue-raising taxes should consist exclusively of consumption taxes with the rates of taxation being dependent on various demand elasticities. In turn, the ideal consumption tax can be mimicked by a value-added tax (VAT) that taxes output at the desired rate but rebates the tax paid on the inputs, thereby only taxing the extra value added at each stage of production. In practice, the information on the demand elasticities required to implement the optimal VAT is rarely available. Moreover, its variegated structure is administratively complex, gives rise to tax disputes and tax evasion, and results in lobbying pressures becoming the main determinants of the tax structure. Therefore, a system characterized by greater uniformity in tax rates has gained popularity with policy analysts and policymakers in recent years.

Since the 1950s, India has relied on both direct and indirect taxes to raise revenue. Direct taxes include both the personal income tax and corporate profit tax. Indirect taxes include domestic commodity taxation and custom duties. Domestic commodity taxation initially took the form of excise duties that taxed output up to the manufacturing stage with no tax rebates on inputs and the sales tax by the states. In recent years, a modified value added tax (MODVAT) that rebates the tax paid on inputs at each stage of production up to the manufacturing stage has progressively replaced the excise tax. Custom duty revenues have principally been a by-product of import protection, and their share in total revenue increased especially rapidly in the 1980s when the government decided to replace the previous system of import quotas with enhanced input tariff rates. With the decline in protection after 1990, the importance of this source of revenue has been declining.

The reforms during the last two decades have focused on both the design as well as the administration of taxes. Marginal tax rates on personal income, which had reached near 100 percent levels in the early 1970s, have now been brought down to around 30 percent (with occasional surcharges). Simultaneously, the number of tax slabs has been reduced to three, and some progress has also been made toward eliminating numerous ad hoc exemptions. Similar steps have been taken in the area of corporate taxation.

The big push in the area of domestic commodity taxation has been toward the development of a genuine VAT and unification of the tax rates. Considerable success has been achieved in both tasks. Custom duties have been brought down substantially, and their dispersion has been considerably reduced. Improvement in tax administration has been more pronounced in direct than indirect taxation.

Rao and Rao observe that the ratio of personal income tax to GDP has increased from 2.1 percent in 1985–86 to 4.3 percent in 2004–05. Reductions in indirect tax revenues as a proportion of GDP have more than offset this gain, however. Central government domestic indirect tax collection declined by 1.6 percentage points and the custom duty collection by 1.8 percentage points over the same period.

It is tempting to argue that the increase in the income tax–GDP ratio represents the operation of the so-called Laffer curve whereby reduced rates by themselves lead to increased revenue. Rao and Rao offer evidence to the contrary, however, and argue that the increase in the revenues from the personal income tax resulted from a more rapid growth of the organized industrial sector that is covered by the tax net; deepening of the financial sector, which makes transactions easier to track; and administrative measures including the spread of tax deduction at source.

Rao and Rao also find that contrary to suggestions in some of the recent literature, personal income tax reform has resulted in increased equity. Granted, the reduction in the dispersion of effective tax rates has led to the richest individuals being subject to lower tax rates. But the reform has also brought into the tax net many relatively rich individuals who previously did not pay taxes. This is reflected in a significant increase in the number of income tax payers and the doubling of revenues from the personal income tax.

Despite substantial rationalization of various components of the tax system, indirect tax revenues remain highly concentrated in terms of commodities. Just five groups of commodities—petroleum products, chemicals, basic metals, transport vehicles, and electrical and electronic goods— contribute 75 percent of the total central domestic commodity tax revenue. Petroleum products alone, which have tripled their share over a thirteenyear period, contribute over 40 percent. Almost 60 percent of custom duty is collected from just three commodity groups: machinery (26.6 percent), petroleum products (21 percent), and chemicals (11 percent). This concentration exceeds the concentration of output or of imports across commodities.

Rao and Rao recommend further rationalization of central taxes through a reduction in the number of tax rates and the elimination of exemptions. In the area of corporation tax, they argue in favor of reducing the depreciation allowance to more realistic levels. They also point to a need for aligning the corporate profit tax rate with the highest marginal tax rate on personal income tax. With regard to import duties, the authors recommend a minimum tariff of 5 percent on all imports as a step toward harmonizing duty rates across commodities.

In the area of domestic commodity taxation, the goal must be a single, unified goods and services tax. The achievement of this goal has several components. All specific duties must be converted into ad valorem rates and the tax on services must be widened substantially. The sales tax must be harmonized across states and, for collection purposes, integrated with the central VAT, which should eventually cover all goods and services. This unification will also allow the adoption of the destination-based sales tax on all interstate trade. Keeping in view revenue needs, Rao and Rao recommend that the total burden of taxation on goods and services should be 20 percent. Of this, 8 percent should be borne by the center and 12 percent by the states.

The state of tax administration, resulting partially from the virtual absence of data on both direct and indirect taxes, has been a major reason for low levels and high costs of compliance. The absence of information has also led to the evolution of a compliance system in which tax payments are negotiated between the payer and the government. The recent initiatives for administrative reform that include the development of a computerized information system and procedural changes such as expanded coverage of tax deduction at source and systematized audit procedures have alleviated this problem to some degree. Within direct taxes, efforts include outsourcing of issue of permanent account numbers, a tax information network established by the National Securities Depository Limited with special focus on tax deductions at the source; and the Online Tax Accounting System. Within indirect taxes, a few examples of new information systems are the customs e-commerce gateway, known as ICEGATE, and the Customs Electronic Data Interchange system. Further initiatives are under way, including a systematic approach to compiling relevant data from a variety of relevant sources. Rao and Rao believe that, as a part of this initiative, it is critical that mechanisms be set up for data sharing between direct and indirect tax authorities, as well as between central and state tax authorities.

Inflation targeting has emerged as one of the most significant developments in the theory and practice of monetary policy. Disenchantment with the outcomes of the activist monetary policies of the 1970s and 1980s led many economists and policymakers to advocate a simplified and more rulesbased approach to monetary policy, one in which attaining and sustaining price stability is given a clear priority. Many countries, however, have experienced difficulties in attempting to use the growth in monetary aggregates or the exchange rate as a guide to such a policy. An inflation-targeting framework (ITF), which consists of setting an inflation target and aligning monetary policy to ensure its attainment in a transparent and accountable manner, is increasingly advocated as a best-practice approach to controlling inflation.

In the long run, the inflation rate is the only outcome that monetary policy can influence. However, because there is a short-run cost of disinflation, a trade-off between inflation and unemployment, the optimum path of future inflation implies a gradual return to the desired rate. At the heart of the ITF is a specific view of the inflation-generating process as a largely demanddetermined phenomenon, a conviction that the most efficient way of dealing with inflation is through an interest rate rule, and the belief that the public’s inflation expectations can be managed. From this follows the prescription that the central bank, as the custodian of interest-rate policy, should play a dedicated and dominant role in promoting the inflation objective. Initially, inflation targeting was adopted by several industrial countries, but it has recently spread to some emerging markets. At present, much of the focus on monetary policy is on credit growth, not interest rates. Is the ITF practical in the absence of a large role for market-determined interest rates?

How Applicable Is the Inflation-Targeting Framework for India?, by Sheetal K. Chand and Kanhaiya Singh

In their paper, Sheetal Chand and Kanhaiya Singh ask whether such a framework might be applicable to developing economies. In particular, is the ITF suitable for guiding the monetary policy of India? Earlier discussions focused on the difficulties that developing countries would have in adopting a policy rule that assigns absolute priority to the control of inflation. They often have less-developed financial institutions (requiring a more nurturing approach by the central bank), an aversion to large exchange rate fluctuations, or a need to be accommodative of some changes in fiscal policy. Widespread public knowledge of these constraints implies that a policy based on inflation targeting would lack credibility.

Chand and Singh examine the issue from a different perspective, however, arguing that the inflation process in India differs in significant respects from that commonly assumed to hold for the industrial economies. The paper first tests a standard formulation of the ITF, relying on a paper by Lars Svensson. This formulation explicitly incorporates a short-run tradeoff between inflation and the deviation of output from full employment (a Phillips-curve type relationship). In their tests of the Indian experience from 1970–71 to 2002–03, Chand and Singh find that the output gap is not a significant determinant of inflation. Thus, they argue that Svensson’s derivation of the optimal policy rule is not satisfactory in the Indian context.

However, this does not necessarily imply that demand factors have negligible effects on inflation. The authors develop an alternative specification that defines excess demand as the difference between the nominal GDP growth rate and the growth rate of potential output valued at the preceding year’s rate of inflation. They find that this alternative version accords better with conditions in India. However, the demand-side effects are supplemented by a substantial role for variations in input prices. In the final model, the coefficients on the measures of demand conditions indicate some effect, but the dominant role is that of supply-side factors.

The authors interpret the large role for supply-side shocks in the generation of inflation as arguing against reliance on the ITF approach. In addition, the nominal interest rate appears to be a less powerful instrument with which to influence the inflation rate. They are also concerned about the potential for undesirable side effects that might result from large variations in interest rates, such as large and persistent swings in exchange rates or asset values.

Chand and Singh favor a more balanced approach that employs both monetary and fiscal policy as instruments to control inflation and that is reflective of supply-side phenomenon. The more active role for fiscal policy is justified by their finding of a shorter transmission lag between an expenditure stimulus and the inflation rate than is typical for the advanced countries. However, they agree that more research is needed to establish fully the role that fiscal policy should play.

Within the monetary policy sphere, they advocate the use of multiple instruments rather than relying solely on interest rates. Examples would be adjustments in liquidity requirements to regulate the supply of credit that finances investment expenditures and direct controls on capital inflows. They perceive these measures as having fewer adverse effects on asset valuations. With regard to interest rate policy, the Reserve Bank of India might seek to maintain a desired real interest rate, with the nominal interest rate being adjusted whenever the underlying inflation rate deviates from target. From time to time, shifts in liquidity preference will result in asset transactions that push interest rates above or below the target long-term level. Accommodating liquidity preference shifts through appropriate open market operations would help keep interest rates stable. All this implies that it may be more prudent and welfare enhancing for India to pursue a strategy other than the standard ITF to control inflation.

The performance of the Indian economy following the initiation of an economic reform program in 1991 has been a subject of intense intellectual debate. There are sharp differences of view on whether the economic situation of Indian workers improved in the postreform years. Some commentators characterize the postreform period as a largely jobless expansion with a marked slowing of real wage growth, particularly in rural areas.

Pre- and Post-Reform India: A Revised Look at Employment, Wages, and Inequality, by Surjit S. Bhalla and Tirthatanmoy Das

Surjit Bhalla and Tirthatanmoy Das undertake a detailed review of the available survey data on employment, unemployment, agricultural wages, and income inequality over the past thirty years to examine several of these controversial propositions. Much of the evaluation of the effects of the economic reforms is confounded by the low frequency of detailed survey data on the economic situation of Indian workers. The discussion has centered on the results from large-scale quinquennial surveys of their employment status conducted in 1983, 1987–88, 1993–94, and 1999–2000. Bhalla and Das construct a more expansive time series of available data by including two surveys from the 1970s and twelve smaller annual surveys from the 1980s and 1990s. The major advantage of the additional data is that it allows a better alignment of the data on labor market conditions with the initiation of the reforms in 1991. Because 1991 was also a year of economic crisis in India, the precise dating of the end of the prereform period and the beginning of the reform era plays a crucial role.

On the employment front, Bhalla and Das conclude that employment growth slowed between 1991 and 2003 to 1.7 percent a year, compared with a 2.6 percent rate in the 1983–91 period. They attribute a large portion of the slowdown during the 1990s to a slower rate of growth of the population of labor force age and to a decline in the labor force participation rate related in part to a rise in the proportion of persons who remained out of the labor force while enrolled in educational institutions. They argue that the slow employment growth of the 1990s is not therefore a reflection of weak labor market conditions.

Labor market surveys in India produce three alternative measures of employment status. First, usual status classifies individuals among employed, unemployed, and not in the workforce on the basis of the principal activity status of the individuals over the prior 365 days. Current weekly status follows international conventions of classifying those who worked at least one hour in the prior week as employed, and distinguishing between unemployed and out of the workforce on the basis of whether they were available for work in the prior week. A third concept of “current daily status” is also determined in the quinquennial surveys. Individuals are asked to report their activities over a seven-day period and to distinguish half days in determining the activity status. Those who work four or more hours are considered employed for the full day, and one to four hours is considered a half day. Similarly, persons who did not work but were available for four or more hours are considered to be unemployed for the full day, and those who were available for one to four hours are reported as unemployed for half a day.

Bhalla and Das point to a general perception that unemployment has increased in the postreform years as the primary rationale for a new government program aimed at providing job guarantees for rural families. They argue, however, that the measures of unemployment based on usual and weekly status show significantly lower rates of unemployment in the years after 1991 relative to the experience of the 1970s and 1980s. This conclusion also accords with their earlier interpretation that the slowing of employment growth in the 1990s was not indicative of a weak labor market. They also point out that the educational level of the unemployed is high; this is consistent with a view that much of the unemployment is the result of the more skilled members of the workforce spending longer in search of better job matches.

Third, the authors examine the patterns of real wage change in the postreform era. That analysis is faced with a severe shortage of high frequency surveys of wage developments. The quinquennial surveys provide the only information on economywide wages, and annual measures are available only for agricultural wages. The quinquennial surveys do suggest an acceleration of real wage growth after 1993, from an annual rate of 2.5 percent between 1983 and 1993–94 to 4.5 percent in the period of 1993–93 to 1999–2000. That pattern is apparent in the wage data for both urban and rural workers.

Bhalla and Das undertake a more detailed analysis of the annual data on agricultural worker wages, a subgroup of the rural workforce. This is also the group for which wage growth is alleged to have slowed sharply after the introduction of economic reforms in 1991. They compare two basic measures: the Survey of Agricultural Wages in India (AWI), and wage data from a lesser-used Survey on the Cost of Cultivation (CoC) of major crops. The AWI survey was terminated after 1999–2000 and the last available year for the CoC is 2000–01. They use a new survey to extend the other wage measures through 2004–05. The measures of real wage growth do grow at different rates over some subperiods and the year-to-year changes are erratic; but neither the AWI not the CoC measure supports the notion of significant deceleration of real wage growth after 1991.

Finally, the trend in income inequality during the 1990s is a subject that has generated great controversy among the group of researchers who have written on the subject. The analysis is largely limited to a comparison of data from the quinquennial surveys, and it is complicated by some changes in the survey methodology. Bhalla and Das believe that there may have been some increase in inequality after 1993–94 but that the change is small and largely limited to a widening of inequality at the very top of the distribution. It is also difficult to match the timing of the change with the introduction of economic reforms. In summary, Bhalla and Das maintain that the frequent assertion that the economic reforms have not helped Indian workers is not supported by the data.

Though telecommunications reform in India began in the 1980s, it achieved at best limited success in the initial decade. Beginning in the early 1990s, technological change and new government policies exhibited greater promise, with dramatic gains made in the quality of service as well as its availability in the new millennium. Telecommunications reforms represent a major success of the economic reforms in India in the last decade. Unsurprisingly, however, telecommunications access has increased more rapidly for wealthy and urban consumers than for poor and rural consumers. To address this gap, India has adopted so-called “universal service” policies, especially targeting rural villages. The philosophy behind the desire to spread the service to all is that certain services, such as electricity, water, and telecommunications, should be available to all.

Universal Telecommunications Service in India, by Roger G. Noll and Scott J. Wallsten

In their paper, Roger Noll and Scott Wallsten remind us that universal service policies are typically justified on three grounds. First, the presence of economies of scale may lead to the underprovision of the service. At best, the firm will price the service at the average cost, which is higher than the marginal cost when scale economies are present. If, in addition, the market turns imperfectly competitive due to a single supplier or a handful of suppliers, the service may be further undersupplied. Second, the government may view some services as “merit goods” that everyone should have, regardless of their willingness to pay. Finally, politics or regional development goals may induce government to transfer resources to rural or lowincome constituents.

The “merit good” argument is easier to justify for universal access to some types of infrastructure than to others. Water and sewerage, for example, involve large health externalities, and bringing these services to everyone can yield large social benefits. The provision of universal telecommunications service is more difficult to justify along these lines. Given the presence of a large proportion of the poor in the population, it can be argued that the government revenues are better spent on direct poverty alleviation programs. The issue of economies of scale points to the need for regulatory measures rather than universal service. It is true that the scale economy may take the form of an externality in the sense that the addition of new customers may lower the cost of supplying the service to the existing customers. But the firms, which are capable of figuring cost at various levels of supply, can readily internalize such externalities. Nevertheless, perhaps because of its political appeal, most countries in the world pursue the goal of universal access to telecommunications services in some form.

Noll and Wallsten also argue that the case for subsidizing the incumbent wire-line carrier, whether privatized or state-owned, to achieve the universal service objective is weak since it offers relatively little service in the poor areas in the initial equilibrium. In the era of state-owned monopolies, the telecom provider had little incentive to invest in telecommunications services in general, as witnessed by the long waiting period to obtain connections and the poor quality of service following installation. Telephone penetration and usage were low, even considering developing countries’ low incomes, with service to poor and rural areas virtually absent.

India’s first official universal service program was introduced as a part of the 1994 National Telecom Policy. That policy set the goal of providing certain “basic telecom services at affordable and reasonable prices” to all citizens. This policy was revised under the New Telecom Policy of 1999, which made the provision of telecom services in remote rural areas a higher priority and set certain specific goals to be achieved by 2002. When those goals were not met, the Department of Telecommunications adopted two objectives: providing public telephones in villages and providing household telephones in rural areas. The first objective was given higher priority.

A universal service fund was created based on the implicit assumption that competition among private providers would not generate adequate service in rural areas. The government also took the view that it could minimize the magnitude of the subsidy necessary to provide universal service by opting for only one firm in any given area. The government finances the subsidy through two taxes. The first, the universal service levy, which goes into the Universal Service Fund (USF), is a tax of 5 percent of adjusted gross revenues on all telecommunications providers except “pure value added service providers” such as Internet service providers. The second includes access deficit charges (ADCs), which are incorporated into interconnection charges and are paid directly to the incumbent state-owned enterprise Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) to compensate it for providing belowcost service in rural areas.

The USF is intended to reimburse the net cost (total cost minus revenues) of providing rural telecom service. Telecommunications firms bid for subsidies to be received in return for providing service in rural areas in an auction. The firm bidding the lowest subsidy, subject to the bid being no higher than a benchmark established by information from the incumbent wire-line monopoly, is eligible to be reimbursed that amount from the fund. Any firm with a license to provide basic or cellular service in the relevant service area is eligible to bid. The winner receives a subsidy for seven years, subject to review after three years.

In nearly all service areas, only one firm bid: the incumbent BSNL. Not surprisingly, the BSNL bid exactly the benchmark amount, which was the maximum subsidy the government was prepared to provide. The failure to create genuine competition for rural public service arose from three problems. First, the benchmark subsidy was based on data provided by BSNL, whose accounts are aggregated in a way that makes it impossible to separate costs of its various operations. Second, BSNL receives nearly all of the ADC cross-subsidies. The incumbent has potential gains from manipulating how cost information is aggregated across service categories and across high-cost and low-cost areas, because these data not only determine the benchmark subsidy, but also the magnitude of the net deficit for all local access service. Allocating some ambiguous cost elements to subsidized areas can increase both the public telephone subsidy and the ADC subsidy. Third, the auction allowed only basic service operators already providing rural service in the area to bid. Given the existing service was in any case quite limited, there was no advantage to choosing the provider from among the existing operators. Therefore, the exclusion of the firms not already present had detrimental effect on new entry into rural services commensurate advantage of choosing an existing operator.

ADCs, the second major source of universal service, are paid by private entrants to the incumbent based on the premise that basic access providers face unprofitable social service obligations and should therefore be compensated for them by entrants who are free to seek out profitable customers. The assumption underlying the expectation of these losses is that regulated price ceilings on basic monthly access service charges applying to a large number of customers are below the cost of service.

The ADC fee structure is highly inefficient for two reasons. First, the price elasticity of demand is much greater for usage than for access. Hence, taxing usage to finance access substantially distorts the former for the relatively small gain in the latter. Second, applying the tax to only some calls creates another distortion. The regulatory authority had intended to impose ADC charges for five years and has recently reduced the fee so that it now represents about 10 percent of the sector’s revenue rather than 30 percent when it was first introduced

Noll and Wallsten argue that India’s universal service policies may unfortunately have had the unintended consequences of deterring investment in precisely the areas they had hoped to target. The subsidies discourage competition, and the most efficient operators are taxed to support the least efficient operator. Fortunately, most of the telecommunications market in India is sufficiently competitive and dynamic that growth may not been hampered significantly by these inefficient policies. Nonetheless, because telecommunications is such an important industry, it is crucial to minimize inefficiencies. Noll and Wallsten conclude that India’s best approach for achieving universal service is to ensure that its policies promote competition and do not favor any single firm over another.

       

This third issue of the India Policy Forum, edited by Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya, covers India’s economic growth performance over the past quarter century and the impact of trade liberalization on the distribution of income and poverty; the distressingly poor performance of India’s elementary schools; the role of economic factors on the decline of the Indian birth rate; and the link between economic growth and environmental change by assessing the interaction between local living standards and forest degradation in the Indian mid-Himalayas. The editors' summary appears below, and you can download a PDF version of the volume, purchase a printed copy, or access individual articles by clicking on the following links: 

Download the 2006 India Policy Forum conference agenda (PDF) »
Download India Policy Forum 2006-07 - Volume 3 (PDF) »
Purchase a printed copy of India Policy Forum 2006-07 - Volume 3 »

Download individual articles:

• Sources of Growth in the Indian Economy, by Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins, and Arvind Virmani
• Trade Liberalization, Labor-Market Institutions, and Poverty Reduction: Evidence from Indian States, by Rana Hasan, Devashish Mitra, and Beyza P. Ural
• Teacher Compensation: Can Decentralization to Local Bodies Take India from the Perfect Storm Through Troubled Waters to Clear Sailing?, by Lant Pritchett and Rinku Murgai
• Does Economic Growth Reduce Fertility? Rural India 1971–99, by Andrew D. Foster and Mark R. Rosenzweig
• Managing the Environmental Consequences of Growth: Forest Degradation in the Indian mid-Himalayas, by Jean-Marie Baland, Pranab Bardhan, Sanghamitra Das, Dilip Mookherjee, and Rinki Sarkar

 

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EDITORS' SUMMARY

This is the third volume of the India Policy Forum. The journal is jointly promoted by the National Council for Applied Economic Research (NCAER) in New Delhi and the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., with the objective of presenting high-quality empirical research on the major economic policy issues that confront contemporary India. The forum is supported by a distinguished advisory panel and a group of active researchers who participate in the review and discussion process and offer suggestions to the editors and the authors. Our objective is to make the policy discussion accessible to a broad nonspecialist audience inside and outside India. We also hope that it will assist in the development of a global network of scholars interested in India’s economic transformation.

The five individual papers included in this volume were selected by the editors and presented at a conference in Delhi on July 31 and August 1, 2006. In addition to the working sessions, Pranab Bardhan, a member of the advisory panel, gave a public address on the topic of “Governance Matters in Economic Reform.” The papers cover a diverse set of macro and microeconomic topics of relevance to policymakers. The first two papers focus on India’s economic growth performance over the past quarter century and the impact of trade liberalization on the distribution of income and poverty. The third paper highlights the distressingly poor performance of India’s elementary schools. The fourth paper examines the role of economic factors on the decline of the Indian birth rate. The last paper explores the link between economic growth and environmental change by assessing the interaction between local living standards and forest degradation in the Indian mid-Himalayas.

Sources of Growth in the Indian Economy, by Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins, and Arvind Virmani

During the first three decades of its development, the Indian economy grew at the so-called Hindu rate of growth of 3 to 4 percent. But India has now turned a corner, growing at a much higher rate of 6 to 7 percent during the last two decades. How has this transition been achieved and what implications does it have for the future transformation from a primarily rural and agricultural economy to a more modern one? These are the key questions Bosworth, Collins, and Virmani address in their paper.

Bosworth et al. observe that answering these questions requires analyses of both the evolution of productivity in the three key sectors—agriculture, industry and services—and the implications for aggregate productivity growth of the reallocation of resources out of agriculture to more productive activities in industry and services. Consequently, they use a growth accounting framework to examine empirically the acceleration in economic growth that India has achieved over the past two decades. The analysis focuses on two dimensions in which India’s experience differs from that of China and other parts of Asia. First, instead of strong growth in the manufacturing sector and in exports, India’s success reflects rapid expansion of service-producing industries. Second, it has been associated with relatively modest levels of human and physical capital accumulation.

The authors construct accounts at the sectoral level, and identify the residual gains from resource reallocation across sectors. They then undertake further analysis of the role of capital accumulation—providing estimates of the returns to schooling for human capital, and reporting on trends in sectoral saving and investment in physical capital. The paper concludes with a discussion of some of the important issues for India’s growth experience and prospects for the future.

Throughout the analysis, the authors focus on the quality of the available data. The updated growth accounts incorporate recent data revisions, some of which are quite large. Extensive examination of the relevant underlying data series helps to clarify a number of issues related to how the data are constructed. In particular, the discussion highlights challenges faced by the Indian statistical agencies in preparing measures of output and employment, primarily because much of the non-agricultural workforce operates outside of standard reporting programs. Thus, India’s national accounts depend on quinquennial surveys (conducted in 1973, 1983, 1987, 1993, 1999, and 2004) for information on households and small enterprises. Researchers should have a reasonable degree of confidence in the GDP estimates for benchmark years that incorporate results from the surveys. However, for non-benchmark years, annual output data are based on interpolation and extrapolation of the labor input data required to construct output measures for India’s large unorganized sector. The lack of reliable annual series makes it impossible to pin down the precise timing of India’s growth acceleration.

A key finding of the paper is that services have shown very substantial productivity growth since the early 1980s—a result in sharp contrast to that obtained for other countries at a similar stage of development. Productivity gains in agriculture and industry have been modest, which is consistent with both the findings of prior studies of India and those for other comparable countries such as Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s. What distinguishes the Indian case is the relatively small output growth in industry: the sector has not played a major role in reallocating workers out of agriculture where they are underutilized.

Considerable attention has been focused on the role of services— especially high-tech services—as the source of India’s growth. The growth accounts attribute 1.3 percentage points of the 3.8 percent per annum growth in GDP per worker during 1980–2004 to growth in total services productivity (versus 0.7 percentage points each to agriculture and industry and 1 percent to reallocation).

However, the authors argue that the frequent emphasis on business services as the driving force behind India’s economic expansion may be overblown. Despite its extraordinary growth, the industry comprises only a small share of India’s GDP and employment. Business services provide jobs primarily for the relatively small proportion of the workforce that is highly educated, and recent increases in the returns to higher education suggest that high-skill services industries are encountering labor shortages. Furthermore, the strong gains in service sector TFP are puzzling. One might expect this in sub-sectors such as finance and business services, but these sectors remain small—just 17 percent of total services output in 2004. In fact, the growth acceleration is quite widely dispersed across service sub-sectors and rapid productivity growth seems unlikely in the biggest, which are trade, transportation and community services. Though difficult to verify, the authors express concern that an underestimate of services price inflation, particularly in the more traditional sectors, may imply an overestimate of output growth. The available measures of employment suggest a less dramatic acceleration of overall growth and a somewhat smaller focus on services.

In any case, India’s growth expansion is not creating adequate job growth for the bulk of the population that is not particularly well-educated. Thus, it is important that India broaden the base of the current expansion by promoting programs that would increase India’s attractiveness as a source of manufactured goods for the world market. Growth of the manufacturing sector would also provide a strong match for the skills of India’s workforce.

The paper also offers additional discussion of education and physical investment, both of which have an important bearing on growth and productivity. The accounting decomposition finds that the growth contribution from increases in education has been quite modest. The paper also examines the evolution of India’s saving behavior. The authors conclude that saving is not constraining India’s growth. However, there is room for increased public and foreign savings.

Pulling together the findings of their analysis, the authors draw a number of implications for India’s growth in the coming decade. A key message is that India needs to broaden the base of its economic growth through the expansion of the industrial sector—especially manufacturing. In this context, China provides a useful model, in its emphasis on exports of manufactured goods as a primary driver of growth.

To accomplish this, India needs to create a more attractive economic environment for doing business—a location able to compete effectively with China. This will require strengthening its infrastructure—including a weak and unreliable power system, and poor land transportation in many states. However, India already enjoys relatively good institutions and is strong in the areas of finance and business services.

The liberalization of the international trade regime is believed to reduce poverty through its impact on both efficiency and distribution. Expansion of trade lowers the cost of goods and services consumed by the poor and freer trade should lead to an increased demand for and higher returns to unskilled labor in poor countries. However, those gains may not emerge if workers are not able to move to the sectors and areas of expanding demand. Thus, the ultimate effect of trade expansion on poverty is ambiguous and must be determined empirically.

Trade Liberalization, Labor-Market Institutions, and Poverty Reduction: Evidence from Indian States, by Rana Hasan, Devashish Mitra, and Beyza P. Ural

In their paper, Hasan, Mitra, and Ural examine the impact of India’s trade liberalization on poverty reduction using state and regional level data from the National Sample Survey (NSS) of households. Their measure of trade policy includes changes in both tariffs and non-tariff barriers (NTBs). They weight tariffs (and alternatively NTBs) by sectoral employment to arrive at a state-level measure of the trade exposure of the labor force, and they construct a second version that is based on a principal-components aggregation of the two policy instruments. They then allow the impact of trade policy on poverty to differ across states according to the flexibility of labor-market institutions. The classification of states with flexible and inflexible labor markets is based largely on a prior study by Besley and Burgess. To obtain a clearer picture of the effects on poverty, they also investigate the impact of another important, complementary component of economic reforms, namely product market deregulation, and look also at its interaction with labor-market institutions.

The measures of poverty are drawn from the NSS surveys of 1987–88, 1993–94, and 1999–2000, and are largely based on a methodology developed by Deaton and Drèze and their approach for adjusting the poverty estimates for a change in the design of the household survey in 1999–2000. However, Hasan et al. also check the robustness of their results with two alternative measures: one based on the official Government of India (GOI) estimates of poverty, and a longer time series of state-level poverty rates created by Ozler, Datt, and Ravallion. Another innovation in the paper is that they allow the transmission of changes in protection rates to domestic prices to vary across states since distance and the quality of the transportation system should influence the extent of change in local prices.

Their principal finding is that states whose workers are more exposed to foreign competition tend to have lower rural, urban and overall poverty rates (and poverty gaps), and this beneficial effect of greater trade openness is more pronounced in states that have more flexible labor market institutions. Trade liberalization has led to poverty reduction to a greater degree in states that are more exposed to foreign competition by virtue of their industrial composition. The results hold, at varying strengths and significance, for overall, urban and rural poverty.

For example, controlling for state as well as time fixed effects, they conclude that the reduction in tariff rates over the 1990s was associated with a reduction in poverty rates ranging from 16 percent to 40 percent. Reductions in tariff rates also were associated with a decline of about 15 percent in urban poverty in states with flexible labor market institutions relative to other states. They find some evidence that industrial delicensing has had a more beneficial impact on poverty reduction in states with flexible labor institutions.

Hasan et al. contrast their evidence on the linkages between trade and poverty with a prior study by Petia Topalova, whose investigation utilized district-level data. Topalova concluded that trade liberalization slowed the pace of poverty reduction in rural districts, with the strength of this effect being inversely related to the flexibility of labor-market institutions. She found that the linkage between trade liberalization and poverty reduction was also negative in urban areas, but that result was not statistically significant. The authors provide some reasons for the differences. First, Topalova restricted her analysis to one measure of employment-weighted tariffs. The current paper includes NTBs and a principal-components aggregate of tariffs and NTBs. Second, there are significant differences between the two studies in the methods used to construct the overall employment-weighted indexes of average tariffs. Topalova included nontradable goods industries, which are explicitly excluded from the measures used in the current study. Third, the Topalova paper did not allow for the effects of changes in trade protection on domestic prices to vary across districts. Finally, the authors explored the robustness of their own results by incorporating a greater variety of poverty measures and by extending the analysis to the regional level.

India’s public elementary education system faces enormous problems. Although enrollments have increased, a recent survey of rural areas found shockingly low levels of learning achievement, confirming the cumulating evidence of a dysfunctional system. There are many other indicators of distress—high levels of dissatisfaction of parents and students with teachers, the massive and on-going shift into private schooling, and the unhappiness of the public sector teachers themselves.

Teacher Compensation: Can Decentralization to Local Bodies Take India from the Perfect Storm Through Troubled Waters to Clear Sailing?, by Lant Pritchett and Rinku Murgai

In their paper, Pritchett and Murgai argue that the current system of teacher compensation in the public sector is at the heart of many of these problems. They argue that the system of compensation within any high performance organization should be designed to attract, retain and motivate workers who, on a day-to-day basis, pursue the goals of the organization. All four elements of a system of compensation (durability of the employment relationship, structure of pay across states of the world, assignment of workers to tasks, and cash versus benefits) should work together towards this goal.

Their paper highlights the extraordinary extent to which India’s system of teacher compensation departs from this norm. While there are many variations across states, the current system can aptly be described as a combination of high pay and zero accountability. The paper documents four facts about the system of teacher compensation: (1) there is little or no ability to terminate the employment of teachers—for any cause; (2) the average pay of public sector teachers is very high relative to alternatives (both private teaching and other private sector jobs); (3) the degree of overpayment is higher for public sector teachers at the early stages of a career; and (4) the pay of public sector teachers has very little variance even potentially related to performance—much less than either private sector teachers or other private sector salaried workers.

Each of these elements of the system of compensation reinforces the lack of accountability. There is nothing in the present system to attract people well matched to teaching, to retain the best and most committed teachers, or to motivate performance of good teachers (for that matter, prevent good teachers from becoming disillusioned, cynical, and embittered and yet stay until they are 60 years old). Moreover, the institutional context of basic schooling—all the other relationships of accountability—is also weak.

Pritchett and Murgai argue that this system of compensation plays a large role in producing the current “perfect storm” in public schooling: (a) the learning achievement of students is low, (b) absenteeism of teachers is very high, (c) the treatment by teachers of students is often abysmal, (d) parents and students are dissatisfied with government schools, and (e) families are voting with their feet and pocketbooks to move their children into private schools. Perhaps worst of all, the potentially good teachers within the public system are disenchanted, overburdened, and feel disrespected by parents and managements. The authors argue that any reform of teacher compensation needs to be pro-teacher in contrast with the current system which is dramatically anti-teacher.

In one study of schools in New Delhi, teachers in government schools were compensated at a rate seven times of that of teachers in unregistered schools, they were present less than half the time, and their students consistently scored far below those of students in the unregistered schools in all subject areas. Parents and students expressed higher levels of displeasure with teacher performance in the public schools. Even so, government teachers were dissatisfied with nearly every element of their jobs.

While accepting the common view that there is no possibility of significant reform of the compensation system under the present circumstances, Pritchett and Murgai argue that the devolution of education to Panchayati Raj Institutions (PRIs) provides a unique opportunity to restructure the system to be consistent with an accountable and performance-oriented public sector. Decentralization to PRIs, if done well, has the potential to break the political impetus behind business as usual by combining a reallocation of functions across tiers of government (states and PRIs) with allowing PRIs to develop systems of compensation that are aligned with the realities of public employment and the particularities of the practice of teaching.

Pritchett and Murgai suggest that the development of a future cadre of teachers should take place within a new system under district control. They propose a system with three phases for teachers’ careers, ranging from an initial apprentice phase up to a masters level, with each stage corresponding to increased pay and prestige. Promotion from one phase to another would be based on performance reviews with input from the local school, peers, and technical reviews. The objective is to develop a professional teacher cadre at the district level, but to leave control of school administration and the actual hiring of teachers from the eligible pool with the local authorities.

Fast growth of the population has been a central concern of policy makers in the developing countries with large populations such as India and China. Reductions in fertility have been seen as an important means to achieve rapid and sustained economic growth. And, many countries have adopted policies ranging from offering incentives for fertility reduction to outright restrictions on the size of the families. The advocates of such direct measures to reduce fertility are skeptical that economic growth alone can deliver the necessary reduction in fertility without at least a major expansion of education among women.

At one level, the controversy over the positive role of economic growth in driving down fertility would seem surprising. After all, richer, more developed economies have uniformly lower fertility rates than do poorer, less developed ones. Over time many formerly poor countries have become richer and simultaneously achieved sustained fertility declines.

But there also exist examples and patterns supporting the view that fertility responds to declining mortality and a transition in cultural perspective that need not be related to growth. For example, we have countries such as Cuba, Costa Rica, and Sri Lanka with traditionally high levels of education and health and correspondingly low levels of fertility. Likewise, China has lowered fertility through direct intervention at a relatively low level of income. There also exists evidence that the timing of a first sustained decline in fertility is not connected to a particular threshold level of economic development.

Does Economic Growth Reduce Fertility? Rural India 1971–99, by Andrew D. Foster and Mark R. Rosenzweig

In their paper, Andrew Foster and Mark Rosenzweig employ a newly available panel data set to assess the impact of economic factors on fertility. The data set offers a representative sample of rural India over the period 1971–99, and it allows an examination of the main factors responsible for the rural fertility decline that occurred in India in the 1980s and 1990s. The authors first construct a simple dynamic model of fertility choice that incorporates the opportunity cost of time, the trade-off between investments in the human capital of children and family size (the so-called qualityquantity trade-off), and increased access to health and family planning services as determinants of fertility. The model yields testable hypotheses relating the fertility decision to its various determinants.

The authors then go on to use the data set to test the hypotheses so derived. A key feature of the data is that it links the households across different rounds of the survey. This permits the elimination of the influence of time-persistent cultural and preference differences across Indian states and households that may be correlated with economic change. When these cultural and preference differences are ignored, the empirical results lead to the conclusion that neither agricultural productivity growth nor changes in the value of time matter for fertility change. Cross-sectional variations in fertility decisions depend only on the spatial differences in maternal education. This analysis supports the advocates of direct intervention to influence fertility decisions.

But once the authors take the cultural and preference differences into account, the results change dramatically. The corrected results show that increases in the opportunity cost of women’s time, as reflected in female wages and increased investments in child schooling, explain the lion’s share of the fertility decline. The results leave very little role for parental schooling, male or female.

The results show that the areas of high agricultural productivity growth not only experience declines in fertility but also increases in the schooling of children and in the time devoted by married women to non-household work. The quantitative estimates suggest that aggregate wage changes, dominated by increases in the value of female wages, explain 15 percent of the decline in fertility over the 1982–99 period. In combination, changes in agricultural productivity and agricultural wage rates explain fully 61 percent of the fertility decline. Health centers are found to have had a significant effect on fertility as well, but the aggregate increases in the diffusion of health centers in villages only explains 3.4 percent of the fall because during the period there was little change in the distribution of such centers. The results thus suggest that the process of economic growth has had a major impact on fertility in India over the last two decades. The authors conclude that given sustained economic growth that continues to raise wages and increase returns to human capital, the fall in fertility in India will continue for the foreseeable future.

Managing the Environmental Consequences of Growth: Forest Degradation in the Indian mid-Himalayas, by Jean-Marie Baland, Pranab Bardhan, Sanghamitra Das, Dilip Mookherjee, and Rinki Sarkar

Given their enormous populations, the rapid, sustained growth of India and China has heightened concerns on the environmental consequences of such growth. Yet there is no accepted professional consensus on the nature and intensity of these links. For some economists, growth is seen as continuing to raise the demand for the earth’s energy resources. For others poverty is seen as the root cause, implying that growth is itself at least part of the solution. The so-called ‘environmental Kuznets curve’ hypothesis represents an intermediate view: economic development may initially aggravate environmental problems, but beyond a threshold of economic development environmental conditions improve. Yet another viewpoint stresses the importance of local institutions such as monitoring systems and community property rights. Particularly where deforestation is concerned it is argued that assigning local communities effective control of forest resources would substantially reduce environmental pressures, leaving little need for external policy interventions.

Despite these different perspectives, there is remarkably little systematic micro-empirical evidence on their relative validity. Efforts to test these hypotheses have been cast mainly on the basis of macro cross-country regressions, with only a few recent efforts to use micro evidence concerning behavior of households and local institutions governing use of environmental resources. The paper by Baland and others attempts to fill this gap through a careful analysis of the determinants of firewood and fodder collection, the chief causes of forest degradation in the mid-Himalayan region of India. The study seeks to predict the deforestation implications of future growth in the region, assess the likely impact on future livelihoods of local residents, and evaluate some specific policies to arrest forest degradation.

The analysis is based on a stratified random sample of 3,291 households in 165 mid-Himalayan villages in the Indian states of Uttaranchal (recently renamed Uttarakhand) and Himachal Pradesh, complemented by detailed measurement of forest conditions in surrounding areas used for collection of firewood and for livestock grazing. Prior accounts of the state of these forests suggest significant externality problems at both local and transnational levels. The local externality problem arises from the dependence of the livelihood of local inhabitants on neighbouring forests. The forests are important for the collection of firewood (the principal source of household energy), fodder for livestock rearing, leaf-litter for generation of organic manure, timber for house construction, and collection of herbs and vegetables. Sustainability of the Himalayan forest stock also has significant implications for the overall ecological balance of the South Asian region. The Himalayan range is amongst the most unstable of the world’s mountains and therefore inherently susceptible to natural calamities. There is evidence that deforestation aggravates the ravaging effects of regular earthquakes, and induces more landslides and floods. This affects the Ganges and Brahmaputra river basins, contributing to siltation and floods as far away as Bangladesh.

On the basis of contemporary recall the paper finds considerable evidence of forest degradation (though not deforestation) over the last quarter century in forest areas accessed by villagers. Such degradation is evident in the presence of over-lopped trees and low rates of forest regeneration, and a 60 percent increase in the average time needed to collect a bundle of firewood—approximately six additional hours per week per household. Against this background, the first part of the paper assesses the likely impact of growth in household incomes and assets on firewood collection. Such growth both gives rise to wealth effects (which raise collections by increasing household energy demand) and substitution effects (which lower collections by raising the value of time of households; almost all firewood is directly collected by consuming households with negligible amounts purchased in markets). The econometric analysis shows that the substitution and wealth effects offset each other, so that firewood and fodder collection is inelastic with respect to improvements in living standards. The paper finds no evidence for any effects of poverty or growth on forest pressure, nor any Kuznets-curve patterns.

In contrast, the effects of growth in population are likely to be adverse: rising population will cause a proportional rise in collections at the level of the village, while leaving per capita collections almost unchanged. To the extent that household fragmentation induces a shift to smaller household sizes, the resulting loss of economies of scale within households will raise per capita collections even further. Hence anthropogenic pressures on forests are likely to be aggravated by demographic changes, rather than economic growth. Unless there is substantial migration out of the Himalayan villages, the pressure on forests is likely to continue to grow in the future.

The paper next estimates the effect of such further projected forest degradation on the future livelihoods of affected villagers, mainly via a further increase in collection times for firewood. This is done by estimating the effects of increased collection times by one hour, which is a plausible estimate for the next decade or two. The welfare impact of this externality turns out to be surprisingly low: the effect is less than 1 percent loss in household income across the entire spectrum of households. Moreover, there are no significant effects on child labor, nor on the total labor hours worked by adults. This indicates that the magnitude of the local externality involved in use of the forests is negligible, providing a possible explanation for lack of effort among local communities to conserve neighboring forests. The argument for external policy interventions then rests on the larger ecological effects of forest degradation, which are beyond the scope of the paper.

Should the ecological effects demand corrective action, the paper surveys the available policy options. The authors find that the principal fuel alternative to firewood, somewhat surprisingly, is LPG (liquefied petroleum gas); kerosene and electricity are still secondary (despite the region’s enormous abundance of hydropower reserves). Household firewood use exhibited considerable substitution with respect to the price and accessibility of LPG cylinders, suggesting the scope for LPG subsidies as a policy which could be used to induce households to reduce their dependence on forests for firewood. The authors estimate the effectiveness and cost of a Rs 100 and a Rs 200 subsidy for each gas cylinder. The latter is expected to induce a rise in households using LPG from 7 percent to 78 percent, reduce firewood use by 44 percent, and cost Rs 120,000 per village annually (about 4 percent of annual consumption expenditure). A Rs 100 subsidy per cylinder would be half as effective in reducing wood consumption, but would have a substantially lower fiscal cost (Rs 17,000 per village annually, approximately 0.5 percent of annual consumption).

The econometric estimates also show that firewood use was moderated when local forests were managed by the local community (van panchayats) in Uttaranchal. However, this effect is limited to those community-managed forests that were judged by local villagers to be moderately or fairly effectively administered, which constituted only half of all (van panchayat) forests. It is not clear how the government can induce local communities to take the initiative to organize themselves to manage the neighboring forests effectively, when they have not done so in the past. Moreover, the authors conclude that, even if all state-protected forests could be converted to van panchayat forests, firewood use would fall by only 20 percent, which is comparable to the effect of a Rs 100 subsidy per LPG cylinder.

       

The fourth volume of the India Policy Forum features papers on schooling inequality, the duration of microfinance groups, sub-national fiscal flows, and reform of the power sector, land policies, and higher education. Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth, and Arvind Panagariya edited the volume. The editors' summary appears below, and you can download a PDF version of the volume: 

Download India Policy Forum 2007-2008 - Volume 4 (PDF) »
Download the 2007-2008 India Policy Forum conference agenda » 

Download individual articles:

• The Political Economy of the Indian Fiscal Federation
• Can Schooling Policies Affect Schooling Inequality? An Empirical Evaluation of School Location Policies in India
• Mortgaging the Future? Indian Higher Education
• Microfinance Lifespans: A Study of Attrition and Exclusion in Self-Help Groups in India

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EDITORS' SUMMARY

The India Policy Forum held its fourth conference on July 17 and 18 of 2007 in New Delhi. This issue of the journal contains the papers and the discussions presented at the conference. The first paper examines the fiscal relationship between the Central Government and the states of India. The next two papers focus on the Indian educational system, specifically the social implications of government policies governing access to primary and secondary schools, and the challenges facing the country’s system of higher education. The fourth paper evaluates the performance of an important component of India’s microfinance system. Finally, the fifth paper provides an assessment of recent efforts to reform the distribution segment of the electric power industry. In addition to the working sessions of the conference, T.N. Srinivasan of Yale University, a member of the advisory panel, delivered a public lecture on the topic of: “Economic Reforms, External Opening and Growth: China and India.”

The Political Economy of the Indian Fiscal Federation

Despite massive unfulfilled need and repeated rhetorical commitment to increase public spending, public expenditure in India on education and health has never exceeded more than 3.3 and 1.3 percent of GDP, respectively. Implementing such spending, and to a large degree paying for it, is the responsibility of India’s states. In her paper, Indira Rajaraman argues that an important explanation for this persistently low level of spending lies in the nature of fiscal transfer arrangements in India’s federal structure, particularly the unpredictable and discretionary nature of significant components of these transfers.

The assignment of expenditure responsibilities and revenue rights in India gives rise to a vertical fiscal gap at the sub-national (state) level. The closure of this gap is provided for by the appointment, every five years, of a constitutional body called the Finance Commission. The report of each Commission, once accepted by the government, prospectively defines the formula for statutory flows from the national government (the “Center”) for the succeeding quinquennium. Such statutory flows from the Center to the states are predictable in relation to the underlying tax base, are pre-defined both in aggregate and in their distribution between states, and are unconditional. In Rajaraman’s view, these are all desirable properties to permit states to make multi-year expenditure commitments of the kind needed for provision of primary education and health.

However, such statutory flows represent only part of the story. In the years before 2005, statutory flows never exceeded 60 percent of the total flow. The remaining Center–state transfers took place under a range of nonstatutory mechanisms, largely under the control of an extra-constitutional body called the Planning Commission, and were unpredictable in aggregate from year to year.

While initially entirely discretionary, in 1969–70 the inter-state allocation of a portion of these “Plan” transfers was in turn subjected to a periodically revised formula (commonly referred to as the “Gadgil Formula”). However, this formulaic distribution was accompanied by a shift from a full grant basis to one comprising 70 percent loans and 30 percent grant. This shift to borrowed funds rather than grants implicitly altered incentives away from health and education state-level spending, which were unable to bear the ensuing interest burden. This disincentive, associated with the loan component, led to a gradual reduction in the share of this formulaic component in overall non-statutory flows.

Against this policy and institutional background, the paper performs three empirical exercises to determine the year-to-year changes in the share in grants from the Center received by states in aggregate that was not subject to formula and therefore open to bargaining by the states. The first empirical exercise quantifies the non-formulaic bargaining margin within aggregate flows for each year of the period 1951–2007, and estimates it to have varied inversely with an index of political fractionalization in the federation. As fractionalization increased, the formulaic share rose. The system thus fluctuated in response to changes in the political situation. This instability is inappropriate for funding requirements of basic developmental services.

The second exercise tests whether the control over aggregate state borrowing from the financial markets (constitutionally vested at the national level, and an important force for macroeconomic stability) represents opportunistic behavior influenced by the national electoral cycle. The difference between the consolidated fiscal imbalance, or deficit (aggregated across national and state levels), and the imbalance for the Central Government alone, provides a proxy measure for measuring the extent of sub-national borrowing from financial markets.

The consolidated fiscal imbalance is shown to have risen in years preceding Parliamentary elections. This is in contrast to the fiscal imbalance at the Center, which was not dictated by the electoral cycle. Taken together, the two sets of specifications strongly suggest that aggregate Central limits on state borrowing from financial markets were raised in pre-election years.

This inter-temporal variability, together with the spatial distortions implicit in the opaque system for allocating borrowing entitlements across the states in all years, further adds to the fiscal uncertainty faced by states, and inhibits orderly and sustained planning.

The third empirical exercise deals with a major initiative that commenced in 2005 to reduce the accumulated debt burden of the states. The proposal to reduce this debt originated from the Finance Commission, and addressed debt owed by the states to the Center arising from the loan component of Plan transfers mentioned earlier. The debt relief was to be granted in exchange for promises of fiscal adjustment.

The Finance Commission took the view, later endorsed by Parliament, that the differences in initial conditions across states should be taken into account in setting such conditionality. However the conditionality actually imposed by executive action at the Center envisaged a common terminal year deficit level for all states, implying a difference in the magnitude of adjustment that varies by as much as 10 percent of state GDP, with presumed adverse consequences, once again, for the stable provision of essential state level developmental services.

Starting in 2005–06, there has been a regime change with the replacement of direct Central lending to states for Plan expenditure, with a more inflexible system of caps on state borrowing as part of the conditionality for the above-mentioned debt concessions. Thus, the kinds of uncertainties and patterns in aggregate borrowing limits on states will not be visible for a while longer.

Rajaraman further notes that there has been a fall over the last ten years in the share of state expenditure in overall public spending on health and education because of the huge new Central expenditures on primary education and mid-day meals in schools, which are not routed through states. Thus, the policy response has been to alter the pattern of functional responsibility, rather than restoration to the states of their constitutionally assigned functions, with correction of the adverse incentives that became embedded in the de facto structure of sub-national funding.

Finally, Rajaraman also uses the empirical exercises to draw implications for the nature of dialogue between the Center and the states regarding fiscal matters. She notes the absence of a dispute-resolution forum where the de facto functioning of fiscal arrangements can be subjected to continual examination and monitoring by all partners to the federation. Within such a forum, major issues spanning Central transfers, revenue rights, expenditure externalities, and unfunded mandates, could be resolved in a participatory framework. Its need is likely to become even more urgent as India moves to an integrated nation-wide goods and services tax (GST), where the direct role of the states in revenue collection would be even more restricted, and the need for a broad review of fiscal federal arrangements even more urgent.

Can Schooling Policies Affect Schooling Inequality? An Empirical Evaluation of School Location Policies in India

Over the past several decades, a primary tool used by the Government of India to improve school enrollments, particularly those of the Scheduled Castes (SCs), has been the expansion of access to schools. To this end, the government has long embraced the objective of providing a school within easy walking distance from each rural household. In her paper, Anjini Kochar argues that in implementing this policy, scant attention was paid to the fact that targeting access to schools as a primary objective may constrain the government in addressing other critical aspects of schools, particularly those related to school quality. This is because decisions regarding the location of schools determine more than just access to schools; they combine with the residential structure of a society to define the school community, and hence school characteristics known to affect schooling attainment.

According to Kochar, it is the nature of residential communities in rural India that makes this trade-off between access and quality likely. Rural India resides in habitations—distinct residential settlements within a village— which vary in size but are, on average, fairly small. Because habitations are generally organized along caste lines, the rural economy is thus characterized by a considerable degree of caste-based segregation. The stated policy objective of providing a school within easy walking distance of each household, in conjunction with the geographic distance across habitations, requires the government to adopt a policy that provides schools to relatively small habitations and frequently results in multiple schools within a village.

Therefore, the paper argues that the current school location policy does not permit an optimal allocation of schools based upon enrollment or size. Because school enrollment determines the availability of inputs such as the number of teachers, there is a corresponding variation in the number of teachers per school. To the extent that this attribute of schools affects schooling attainment, Kochar argues that the policy generates schooling inequality across regions, with schools in smaller habitations being of generally lower quality than those in larger habitations.

School location policies also affect the caste composition of the student population. When schools are provided in SC habitations as well as in the other habitations of a village, the residential segregation that characterizes the village gets translated into a corresponding system of de facto schooling segregation. The corresponding difference in the caste composition of students across village schools is also likely to affect schooling attainment. 

The paper explores these hypotheses empirically, examining the relationship between school enrollments and availability of schools within habitations, as well as the effect of the number of teachers and the prevalence of schooling segregation. To identify the effect of these school attributes, Kochar uses the policy rules that determine whether a school can be placed in a habitation and the number of teachers assigned to a school. These rules are specified at the district level, and are implemented by the government based on district level data on habitations collected in the All India Education Surveys (AIES). The paper uses this same data that guides policy decisions, and relates it to household data from the Government of India’s National Sample Surveys. The use of policy rules specific to the attributes in question, and the availability of the data that guides current policy decisions, provides a compelling source of identification. To assess the effects of school segregation, Kochar uses the insight that schooling segregation exists only when schools are provided in the SCs/STs (Scheduled Castes/Scheduled Tribes) habitations. Because the AIES data also provide information on the size distribution of SC/ST habitations, it is possible to identify the probability of schools being located in SC/ST habitations (a proxy for schooling segregation) separately from the overall effect of school availability.

The paper has two principal findings. First, based on the size distribution of habitations within a district, the author finds that the current policy rules do affect access, but they also affect teacher numbers and schooling segregation. The regression analysis shows that schools with two or fewer teachers experience reduced enrollments. The results on teacher availability suggest that the decision to provide schools even to relatively small habitations generates a source of schooling inequality: children who reside in small habitations with schools attend schools of poorer quality than those who reside in larger habitations.

Second, the author finds that school location policies also perpetuate caste-based inequalities. Since the SC habitations are generally smaller than others, this means that SC schools are of lower quality, as measured in terms of the availability of teachers. The empirical results show an asymmetric effect of schooling segregation by caste: children of upper castes benefit significantly while segregation has little effect on the SCs. The benefits of living in districts with widespread access to schools therefore vary by caste.

The results of the paper suggest that improvements in school quality cannot be affected without re-considering the government’s school location policies. Kochar admits, however, that improving school quality along the dimensions considered in the paper is no easy task. She suggests an alternative policy that consolidates habitation schools to provide one school in each village, which would enable an optimal number of teachers in each school and thereby improve schooling attainment. While the greater distance to school implied by such a consolidation, particularly for children from the SC/ST habitations, may reduce access, the paper argues that the savings generated by the consolidation could be used to implement a system of cash transfers to children from the SC and the ST conditional on their school attendance records. The positive effects from increased teachers and economies of scale are enough to provide cause for a reconsideration of school location policy in India.

Mortgaging the Future? Indian Higher Education

The higher education system in India also faces troubling distortions and suboptimal outcomes. In their paper, Kapur and Mehta argue that the vast majority of institutions of higher learning are incapable of producing students with skills and knowledge. Attendance does not serve as a screening system for the vast bulk of students, nor does it prepare students to be productive and responsible citizens. The current system is highly centralized, politicized, and militates against the production of general intellectual virtues. It may come as no surprise then, that the last few years have witnessed a rapid rise in skill premiums in India despite the country’s huge population.
 
Kapur and Mehta maintain that the poor state of the sector and the recent rise in skill premiums can be largely explained by the regulatory bottlenecks facing Indian higher education. Despite impressive reforms elsewhere, Indian higher education remains one the last bastions of the “license control raj”—with troubling implications for India’s future. The paper argues that the result is a state of crisis in Indian higher education notwithstanding the success of a few professional schools. The fact that the system produces a noticeable number of high-quality students is largely the result of Darwinian selection mechanisms and very little because of pedagogic achievements.

According to the authors, the most acute weakness plaguing India’s higher education system is a crisis of governance, both of system and of individual institutions. Because the prevailing political ideological climate views elite institutions as anti-democratic, there is a natural response in political circles to influence admissions policies, internal organization, and the structure of courses and funding. The paper provides data to show that there has been a massive increase in both private higher education and the flight of elites to foreign educational institutions. However, the private sector also suffers from regulatory obstacles and governance weaknesses, raising doubts as to its ability to address the huge latent demand for quality higher education in the country.
 
From the perspective of the three key suppliers of Indian higher education—markets, the state, and civil society (philanthropy)—the authors elaborate on six significant distortions. First, the process of regulatory approvals diminishes the capacity of private investment to respond to market needs. Second, the regulatory process produces an adverse selection in the kind of entrepreneurs that invest since the success of a project depends less upon the pedagogic design of the project and more on the ability to manipulate the regulatory system. Third, there are significant market failures in acquiring physical assets that are necessary for educational institutions, especially land. Fourth, regulatory approvals are extremely rigid with regard to infrastructure requirements (irrespective of costs or location) and academic conformity to centrally mandated course outlines, degree structures, and admissions policies. Fifth, a key element of a well-functioning market — competition—is distorted by restricting foreign universities from setting up campuses in India, which limits benchmarking to global standards. Sixth, another central element of a well-functioning market, informational transparency, is woefully inadequate.

The university system in India is the collateral damage of Indian politics. As the paper demonstrates, the dismal educational outcomes are not the result of limited resources. For politicians, the benefits of the license-control raj extend beyond old-fashioned rent seeking by manipulating contracts, appointments, admissions, and grades in government-run colleges and universities to the use of higher education for vote-banks, partisan politics, and as a source of new entrepreneurial activities.

The authors identify three key variables that help to clarify the political economy of India’s higher education: the structure of inequality in India, the principal cleavages in Indian politics, and the nature of the Indian state. India is an outlier in the extreme degree of educational inequality, which has led to a populist redistributive backlash. However, the specific redistributive mechanisms are conditioned by the principal cleavages in Indian politics and the nature of the Indian state. The growth of identity politics has sharply enhanced political mobilization around two key cleavages in Indian society: caste and religion. Consequently, redistributive measures follow these two cleavages rather than other possibilities such as income, region (urban–rural), or gender. Thus, the focus on redistribution helps explain why Indian politicians have obsessed over reservations (that is, quota-based affirmative action) in elite institutions of higher education rather than improvements in the quality of primary and secondary schooling, and the thousands of colleges of abysmal quality.

The consequences of the preceding political economy are onerous. One, a diminished signaling effect of higher education; two, an ideological entrapment between what the authors call half-baked socialism and halfbaked capitalism, with the benefits of neither; and three, a pathology of statism wherein higher education policy is being driven foremost by the state’s own interest (or perhaps its own ideological whims). Much of what goes in the name of education policy is a product of the one overriding commitment of the education bureaucracy—namely state control in as many ways as possible.

The paper also highlights the role of the Indian judiciary in higher education reforms, arguing that it has done as much to confuse as to clarify the existing regulatory framework. Although there has been a distinct shift in the Supreme Court’s stance in the past decade, its primary response does not always center on what will enable the education system to adequately respond to demands. Rather, it has uneasily and often confusingly attempted to reconcile disparate principles, be it the dichotomy between education being a charitable or commercial enterprise, or the inherent tension between institutional autonomy and equitable access in higher education.

Kapur and Mehta conclude with a few options for change moving forward. Market failure in higher education means that substantial public investment will continue to be critical in this sector. However, since there are few clear analytical criteria to address the central question of what is “good” higher education, the paper argues that a regulatory system that emphasizes diversity, flexibility, and experimentation is in the long run most likely to succeed. Such a system will also need a different conception of accountability than the one currently prevailing in the Indian system, where resource allocation decisions are centralized to an extreme degree in the Planning Commission, the Ministry of Human Resource Development, and the University Grants Commission. Its quality depends entirely upon the informational resources of a very small group of decision makers and presumes an omniscience that few decision makers can have. Instead India needs to move to a regulatory system with increased horizontal accountability that empowers students to make better informed decisions. Finally, Indian policy makers need to recognize that the competition for talent is now global and that only a combination of a flexible and supple state system that enlists the energies of the market as well as a committed non-profit sector will be able to meet the challenges and the vast scale of demand for higher education in India.

The expansion of rural credit through the “formal” financial system has been a major goal of Indian policy since independence. While a number of initiatives (including nationalization of the country’s major commercial banks) have been taken over the years, success of these initiatives has been only partial.

In 1992, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central bank and banking regulator, issued guidelines to the public sector commercial banks (which still dominate Indian banking) encouraging them to lend to small preformed groups called “self-help groups” (SHGs). These groups are almost always composed of rural women, and are often assisted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in their formation and their subsequent growth and development.

While the scheme, sometimes called the “commercial bank–SHG linkage scheme”, was in part inspired by the success of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank in sustainably widening access to financial services in that country, the Indian SHG scheme differs in several respects from the Bangladesh model, and therefore needs to be assessed in its own right. One such difference is the provision of subsidized refinancing to the commercial bank by the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) (a publicly-owned affiliate of the RBI). The RBI reports that over 2.5 million of such groups have borrowed from commercial banks since 1992, and loan disbursements by commercial banks to SHGs were 29 percent of all direct bank credit to small farmers in 2004–05.

Microfinance Lifespans: A Study of Attrition and Exclusion in Self-Help Groups in India

However, in spite of the growing importance of SHGs as a source of credit to the poor, there is little systematic evidence on their internal functioning. The paper by Baland and Somanathan attempts to fill this informational gap by using survey data on SHGs created during the period 1998–2006. It does so by describing the survival of groups and members within groups, documenting group activities, and estimating the determinants of group and member duration using an econometric survival model.

The data comes from a survey of 1,102 rural SHGs and the 16,800 women who were members of these groups at some point during the period 1998– 2006. It considers all groups formed by PRADAN (an NGO that has actively promoted SHGs since the start of the NABARD program) in the districts of Keonjhar and Mayurbhanj in northern Orissa, and the Raigarh district in the newly formed state of Chhattisgarh in central India. Although the group members are engaged in a variety of collective activities, saving and credit do seem the most important. Almost all groups surveyed had made small loans to their members and 68 percent of them had received at least one loan from a commercial bank.

For those members who do borrow from the group the average size of the loan, provided from internal group funds, is Rs. 2,200 per year. For groups with at least one bank linkage, 83 percent of members in the group received some part of this loan, and the average amount received by these members is Rs. 2,189 per year. Although loan sizes provided by some specialized microfinance institutions are often larger, these SHG loans are sizable as a fraction of local earnings and, for women who received both group loans and bank loans, it corresponds to roughly two months of labor earnings at the minimum wage in these areas.

The group members in many SHGs appear to be collectively involved in activities not directly related to credit. About 10 percent of the surveyed groups are involved in the preparation of school meals, 3 percent administer state programs that distribute subsidized foodgrains, and about half of them get involved in family or village conflicts or help members during periods of personal distress. These groups therefore seem to play a role in promoting solidarity networks in the community.
 
The paper then estimates models of both group and member duration. It finds that factors behind group survival are quite different from those affecting member longevity. With respect to group survival, the highest attained level of education in the group is important for its survival, perhaps because some educated members are needed to facilitate transactions and ensure that group accounts are accurate. The presence of other SHGs in the area also has a positive effect on group duration. It may be that a dense cluster of groups allows for the sharing of costs, provides each group with ideas for successful activities, or simply instills in members the desire to survive, compete, and be part of a larger network.

Drawing upon on a large literature pointing to the importance of social heterogeneity in collective action, the paper then explores whether such heterogeneity matters for the average duration of groups and the members within groups. For each member surveyed, the paper records both their individual caste group (or jati) and the “official” caste category to which they belong—ST, SC, Other Backward Castes (OBC), and a residual category often termed General Castes that we refer to as Forward Castes (FC).

The particular question explored is whether heterogeneity matters for group functioning when members belong to different jatis in the same official caste category. The paper finds that commonly used measures of fractionalization and social heterogeneity based on these classifications do not have systematic effects on group survival, but that they do help explain the departure of individuals from groups. Even within broad caste categories, heterogeneity matters. This suggests that the “official” classifications fail fully to capture the relevant social hierarchy.

The members from traditionally disadvantaged groups, especially from the ST, are more vulnerable to group heterogeneity. In addition to group heterogeneity, lower levels of education, lower landholdings, and fewer relatives within the SHG are also associated with higher rates of member exit.

The paper also finds that the bulk of the difference in the duration of membership in a SHG observed between Chhattisgarh and Orissa can be attributed to characteristics of groups in these areas; the authors find that state-level variations in performance are negligible once these characteristics are incorporated in their model.

The results suggest that it is problematic to evaluate the success of microfinance interventions based on conventionally reported coverage figures because they do not account for attrition. The authors’ concern is not with overall attrition rates but with the selectivity they exhibit. It is predominantly the poorer and socially marginalized communities that leave the SHG network and this makes it unlikely that women moving out of SHGs enter individual contracts with lending institutions. It also means that some of those in desperate need of credit cannot obtain it from within this sector. To arrive at concrete policy prescriptions for this sector, more information is needed about the financial opportunities available to members once they leave this sector and the extent to which SHG lending crowds out other types of lending to the poor. Although the duration of membership is only one, admittedly crude, measure of the performance of the microfinance sector, the study suggests that survey data which follows members and groups in this sector is critical to an assessment of Indian microfinance.

The Power Sector in India: An Inquiry into the Efficacy of the Reform Process

Electricity supply constitutes the most important infrastructure constraint on overall economic growth in India. While the telecommunications sector has gone through a revolution of increased service and lower prices, and signs of progress are visible in virtually all areas of transportation, progress in improving the performance of the electricity sector has been painfully slow. The paper by Saugata Bhattacharya and Urjit R. Patel examines the sources of the inefficiencies and undertakes an evaluation of the efforts to reform the industry’s distribution segment, which is dominated by state governments.

The electricity sector can be divided into three segments: the generation of electricity using a variety of fuels; the transmission of electricity from generating plants over high voltage towers and lines to the major distribution points; and the distribution of electricity from distribution points to consumers whether industrial or residential. While both the Central Government and the states have the constitutional right to legislate in areas of generation and transmission, distribution is entirely under the jurisdiction of the states. Reform in the electricity sector is made far more difficult than in the telecommunications sector because it requires active participation from the states, which often lack the necessary technical, legal, and administrative talent as well as motivation.

By the early 1960s, the electricity sector had become a vertically integrated monopoly in each state with generation, transmission, and distribution coming under a single umbrella known as the State Electricity Boards (SEBs). Recent reforms have resulted in the unbundling of these segments in many but not all states, and distribution has been delegated to autonomous distribution companies (discoms). With rare exceptions, the latter remain in the public sector.

A key problem facing the electricity sector is the large magnitude of aggregate technical and commercial (ATC) losses. In effect, ATC losses reflect that fraction of power generation for which there is no remuneration. Nationally, they amounted to 37.2 percent of electricity generated in 2001–02. Electricity shortages could be considerably alleviated if these losses could be brought down to normal international levels. Bhattacharya and Patel analyze the success achieved in this area through a variety of reform efforts beginning in the early 2000s. They emphasize the state-by-state variation in performance as a means of identifying the most successful reform measures. The authors identify three specific reforms. First, SEBs, which buy electricity from central public sector generation companies, have traditionally accumulated large arrears with the latter. The Central Government offered them a one-time settlement (OTS) scheme provided they undertook a set of efficiency-enhancing steps. Second, the Central Government followed up the OTS with the Accelerated Power Development and Reform Program (APDRP) under which incentives were offered to undertake a variety of reforms. Finally, the government introduced the landmark Electricity Act of 2003 to bring about nation-wide systemic reforms in the sector.
 
The authors study revenues and cash flows of discoms and SEBs to explain the connection between the reform initiatives and financial performance across states. They also devise a composite index of commercial orientation, which they call the Index of Revenue Orientation (IRO), and rank utilities according to it. The authors explore data over several years from a consistent group of SEBs/discoms on outcomes, and the concomitant key economic and financial parameters that indicate the effect of reform steps associated with SEBs/discoms.

The analysis yields a number of provisional findings. First, at an aggregate level, the deterioration in the power sector has been arrested. The financial situation of the sector has eased and state government subsidies as a ratio to GDP have declined. The sector, nevertheless, is still far from financial viability. The key performance indicators, after having improved significantly in the immediate aftermath of the reform measures, seem to have stagnated after 2003–04. The ATC losses, while having dipped slightly from the 2000–01 crisis levels, remain very high. The basic problem is that although the sector is expected to have made a small cash profit at an all- India level in 2005–06, there are simply not enough resources in the state government-owned system to add capacity (and/or buy excess capacity from other systems) on any appreciable scale, let alone that which is required to power India’s economic growth.

Second, there are significant differences across states and utilities in performance and related indicators (including average revenue realization, collection efficiency, composition of demand, power units input, cost of supply, and physical losses). Also, the variability in performance among states and among utilities has increased between 2001–02 and 2004–05. The outcomes and many of the underlying explanatory variables have exhibited even greater unevenness after the reform measures than in 2001–02. Some states have improved significantly and some have deteriorated sharply. Five utilities account for 80 percent of the total cash losses and another five utilities contribute 78 percent of the cash profits.
 
Finally, using their IRO, authors note that the spread of performance between utilities increased in 2004–05, compared to the situation in 2001–02. While the average index value increased from 1.14 in 2001–02 to 1.3 in 2004–05, the associated standard deviation rose from 0.9 to 1.2. In other words, utilities had a more homogenous ordering of revenue orientation in 2001–02 than in 2004–05. The authors also show that the strongest influence on the extreme ends of the rankings in the IRO was the relative amount of power supplied to the subsidizing (industry) segment versus the subsidized (agriculture and residential) segment.

What implications do these findings have for policy? Various utilities have placed emphasis on different strategies for enhancing revenues. The fragmented information indicates that there is significant progress in many of the basic inputs of utilities. These, however, do not seem to be rapidly translating into higher revenues and cash flows. The unevenness in performance among discoms suggests that there would be large gains to tariff setting at the level of discoms rather than states, or, even at the level of distribution circle and city. This would attract reliable suppliers to discoms or circles who are paying their bills and lead to lower tariffs in an area with low ATC losses. The variation of improvements in different states is also a warning sign of the increasing disparities in the ability of states to attract investments and foster growth.

       

The fifth issue of the India Policy Forum, edited by Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya, includes papers on India’s financial sector, including capital account liberalization, currency appreciation and capital reserves, as well as growth and employment in Indian manufacturing and the impact of private education. The editors' summary appears below, and you can purchase a printed copy, or access individual articles by clicking on the following links: 

Download the 2008 India Policy Forum conference agenda »
Download India Policy Forum 2008-2009 - Volume 5 »
Purchase a printed copy of India Policy Forum 2008 - Volume 5 »

Download individual articles:

• Some New Perspectives on India's Approach to Capital Account Liberalization, by Eswar Prasad
• The Cost of Holding Excess Reserves: Evidence from India, by Abhijit Sen Gupta
• Big Reforms But Small Payoffs: Explaining the Weak Record of Growth and Employment in Indian Manufacturing, by Poonam Gupta, Rana Hasan, and Utsav Kumar
• What Explains India's Real Appreciation?, by Renu Kohli and Sudip Mohapatra
• Private Schooling in India: A New Educational Landscape, by Sonalde Desai, Amaresh Dubey, Reeve Vanneman, and Rukmini Banerji

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EDITORS' SUMMARY

The fifth annual conference of the India Policy Forum was held on July 15 and 16 of 2008 in New Delhi. This issue of the journal contains the papers and discussion presented at the conference. A total of five papers were presented. The first paper examines the growth of private schools in India and their influence on school quality. It is an extension of recent issues of this journal that have evaluated the performance of India’s education system. The second paper addresses a major question of why the growth of manufacturing output and employment in India has been disappointingly low. The final three papers share a common focus on India’s external financial relations. The third paper analyzes the process of capital account liberalization and the integration of India’s financial institutions into the global financial system. The fourth paper measures the evolution of prices in the nontradable and tradable sectors of the Indian economy and seeks explanations for the rise in the relative price of nontradables. The last paper addresses the issue of the adequacy of India’s current foreign exchange reserves.

Private Schooling in India: A New Educational Landscape

Although the growth of private schooling in India is ubiquitous even in rural areas, the contours and implications of this change remain poorly understood, partially due to data limitations. Official statistics often underestimate private school enrollment and our understanding of the effectiveness of private education in India is also limited. If we assume that parents know what is best for their children and that what is beneficial privately is also beneficial socially, their decision progressively to opt for private schools would suggest the superiority of the latter over public schools.

In their paper, Sonalde Desai, Amaresh Dubey, Reeve Vanneman, and Rukmini Banerji point out, however, that this is not a foregone conclusion. The vast body of research on school quality, especially that relating to the United States, suggests that much of the observed difference in school outcomes results from differences in parental background and levels of parental involvement with children going to different schools. In the Indian context, one runs the additional risk that many private schools are poorly endowed with resources, unrecognized (lack accreditation), and have untrained teachers. A proper empirical examination is essential to arrive at an informed assessment.

The authors use data generated from a new survey, the India Human Development Survey 2005 (IHDS), jointly conducted by researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Council of Applied Economic Research. These data allow them to explore some of the links between private school growth and school quality in India. They begin by providing a description of public and private schools in India as well as some of the considerations that guide parents in selecting private schools. They then examine whether private school enrollment is associated with superior student performance and whether this relationship is concentrated in certain sections of the population.
 
The IHDS data show considerably higher private school enrollment, particularly in rural areas, than documented in other studies. The authors place private school enrollment (including in schools receiving grants-in-aid from the government) among children aged 6–14 years at 58 percent in urban and 24 percent in rural areas. Private school enrollment is particularly high in India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh. In terms of outcomes, based on specially designed reading and arithmetic tests administered to children aged 8–11 years, those in private schools exhibit better reading and basic arithmetic skills than their counterparts in government schools.

But since these children also come from higher income households and have parents who are better educated and more motivated to invest in their children’s education, it is important to control for selectivity bias. The paper utilizes a variety of techniques (including multivariate regression, switching regression, and family fixed effects) to examine the relationship between private school enrollment and children’s reading and arithmetic skills. While no model is able to completely eliminate possible biases—there is a different source of bias left in each case—taken together, the results strongly indicate that private school enrollment is associated with higher achievements in reading and arithmetic skills. The magnitude of the gain from private school enrollment varies from one-fourth to one-third standard deviation of the scores.

The paper also distinguishes the relative magnitudes of the benefits from private schooling to children with rich versus poor economic backgrounds. It finds that the benefits to private school enrollment for children from lower economic strata are far greater than those for children from upper economic strata; at upper income levels, the difference between private and government school narrows considerably. This seems plausible since at upper income levels, students are likely to have better access to alternative educational resources including well-educated parents.

While the results of the paper point to positive benefits from private schools, especially for the underprivileged, the authors emphasize that their analysis does not imply that private schooling is the elixir that will cure the woes of primary education for children from poor families. They argue that both empirical results based on the IHDS data and theoretical considerations point to the need for caution.

Empirically, the paper finds that while private school students perform better than their counterparts in government schools, these effects are modest in comparison to other factors influencing the outcomes. For example, the results show substantial inter-state variation in the scores of both government and private school students. Controlling for parental characteristics, government school students in states as diverse as Kerala, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, and West Bengal perform at a higher level than private school students in many other states. More importantly, the private school advantage seems to be concentrated in states such as Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand (formerly Uttranchal), and Madhya Pradesh—states known for poorly functioning public institutions as well as high rates of poverty or low per capita incomes.

These results suggest that before a blanket embrace of private schooling, it may be worthwhile to understand why some government schools function well and others do not. Blaming teacher absence is superficially appealing, but theoretical considerations suggest that the complete story may be more complex. If the classroom environment in private schools is favorably impacted by the demands made by paying middle-class parents, a voucher program that brings a large number of poorer parents to the schools may dilute this effect. But this argument would seem to be undermined by the fact that the authors themselves find the private school effect to be significant in poor states with many students coming from poor families.

Nevertheless, the authors are correct in noting that it will be useful to further examine the processes that give rise to different classroom environments as between government and private schools before jumping to wholesale voucher programs leading to privatization of education. We must know, for example, whether children from poor households in private schools benefit because their parents are able to prevent teachers from resorting to physical punishment. And if so, would this benefit be diluted when vouchers rather than parents pay for the tuition? Can we devise mechanisms to ensure that government school teachers do not resort to discriminatory behavior when dealing with students from poor families? To date, the discourse on the benefits of private schooling in a developing country context has focused on teacher absence, lack of accountability, and lower costs of private schooling. While these are important issues, perhaps future research could try to shed additional light on other processes that establish different environments in private and public schools.

Big Reforms But Small Payoffs: Explaining the Weak Record of Growth and Employment in Indian Manufacturing

The promotion of manufacturing, particularly for export, has been a key pillar of the growth strategy employed by many successful developing countries, especially those with abundant labor. India’s recent experience is puzzling on two accounts. While India’s economy has grown rapidly over the last two decades the growth momentum has not been based on manufacturing. Rather the main contributor to growth has been the services sector. Second, the relatively lackluster performance of Indian manufacturing cannot be ascribed to a lack of policy initiatives. India introduced substantial product market reforms in its manufacturing sector starting in the mid-1980s, but the sector has never taken off as it did in other high-growth countries. Moreover, insofar as subsectors within manufacturing have performed well, these have been the relatively capital or skill-intensive industries, not the labor-intensive ones as would be expected for a labor abundant country like India.

One of the main components of reforms in India was the liberalization of the industrial licensing regime, or “delicensing.” Under the Industries Development and Regulation Act of 1951, every investor over a very small size needed to obtain a license before establishing an industrial plant, adding a new product line to an existing plant, substantially expanding output, or changing a plant’s location.

Over time, many economists and policymakers began to view the licensing regime as generating inefficiencies and rigidities that were holding back Indian industry. The process of delicensing started in 1985 with the dismantling of industrial licensing requirements for a group of manufacturing industries. Delicensing reforms accelerated in 1991, and by the late 1990s, virtually all industries had been delicensed. Large payoffs were expected in the form of higher growth and employment generation with this policy reform.
 
However, the payoffs to date have been limited. It could be argued that a lag between the announcement and implementation of the policy, and also a lag between implementation and the payoffs may be responsible. However, as many as 20 years have passed since the first batch of industries was delicensed, and the last batch of industries was delicensed almost a decade ago; the view that payoffs would occur with a lag is no longer easy to sustain.
 
What then could be the reasons for the rather lackluster performance of the industrial sector? The following factors are usually cited: (a) strict labor laws have hindered growth, especially of labor-intensive industries; (b) infrastructure bottlenecks have prevented industries from taking advantage of the reforms; and (c) credit constraints due to weaknesses in the financial sector may be holding back small- and medium-sized firms from expanding. More recently, two other factors have also been raised. First, it has been pointed out that the evolution of Indian industry may be influenced by path dependence or hysteresis so that despite the reforms of the mid-1980s and the early 1990s the relative profitability of capital and skill-intensive activities remains higher than that of labor-intensive activities. Second, the major reform initiatives undertaken so far—focused mainly on product market reforms—have been national ones. However, the working of product markets in a federal democracy such as India is influenced not only by regulations enacted by the Central Government, but also by those enacted by individual state governments. Moreover, much of the authority on administration and enforcement of regulation also rests with state governments. Accordingly, it has been pointed out that regulatory and administrative bottlenecks at the state level may be blunting the impact of reforms undertaken at the central level.

Using the Annual Survey of Industries (ASI) data at the three-digit level for major Indian states over the period 1980–2004, the paper by Gupta, Hasan, and Kumar analyzes the effects of delicensing reforms on the performance of what in India is called registered manufacturing. (The portion of manufacturing in the so-called unorganized sector is not covered by the ASI data and is therefore not analyzed in the paper; however, this component was also unlikely to have been affected by the licensing controls when these were in effect.) The paper utilizes variations in industry and state characteristics in order to identify how factors such as labor regulations, product market regulations, availability of physical infrastructure, and financial sector development may have influenced the impact of delicensing on industrial performance.

The main findings of the paper are as follows:

1. The impact of delicensing has been highly uneven across industries. Industries that are labor intensive, use unskilled labor, depend on infrastructure, or are energy dependent have experienced smaller gains from reforms.

2. Regulation at the state level matters. States with less competitive product market regulations have experienced slower growth in the industrial sector post-delicensing, as compared to states with competitive product market regulations. States with relatively inflexible labor regulations experience slower growth of labor-intensive industries and slower employment growth.

3. Infrastructure availability and financial sector development are important determinants of the benefits that accrued to states from reforms.

If supportive regulatory conditions prevailed and infrastructure availability allowed it, businesses responded by expanding their capacity and grew; thus hysteresis does not seem to matter. The authors acknowledge that their approach is subject to a few caveats. Several other major reforms have been introduced that impact Indian manufacturing, including reductions in barriers to trade and the dismantling of the policy of reserving particular industries for production by small-scale enterprises. These are not systematically examined and might interact with the impact of delicensing. Second, the neglect of the unorganized sector noted above means that the interactions between the “registered” and the “unorganized” sectors in adjusting to policy change is not systematically explored. Finally, regulations can affect firms and industries in many different ways. For example, they may create incentives for firms to operate in the informal sector, stay relatively small, or adopt particular types of techniques. While the analysis of aggregate data can shed (indirect) light on some of these effects, a more complete analysis would require the use of a microbased approach utilizing plant-level data.
 
The authors conclude that the agenda of reforms to promote manufacturing is not yet complete. Areas for additional action include further reform of labor market regulations; improvement of the business environment; provision of infrastructure and further development of the financial sector. In addition, in a federal democracy like India, reforms at the Center (especially those related to labor) need to be complemented by reforms at the state level.

Some New Perspectives on India's Approach to Capital Account Liberalization

Capital account liberalization remains a highly contentious issue. Proponents argue that rising cross-border flows of financial capital allow for a more efficient allocation of financial resources across countries and also permit countries to share their country-specific income risk more efficiently. Detractors have blamed capital account liberalization as being the root cause of the financial crises experienced by many emerging market countries. Their case has been strengthened by the lack of clear evidence of the presumed benefits of financial globalization. This debate has again become topical as many emerging market economies and even some low-income countries are coping with volatile capital inflows, with major economies like China and India contemplating further opening of their capital accounts.
 
A common argument in the literature in favor of openness from the viewpoint of the developing economies has been that access to foreign capital helps increase domestic investment beyond domestic saving. The recent literature has revived another older argument emphasizing the indirect benefits of openness to foreign capital, including the development of domestic financial markets, enhanced discipline on macroeconomic policies, and improvements in corporate governance.
 
In his paper, “Some New Perspectives on India’s Approach to Capital Account Liberalization,” Eswar S. Prasad argues that a major complication in considering capital account convertibility is that economies with weak initial conditions in certain dimensions experience worse outcomes from their integration into international financial markets in terms of both lower benefits and higher risks. For countries below these “threshold” conditions, the benefit–risk tradeoff becomes complicated and a one-shot approach to capital account liberalization may be risky and counter-productive. This perspective points to a difficult tension faced by low and middle-income countries that want to use financial openness as a catalyst for the indirect benefits mentioned above.
 
The author, nevertheless, maintains that the practical reality is that emerging market countries are being forced to adapt to rising financial globalization. In his view, capital controls are being rendered increasingly ineffective by the rising sophistication of international investors, the sheer quantity of money flowing across national borders, and the increasing number of channels (especially expanding trade flows) for the evasion of these controls. Hence, concludes the author, emerging market economies like China and India are perforce grappling with the new realities of financial globalization, wherein capital controls are losing their potency as a policy instrument (or at least as an instrument that creates more room for monetary and other macro policies). Against this background, the author provides a critical analysis of India’s approach to capital account liberalization through the lens of the promised indirect benefits from such liberalization. In recent years, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has taken what it calls a calibrated approach to capital account liberalization, with certain types of flows and particular classes of economic agents being prioritized in the process of liberalization. The result of these policies is that, in terms of overall de facto financial integration, India has come a long way, experiencing significant volumes of inflows and outflows. Although foreign investment flows crossed 6 percent of GDP in 2007–08, in the author’s view the flows are modest, placing India at the low end of the distribution of de facto financial integration measures in an international comparison across emerging market economies.

The RBI’s cautious and calibrated approach to capital account liberalization has resulted in a preponderance of FDI and portfolio liabilities in India’s stock of gross external liabilities. The author agrees that this is a favorable outcome in terms of improving the benefit–risk tradeoff of financial openness and has reduced India’s vulnerability to balance of payments crises. But he goes on to argue that the limited degree of openness has, nevertheless, hindered the indirect benefits that may accrue from financial integration, particularly in terms of broad financial sector development.

Against the backdrop of recent global financial turmoil, the author sees merit in a high level of caution in further opening the capital account. He states, however, that excessive caution may be holding back financial sector reforms and reducing the independence and effectiveness of monetary policy. He goes on to argue that increasing de facto openness of the capital account implies that maintaining capital controls perpetuates some distortions without the actual benefit in terms of reducing inflows. Flows of different forms are ultimately fungible and it is increasingly difficult, given the rising sophistication of investors and financial markets, to bottle up specific types of flows. In the author’s view, rising de facto openness in tandem with de jure controls may lead to the worst combination of outcomes—new complications to domestic macroeconomic management from volatile capital flows with far fewer indirect benefits from financial openness.

The author takes the view that a more reasonable policy approach would be to accept rising financial openness as a reality and to manage, rather than resist (or even try to reverse), the process of fully liberalizing capital account transactions. Dealing with and benefiting from the reality of an open capital account will require improvements in other policies—especially in monetary, fiscal, and financial sector regulations. This approach could in fact substantially improve the indirect benefits to be gleaned from integration into international financial markets.

In terms of specific steps, the author suggests that this may be a good time to allow foreign investors to invest in government bonds as an instrument of improving the liquidity and depth of this market. A deep and well-functioning government bond market can serve as a benchmark for pricing corporate bonds, which could in turn allow that market to develop. By providing an additional source of debt financing, it would create some room for the government to reduce the financing burden it currently imposes on banks through the statutory liquidity ratio—the requirement that banks hold a certain portion of their deposits in government bonds.

The author also recommends an “opportunistic approach” to liberalization whereby outflows are liberalized during a period of surging inflows. He suggests that if undertaken in a controlled manner, it could generate a variety of collateral benefits—sterilization of inflows, securities market development, and international portfolio diversification for households. The RBI has recently adopted such an approach by raising ceilings on external commercial borrowings in order to compensate for capital outflows. According to the author, these are steps in the right direction. But one potential problem he sees is that when taken in isolation rather than as part of a broader and well articulated capital account liberalization agenda, these measures are subject to reversal and unlikely to be very productive.

Despite this enthusiasm for capital account liberalization, the author goes on to suggest that none of this implies that the remaining capital controls should be dropped at one fell swoop. What it does imply is that there are some subtle risks and welfare consequences that can arise from holding monetary and exchange rate policies as well as financial sector reforms hostage to the notion that the capital account should be kept relatively restricted for as long as possible. It may seem reasonable to maintain whatever capital controls still exist in order to get at least some protection from the vagaries of international capital flows. However, in the author’s view, not only this is an unrealistic proposition, it could detract from many of the potential indirect benefits of financial integration. He sees steady progress toward a more open capital account as the most pragmatic policy strategy for India.

What Explains India's Real Appreciation?

India’s rapidly evolving economic landscape during the past two decades has elicited broad discussion of how changing economic factors will influence the future of India’s growth and prosperity. Often overlooked in the discussion are the effects of India’s changing economic structure on relative price dynamics, which have consequential effects on the allocation of resources in the economy. A host of recent developments would likely induce a change in relative prices, including the shift in economic policies beginning in 1991, the acceleration in economic growth, a rapid increase in exports, and rising per capita incomes and productivity growth. Taken together, these factors amount to the “catch-up” process that typically leads to an increase in the relative price of nontradables in developing economies.

In their paper, Renu Kohli and Sudip Mohapatra trace relative price developments in a two-sector, two-good (tradable and nontradable) framework for the Indian economy over the period 1980–2006. In line with their a priori expectations, the ratio of nontradable to tradable prices, also called the internal real exchange rate, rises consistently over the past one-and-a-half decades. Their empirical analysis confirms that this rise, or real appreciation, is driven by both demand and supply factors. A later section uses the results of the study to illuminate the evolution of past macroeconomic policies. Finally, using India’s recent robust economic performance as a guide, the paper concludes with a discussion on an appropriate macroeconomic policy mix for the future.

The authors construct the relative price of nontradables from the national accounts statistics using the degree of participation in trade as a criterion for classifying the economy into traded and nontraded sectors; the tradable– nontradable price series are derived as respective deflators for the two sectors. They find that the tradable and nontradable sectors are characterized by divergent inflation rates with the relative price of nontradables accelerating after 1991; on average, the difference exceeds 1 percentage point per year during 1991–2006. There are two competing explanations for such a divergent acceleration in prices: (a) the Balassa–Samuelson hypothesis posits that real exchange rates tend to appreciate as countries develop and (b) other demand-side explanations originate from changes in government spending and/or a shift in consumer preferences toward services (nontradable) as incomes rise. The preliminary analysis presented in the paper indicates a role for both factors in explaining the real exchange rate appreciation. A puzzle posed by the data, however, is the increase in the relative price of nontradables in conjunction with an expansion of the tradable sector, which suggests an offsetting role might have been played by economic reforms like import liberalization and exchange rate correction, leading to the emergence of new tradables through an increase in competitiveness.

The paper examines the determinants of this divergence in an integrated framework, exploring the role of both demand and supply side determinants. The relative price of nontradables is modeled as a function of the labor productivity growth gap between the tradable and nontradable sectors, real government expenditure as a share of gross domestic product, real per capita income, and a measure of import tariffs. The labor productivity growth gap and the import tariff rates capture the supply-side influences due to technological change (the Balassa–Samuelson effect) and the impact of trade liberalization, which accelerated after 1991. The fiscal and income growth variables summarize the demand side impact upon relative prices. The regression results reveal a significant influence of both demand and supply factors. A percentage point rise in the relative price of nontradables is associated with a 5 percent increase in the labor productivity growth gap, a 4 percent increase in per capita income growth, and a 3 percent increase in fiscal growth; the estimated impact of a fall in import prices upon the relative nontradables’ inflation rate is 0.04. The results are robust to a number of sensitivity checks, including different estimation methods, stability, specification, omission, and inclusion of variables as well as alternate definitions of the variables.

A decomposition of the relative price change over the sample period indicates that demand factors accounted for almost three-fourths of the average relative price increase over the sample period. In contrast, the supply-side influence stemming from the labor productivity growth differential between the two sectors accounted for only 35 percent of the mean of the dependent variable. Noting the rapid decline in import tariffs after 1991, the authors argue that this result underscores the role of convergence in tradable prices and its contribution to the divergence in sectoral inflation rates in liberalizing economies.

Kohli and Mohapatra link their results to macroeconomic policy by tracing the past evolution of exchange rate and fiscal policies in India. They argue that the fiscal expansion of the 1980s ending in the 1991 crisis led to a rise in the inflation rate of the nontradable sector, while the exchange rate policy favored steady depreciation in order to retain competitiveness and boost growth. Noting India’s recent and potential economic performance, its buoyant exports, and strong per capita income growth, they observe that the pressures upon real exchange rate appreciation, internal as well as external, are likely to continue—and indeed, accelerate—in the future. Under the circumstances, an appropriate macroeconomic policy mix would be to continue with the gradual increase in exchange rate flexibility so as to absorb the equilibrium shifts in the economy. This could be complemented with fiscal consolidation to offset competitiveness losses arising from the nominal and real exchange rate appreciation.

The Cost of Holding Excess Reserves: Evidence from India

Finally, the paper raises a number of critical data issues, not the least of which is the absence of a services price index in India. The implicit price series developed in the paper strongly suggests an understatement of generalized inflation through the current inflation indicator, the wholesale price index (WPI), which can be misleading. It also identifies gaps in the data on sectoral employment shares, emphasizing the need for sufficiently disaggregated information to enable fruitful analysis and informed policymaking.
 
The Asian financial crisis of 1997–98 served as a startling revelation to emerging economies of the drawbacks of financial integration. Neither the International Monetary Fund nor reliance on more flexible exchange rate regimes succeeded in preventing—or indeed, adequately combating—such a systemic crisis. Moreover, even countries practicing sound macroeconomic policies realized they were not immune to such crises as they can be hit by contagion and financial panic from other countries, regardless of their proximity. As a result, many countries have decided that they need to protect themselves against a speculative currency attack, and further, that the key to self-protection is the accumulation of substantial holdings of liquid foreign exchange. Over the past decade, developing countries, and particularly those in East and South Asia, have greatly expanded their foreign currency reserves. By the middle of 2008, the reserves of China, South Korea, Russia, and India alone amounted to over US$2.85 trillion. In the case of India, reserve accumulation has increased five-fold since 2001–02.
 
The security that results from high reserves does come at a price, however. The magnitude of reserves being held combined with the fact that most reserves are held as low-yield government bonds suggests that the opportunity cost of reserve holdings can be substantial. In his paper, Abhijit Sen Gupta employs a new empirical methodology to evaluate the factors influencing the demand for international reserves in emerging markets, and he estimates the costs incurred in the process for India in particular. Sen Gupta argues that the traditional analysis of the costs of reserve holdings, which considers a single adequacy measure (namely, import cover), does not reflect the multitude of factors influencing demand for international reserves in a financially integrated world. In addition to the desire to meet potential imbalances in current account financing, a central bank may also hold reserves to defuse a potential speculative run on its currency or to cover its short-term debt obligations.

The author first introduces a simple empirical model to highlight the principal determinants of reserve holding in emerging countries. Using the results of this model, one can create an “international norm” of reserve holding, and thereby calculate a measure of “excess reserves” which is the difference between actual reserve holdings and this international norm. Next, Sen Gupta provides a brief discussion of the history of reserve accumulation in India. As the bulk of India’s reserves are held in the form of highly liquid securities or deposits with foreign central banks and international organizations, the real return on these assets in recent years has been largely negative. In the final section, Sen Gupta estimates the cost of holding reserves in India by considering three alternative uses of the resources currently held in excess of the international norm described earlier.

The empirical section of the paper employs a sample of 167 countries over the period 1980–2005 and a regression framework that identifies the principal determinants of cross-country variation in the level of international reserves. In this context, reserves are defined as total reserves minus the country’s holdings of gold. The dependent variable is this measure of reserves scaled by Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The results of this regression accord well with the a priori expectations. The log of per capita GDP and a proxy for trade openness (measured as the ratio of imports to GDP) both record positive and significant coefficients for reserve holding, implying that richer countries and more open countries tend to have higher reserves. In addition, the regression results reveal that countries with less flexible exchange rate regimes and more capital account openness tend to accumulate greater reserves.

Next, the author uses the above framework for the period 1998–2005 to predict the demand for international reserves for various emerging countries. The difference between actual reserves and the reserve level predicted by the equation is interpreted as a measure of excess reserves. As illustrations of his results, Sen Gupta finds that by 2005, Indonesia, Philippines, and Argentina had reserves close to the amount predicted by the model, while Brazil’s reserve accumulation fill significantly short of the predicted value. In contrast, China, India, Korea, Russia, and Malaysia all exhibit significantly more reserves than what could be interpreted as an “international norm.”

In his discussion of India’s experience in reserve accumulation, Sen Gupta identifies several distinct episodes of significant reserve buildup in India: April 1993 to July 1995, November 2001 to May 2004, and November 2006 to February 2008. These three episodes account for more than US$ 220 billion worth of India’s current stock of reserve accumulation of US$ 300 billion. In each of these episodes, the author discusses the role that both the government and the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) played in the decision to accumulate reserves. Sen Gupta estimates that by the end of 2007, India had more than US$ 58 billion of excess reserves. In order to impute the costs of holding these excess reserves, he considers three alternative uses of the resources: financing physical investment, reducing the private sector’s external commercial borrowing, and lowering public sector debt. The cost is substantial across all specifications, both in terms of actual income foregone and as a percentage of GDP. The author estimates the annual cost of keeping excess reserves in the form of low-yielding bonds rather than employing the resources to increase the physical capital of the economy to be approximately 1.6 percent of GDP. Alternatively, if the resources were instead used to reduce private sector external commercial borrowing or public sector debt, India could gain more than 0.23 percent of GDP.

       

The sixth annual India Policy Forum conference convened in New Delhi from July 14-15. This fourth issue of the India Policy Forum, edited by Suman Bery, Barry Bosworth and Arvind Panagariya, covers the global financial crisis and the implications for India. The editors' summary appears below, and you can download a PDF version of the volume, or access individual articles by clicking on the following links:

Download the India Policy Forum 2009-2010 agenda »
Download India Policy Forum 2009-2010 - Volume 6 » 

Download the individual volumes:

• Why India Choked When Lehman Broke
• Global Crisis and the Indian Economy - On a Few Unconventional Assertions
• India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988-2007
• Climate Change and India: Implications and Policy Options
• India Equity Markets: Measures of Fundamental Value

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EDITORS' SUMMARY

The sixth annual conference of the India Policy Forum was held on July 14 and 15, 2009 in New Delhi. The meeting was dominated by considerations of the global financial crisis and its implications for India. The events of 2009 provided evidence of India’s growing integration with the global economy, an illustration of the resilience of country’s economic growth, and its emergence as a major participant in an expanded system of governance for the global economic system. This issue of the journal includes four papers and the associated discussion from the conference, and a fifth paper that was originally presented at the 2007 conference. 

Indian Equity Markets: Measures of Fundamental Value

Beginning in 2005, the Indian equity market underwent a period of explosive growth rising from a valuation equal to about 50 percent of GDP to a peak of 150 percent by early 2008. Growth of this magnitude raised concerns that the market was hugely overvalued and it was often characterized as an example of an asset market bubble. The market valuation subsequently fell back to about 70 percent of GDP during the global financial crisis. This experience stimulated interest in India in the question of what would constitute a reasonable or fair value for equities that could be use as a standard for evaluating market fluctuations. In “India Equity Markets: Measures of Fundamental Value,” Rajnish Mehra examines this question by comparing corporate valuations in India over the period of 1991–2008 relative to three key market fundamentals: the corporate capital stock, aftertax corporate cash flows, and net corporate debt.

Mehra’s model builds on the idea of a link between the market value of the capital stock and the debt and equity claims on that stock—a concept known as Tobin’s q. He extends the existing framework using some prior work by McGrattan and Prescott on US equity valuations, and he incorporates both intangible capital and key features of the tax code. It is a multi-period model in which firms maximize shareholder value subject to a production function with labor and two kinds of capital—tangible and intangible—as the inputs. Wages, intangible investment and depreciation of tangible capital are treated as tax-deductible expenses. It yields an equilibrium representation of the relationship between the market value of equity and the reproduction value of tangible and intangible capital in the corporate sector. All of the nominal values are normalized by GDP and the result is a framework that can be used to evaluate the effect on equity prices of a range of different policy actions, such as changes in the taxation of corporate dividends.

The model is calibrated to the Indian situation with respect to the capital stock, tax rates, and the characteristics of economic growth in the nonagricultural sector. Mehra also develops his own estimates of the valuation of intangible capital using three different methodologies. The first method is that used by McGrattan and Prescott and is based on the assumption that tangible and intangible capital earn the same rate of return along a balanced growth path. That assumption allows him to derive the equilibrium ratio of tangible and intangible capital. The alternative methods are based on recent work in the United States by Corrado, Hulten, and Sichel that involves cumulating investment flows to estimated stocks. Mehra uses two different methods to calibrate the Indian data with information from the United States, and he estimates the stock of intangible capital for two periods of 1991–2004 and 2005–08. The focus on two sub-periods is designed to capture a structural break in the data: Indian equity valuations as a fraction of GDP were fairly constant over the period 1991–2004, rising sharply starting in 2005. The two estimates of the stock of intangibles based on the comparison with the United States are very similar, but they are significantly lower than the estimates obtained with the McGrattan and Prescott methodology.

His analysis suggests that an optimistic estimate of the fundamental value of the current Indian equity market is about 1.2 times GDP, considerably lower than the 1.6 value observed in 2008, but close to the average over the full period. One effect on equity prices that the study does not account for is a change in investor demand from foreign institutional investors. If the effect of this is a change in the characteristics of the marginal investor, the relevant marginal rate of substitution will change, and with it market valuations. Thus, Mehra suggests that the extension of the model to include foreign investors should be a major objective for future research.

Why India Choked when Lehman Broke

Mehra’s paper generated an active discussion that centered on the difficulties of accurately measuring some of the values, such as the rate of technological change and real interest rates, required to calibrate the model to India’s situation. Several commentators also emphasized the important role of foreign investors. Others pointed to the difficulties of applying a model based on equilibrium conditions to the highly transitional nature of the Indian economy. In “Why India Choked when Lehman Broke,” Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah analyze the rapid transmission of the impact of the Lehman bankruptcy into Indian financial markets. The authors propose an explanation that revolves around the treasury operations of Indian multinational corporations (MNCs). Such MNCs are less subject to the capital controls imposed on purely domestic Indian companies. 

The developments that emerged within Indian financial markets in September and October following the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on September 14, 2008 were quite extraordinary. First, there was a sudden change in conditions in the money market. Call money rates shot up immediately after September 15. Despite swift action by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the tightness persisted through the month of October. The operating procedures of monetary policy broke down in unprecedented fashion and interest rates were persistently above the target range of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). The call rate consistently breached the 9 percent ceiling for the repo rate and attained values beyond 15 percent. There was a huge amount of borrowing from the RBI. On some days, the RBI lent an unprecedented Rs 90,000 crore through repos. These events are surprising given the extent of India’s de jure capital controls that were expected to isolate its financial markets from global developments. Greater understanding of crisis transmission, the effectiveness of capital controls, and India’s de facto openness could be achieved by carefully investigating this episode and identifying explanations.

The main hypothesis of this paper is that many Indian firms (financial and non-financial) had been using the global money market before the crisis to avoid India’s capital controls. This was done by locating global money market operations in offshore subsidiaries. When the global money market collapsed upon the demise of Lehman, these firms were suddenly short of dollar liquidity. They then borrowed in the rupee money market, converting rupees to US dollars, to meet obligations abroad.

The result was strong pressure on the currency market, and the rupee depreciated sharply. The RBI attempted to limit rupee depreciation by selling dollars. It sold $18.6 billion in the foreign exchange market in October alone. Ordinarily, one might have expected depreciation of the exchange rate in both the spot and the forward markets. However, instead of the forward premium rising in response to the pressure on the rupee to depreciate, it crashed sharply. The authors’ hypothesis is that some Indian MNCs that were taking dollars out of India planned to return the funds within a few weeks. To lock in the price at which they would bring that money back, they sold dollars forward. Thus, the one month forward premium fell sharply into negative territory.

Balance of payments data shows outbound FDI was the largest element of outflows in the “sudden stop” of capital flows to India of the last quarter of 2008. This supports the aforementioned hypothesis. During this time there was no significant merger and acquisitions activity taking place owing to the banking and money market crisis around the world. The explanation for the large FDI outflow when money market conditions in India and the world were among the worst seen in decades, could lie in the offshore money market operations of Indian MNCs. Finally, the authors analyze stock market data, finding that Indian MNCs were more exposed to conditions in international money markets as compared to non-MNCs.

This paper’s main contribution lies in showing that Indian MNCs are now an important channel through which India is financially integrated into the world economy. This raises questions about the effectiveness of India’s capital controls, which inhibit short-dated borrowing by firms. This restriction appears to have been bypassed to a substantial extent by Indian MNCs. This phenomenon contributes to a larger understanding of the gap that exists between India’s highly restrictive de jure capital controls and its de facto openness.

De jure capital controls have not made India as closed to global financial markets as expected. The expectation that a global financial market crisis would not hit India owing to these controls was proved to be incorrect when the financial crisis was transmitted to India with unprecedented speed. This evidence of India’s integration with global capital markets will influence the future discussion of its de facto capital account convertibility.

Climate Change and India: Implications and Policy Options

Climate change and the mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have moved to the forefront of international discussion and negotiations. While global warming may have adverse effects on Indian society, there are also concerns that efforts to mitigate emissions within India could seriously impair future economic growth and poverty alleviation. These concerns are the focus of the paper, “Climate Change and India: Implications and Policy Options” by Arvind Panagariya.

The basic perspective is that India’s current per capita carbon emissions are very small, only one-fourth those of China and one-twentieth those of the United States; and given the strong association between income and emissions, the capping of emissions at current levels would make it impossible for India to sustain the growth required to match Chinese income levels, much less narrow the gap with the developed economies. Panagariya argues that India should resist making binding emission commitments for several decades, or until it has made greater progress in poverty alleviation.

The paper begins with a discussion of various uncertainties relating to the response of temperatures to GHG emissions, and in turn, the impact of any temperature changes on rainfall and various forms of extreme weather. There is further uncertainty about the effects of those weather changes on productivity and GDP growth. The author discusses the changes in temperatures and rain patterns specific to India during the last century, as well as their impact if any on sea levels, glacier melting, and natural disasters such as drought and cyclones.

The paper then explores the question of optimal mitigation and instruments to achieve it. A key conclusion is that, absent any uncertainties, either a uniform worldwide carbon tax or a fully internationally system of tradable pollution permits should be employed to reach the optimal solution. A more complicated issue relates to the distribution of the costs of mitigation. Efficiency dictates that countries in which the marginal loss of output per ton of carbon mitigated is the lowest should mitigate more. But absent any international transfers, this may lead to an inequitable distribution of costs of mitigation. An additional question arises with respect to past emissions for which the responsibility largely rests with developed countries. A case can be made that if countries are asked to pay a carbon tax for future emissions, they should also pay for the past emissions. This is especially relevant since big emitters of tomorrow are likely to be different from big emitters of yesterday.

Panagariya argues that these distributional conflicts are the primary explanation of why countries have found it so difficult to arrive at a cooperative solution. Developing countries argue that since developed countries are responsible for the bulk of the past emissions and are also among the largest current emitters, they should undertake much of the mitigation. In turn, the United States has responded by raising the specter of trade sanctions against countries that do not participate in the mitigation efforts. The paper discusses whether such trade sanctions are compatible with the existing World Trade Organization (WTO) rules. It argues that the legality of the trade sanctions is far from guaranteed although the ultimate answer will only be known after the specific measures are tested in the WTO Dispute Settlement Body.

Turning to the specific situation of India, Panagariya argues that it should resist accepting specific mitigation obligations until 2030 or even 2040. The case for an exemption from mitigation for the next two or three decades is justified by the fact that India is a relatively small emitter in absolute as well as per capita terms. Based on 2006 data, it accounts for only 4.4 percent of global emissions, and in per capita terms it ranks 137th worldwide. This is in contrast to China, with which it is often paired. China currently emits the most carbon in the world in absolute terms, and as much as one-fourth of the United States in per capita terms. In addition, Panagariya argues that India needs to give priority to the reduction of poverty.

Given the situation of India and other poor countries, how can an international agreement to combat global warming be reached? Panagariya proposes first that significant progress can be made through agreements on the financing of investments devoted to the discovery of green sources of energy and new mitigation technologies. He believes that private firms will under-invest in such technologies due to the inherent uncertainties. Thus, he argues for establishing a substantial fund financed by contributions from the developed countries and using it to finance research by private firms with the proviso that the fruits of such research would be made available free of charge to all countries. Second, he argues that there is still considerable work to be done in completing an agenda of near-term actions. If developed countries are serious about the necessity of developing countries undertaking mitigation targets beginning some time in the near future, they need to lead by example and accept substantial mitigation obligations by 2020. Finally, he believes that mitigation targets for the developing countries should be stated in terms of emissions per capita or per unit of GDP.

The paper generated a lively exchange among participants on both the effects of climate change and on how India should participate in the international policy discussion. Some thought that Panagariya underestimated the costs to India of climate change, but most of the discussion centered on the development of an appropriate Indian policy response.

Beginning with the major 1991 reform, India has systematically phased out investment and import licensing. Progressive movement toward promarket policies accompanying this phasing out of controls was expected to bring about major shifts in India’s industrial structure. Partly because the opening up itself was uneven across sectors and partly because responses to liberalizing reforms were bound to differ across sectors and firms, it was expected that the changes would be highly variable.

India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988-2005

“India Transformed? Insights from the Firm Level 1988–2005” by Laura Alfaro and Anusha Chari, sets out to study the responses of firms and sectors accompanying the ongoing transformation of India’s microeconomic industrial structure. Relying on firm-level data, collected by the Center for Monitoring the Indian Economy from company balance sheets and income statements, they study the changes in firm activity from 1988 to 2005. They highlight the differing responses to reforms across sectors, private versus public sector firms, and incumbent versus new firms.
 
The authors define liberalization as consisting of trade and entry liberalization, regulatory reform and privatization that lead to increased domestic and foreign competition. They present a series of stylized facts relating to the evolution of firms and sectors accompanying and following liberalization. The database covers both unlisted and publicly listed firms from a wide cross-section of manufacturing, services, utilities, and financial industries. Approximately one-third of the firms in the database are publicly listed and the remaining two-thirds are unlisted. The companies covered account for more than 70 percent of industrial output, 75 percent of corporate taxes, and more than 95 percent of excise taxes collected by the Government of India.

Detailed balance sheet and ownership information permits the authors to analyze a range of variables such as sales, profitability, and assets for approximately 15,500 firms classified across 109 three digit industries encompassing agriculture, manufacturing, and services. Therefore, in contrast to most existing firm level studies that focus on manufacturers, the authors are able to study the firms in the services and agriculture sectors as well. The data also permit distinction according to ownership categories such as state-owned, business groups, private stand-alone firms, and foreign firms. The authors divide the years from 1988 to 2005 into five sub-periods: 1988–90, 1991–94, 1995–98, 1999–2002, and 2003–05. This division into sub-periods is intended to capture the effects of various reforms taking place over time.

The authors present detailed information on the average number of firms, firm size, as measured by assets and sales, and profitability as measured by operating profits and the return on assets. The information is presented by sector as well as by category of firm: state-owned enterprises, private firms incorporated before 1985 (old private firms), private firms incorporated after 1985 (new private firms), and foreign firms for the five sub-periods. Sales, entry, profitability, and overall firm activity are interpreted as disaggregated measures of economic growth and proxies for efficiency; and thus, they provide an understanding of the effectiveness of reforms. The authors also look at market dynamics with regard to promotion of competition in order to understand the efficiency of resource allocations. They also examine the evolution of industrial concentration over time.
 
Alfaro and Chari find some evidence of a dynamic response among foreign and private firms as reflected in the expansion of their numbers as well as growth in assets, sales, and profits. But overall, they find that the sectors and economy continue to be dominated by the incumbent state-owned firms and to a lesser extent traditional private firms that were incorporated before 1985. Sectors dominated by state-owned and traditional private firms prior to 1988–90, where dominance is defined by 50 percent or larger share in assets, sales, and profits, generally remain so in 2005. Interestingly, rates of return remain remarkably stable over time and show low dispersion across sectors and across ownership groups within sectors. Not only is concentration high, but there is persistence in terms of which firms account for the concentration.

The exception to this broad pattern is the growing importance of new and large private firms in the services industries in the last ten years. In particular, the assets and sales shares of new private firms in business and IT services, communications services and media, health, and other services have expanded at a rapid pace. These changes coincide with the reform measures that took place in the services sectors after the mid-1990s, and they are also consistent with the growth in services documented in the aggregate data.

According to Joseph Schumpeter (1942), creative destruction, defined as the replacement of old firms by new firms and of old capital by new capital, happens in waves. A system-wide reform or deregulation such as the one implemented in India may have been the shock that prompted the creative destruction wave. Creation in India seems to have been driven by new entrants in the private sector and foreign firms forcing the incumbent firms to shape up as well. Outside of the services sectors noted in the previous paragraph, and especially in many manufacturing sectors, transformation seems not to have gone through an industrial shakeout phase in which incumbent firms are replaced by new ones. In many of these sectors, stateowned enterprises and private business groups have continued to dominate despite many liberalization measures.

Different explanations may account for these findings. In part, continued dominance of public sector firms in certain sectors may reflect the high barriers to exit that not only impede destruction of marginal firms but also discourage new firms from entry. On the one hand, potential entrants know that exit of public sector firms is unlikely; on the other hand, they may fear paying high exit costs in case they fail to find a foothold. An additional explanation, perhaps not sufficiently stressed in the debate, is the possibility that entrenched public sector and business group firms subvert true liberalization in sectors in which they dominate. The authors find, for example, that both industry concentration and state ownership are inversely correlated with measures associated with liberalization.

Recent literature highlights the idea that economic growth may be impeded not simply by a lack of resources such as capital and skilled labor, but also by a misallocation of available resources. The high levels of state ownership and ownership by traditional private firms in India raise the question of whether significant gains could be made simply through the allocation of existing resources from less efficient to more efficient firms.

Land Reforms, Poverty Reduction, and Economic Growth: Evidence from India

In “Land Reforms, Poverty Reduction, and Economic Growth: Evidence from India,” Klaus Deininger and Hari K. Nagarajan consider the important but relatively neglected issues of land market policies and institutions. They focus attention on three issues: the role of rental markets in land, the contribution of land sales to the promotion of efficiency, and the potential benefits of better land ownership records and the award of land titles. The authors posit that well-functioning rental and sales markets lead to superior outcomes by raising productivity and providing improved access to land. On an average, these markets shift land toward more efficient farmers, thus contributing to poverty alleviation. The paper also brings into question the long-held view that land sales markets are dominated by distress sales whereby poor farmers facing credit constraints are forced to sell their land for below-market prices to their creditors.

In evaluating the impact of rental markets, the authors test three hypotheses: 

1. Whether a household becomes a lessor or a lessee should be a function of the household’s agricultural ability. Efficient but land-poor households would rent additional land to cultivate while inefficient and land-abundant households should rent out their land for cultivation by other more efficient households. In this manner, well-functioning rental markets in land enhance productivity and improve factor use in the economy.
2. The presence of high transactions costs inhibits households from participation in rental markets. These costs may force households to withdraw from rental transactions altogether and undermine productivity.
3. Participation in rental markets is crucially impacted by wage rates offered in the market. Increases in wage rates will prompt households with low ability to manage their land to rent their land to other households. The resulting increase in the supply of land to the rental markets leads to lower rental rates.

Using survey data, the authors test these various hypotheses. They show that rental markets improve productivity of land use by transferring land to more efficient producers. The results suggest that the probability for the most productive household in the sample to rent additional land is more than double that of the average household. The paper also shows that higher land and lower labor endowments increase the propensity of households to supply land to the rental market. By transferring land to labor-rich but land-poor households, markets allow gainful employment of rural labor. The current policies have severely curtailed rental and have therefore retarded advancement of efficiency and equity in rural India.

The authors next turn to markets for land sales. They examine the impact of a well-functioning land sales market on land access. The long-held view has been that land sales are primarily motivated by adverse exogenous shocks. To the contrary, the authors find that such markets have helped more productive and more labor-abundant farmers to gain access to land. The authors also show that land sales markets exhibit greater activity in the presence of higher economic growth. This suggests that if other factor market imperfections are removed, the role of sales markets in promoting equity and efficiency will be expanded. Finally, identifying the source of shocks leading to distress sales and adopting policies that directly address these shocks can ameliorate the adverse effects of such sales in otherwise well-functioning land sales markets.

The last issue addressed in the paper concerns the importance of land administration for the promotion of efficient rental and sales markets. In India, there exist multiple institutions governing land records, registration, and transactions. This situation has led to a duplication of land records, leading to confusion and conflicts over ownership. It also creates a general sense of insecurity of tenure. The authors argue that the computerization of land records can help alleviate these problems. They cite Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh as examples of this experience. They note that the computerization of records can reduce petty corruption, ease access to land records, and possibly increase the probability of land becoming acceptable as collateral to obtain credit.