August 12, 2009 — drsubrotoroy
From Facebook:
Subroto Roy suggests one reason China has far outpaced India in exports is because it was willing to focus on manufacturing common man mass consumption items like toys, umbrellas, winter clothing etc for a start, where India’s conceited nomenclatura businessmen/ bureaucrats either maintained traditional imperial exports like textiles, raw materials & tea or chose a high-end middle-class item like software….
April 1, 2009 — drsubrotoroy
“Summits” of global political leaders require competent “sherpas” to do the preparations. From what I gather about the London “G-20 summit” this has not happened adequately enough, so I expect only a lot of waffle to emerge. (If they suddenly start talking about Global Warming or AIDS in Africa or whatever, we will know the actual talks have failed badly.)
Reforming the IMF? Hmmm, let’s see, what happened to all that talk four years ago about reforming the Big Daddy of them all, the UN? Oh yes, I forget, India is now a permanent veto-wielding Security Council Member, NOT!
It has been said that academic syllabus reform at a university is like ‘”moving a graveyard”. Reforming the world monetary system and its major institutions would be like moving thousands of graveyards. And there is no one with the brains of a White or a Keynes to help things along. But we should not be surprised if there were pronouncements of this or that high-powered commission of pompous worthies who will make recommendations for reform some time in the future. In general, little more than waffle will emerge now — I cannot even see the UK Government following informal British advice to stand down from its founding role at the IMF.
There is no clear path to solving the great (alleged) economic and financial crisis because no one wants to admit its roots were the overvaluation (over decades) of American real-estate, and hence American assets in general.
India’s PM shall be seen at least up and about after several months out of action, indeed he will be up and about for the first time in months doing what he (like India’s nomenclatura in general) likes doing best, which is to travel outside India.
Subroto Roy, Kolkata
March 19, 2009 — drsubrotoroy
In the summer of 1983 Dr James Dorn of Cato Institute invited me (then in Menlo Park) to comment on the influential papers then being given by the prominent trade economist Dr J Michael Finger.
I think I might have said I hadn’t worked on trade since LSE days a decade earlier but Jim said something sweetly persuasive like “We want to put you in the limelight” — and limelight there was, a full house in Washington (the Capitol Hill Hyatt Regency), with the bright camera lights of C-Span and local television.
I do not recall what current trade issues dominated the agenda, certainly it was years before NAFTA or China were being discussed, perhaps tariff removal on US textiles, probably Japanese auto-imports: Michael Finger certainly gave a devastating example of the difficulty US beef exporters had entering Japan’s beef market at the time.
But whatever I said, as a 28 year old Indian from Cambridge and India, was very well received by that packed Washington audience. And I did not say much more than offer a Hahnian-Keynesian scepticism about textbook economic theory being divorced from ground realities.
Half a dozen years later at the University of Hawaii in March 1989 I amplified the argument a little bit as follows:
“Risk-aversion explains resistance to freer trade (and explains protectionism during a recession)
Textbook economics suggests world trade improves material welfare: consumers are better off when imports may compete freely in the home-market. Yet from Adam Smith’s critique of mercantilism to modern theories of rent-seeking, domestic producers in import-competing industries have been described as trying to restrict international trade by tariffs or other means. How is it producers so often succeed in persuading governments of the social costs of imports? Why are there not (or not as many, or not as powerful) consumer lobbies? Certainly there are high costs of organizing consumer lobbies relative to producer lobbies, but leaving that aside, is it possible consumers are ignorant and irrational? J. Michael Finger (1982, 1983/84) argued that in this respect consumers are in fact ignorant of their own best interests.
Roy (1983/84) suggested that a simple Keynesian observation offers a different explanation. A domestic household may be definitely better off by trade-liberalization on the expenditure side of its budget but the increased competitiveness of the economy accompanying liberalization may so decrease the expected value of its income that a risk-averse household would prefer the trade-protected status quo and have no incentive to lobby for trade-liberalization. Conversely, in a recession when the expected value of a household’s income declines, households have an incentive to lobby for trade-protection despite this worsening the expenditure side of their budgets.
The simplest of examples suffices to show all this. Let x1 be a non-traded domestic good, and x2 an imported good, and let a domestic household have preferences
U (x1, x2) = x1α . x2β
α + β < 1; 0 < α, β < 1 (1)
Let x1 be numeraire, p’ and p be the world and domestic prices of x2 respectively, and t be the tariff-rate on x2 such that p = (1 + t). p’. Let the household’s expected income be ya in the trade-protected state and yb in the trade-liberalized state, so its budget constraint is either
ya = x1 + (1 + t).p’. x2 in the trade-protected state (2a)
or
yb = x1 + p’. x2 in the trade-liberalized state (2b).
Maximizing (1) subject to (2a) gives a “final utility” in the trade-protected state, Ua*. Maximizing (1) subject to (2b) gives a “final utility” in the trade-liberalized state, Ub*.
Hence Ua* > Ub* as
[ya/yb] (α + β)/β > 1 + t where (α + β)/β > 1.
If income is certain in the trade-protected state but uncertain in the trade-liberalized state, a household’s risk-aversion will require loss in the expected utility of income in the trade-liberalized state to be offset by a gain in final utility that it receives as a consumer due to tariff-reduction.
E.g., let α = β = ½ and let the household have a certain income in the trade-protected state of $20,000; let it place a subjective probability of 1/4 on being unemployed with zero income in the trade-liberalized state, and 3/4 on maintaining the same income of $20,000.
Then Ua* > Ub* as [4/3]2 > 1 + t.
I.e., for any tariff-rate less than about 78% with these particular data, the household may rationally think itself better off in the trade-protected state than in the trade-liberalized state, and hence have no incentive to lobby for the latter.
Cooper (1987) remarked: “There should of course be a strong appeal to consumers of imported goods for removing restrictions. For a variety of reasons, political mobilization of consumers has been difficult in most countries. Many of these consumers also are employed in producing tradable goods, and they worry more about their jobs than about the purchasing power of a given wage. But most goods that move in international trade are not consumer goods. They are capital goods and intermediate products, and it should be easier to appeal to buyers of these intermediate products for import liberalization, because such buyers would enjoy a reduction in their costs.” The sentence italicized above may be consonant with the simple point made here.
References
Richard N. Cooper “Why liberalization meets resistance” in J. Michael Finger (ed.), The Uruguay Round, A Handbook on the Multilateral Trade Negotiations, World Bank, November 1987.
J. Michael Finger, “Incorporating the gains from trade into policy”, The World Economy, 5, December 1982, 367-78.
“The political economy of trade policy”, Cato Journal, 3, Winter 1983/84.
Subroto Roy, “The political economy of trade policy: comment”, Cato Journal, 3, Winter 1983/84″
I sent it to Economic Letters but the editor Professor Jerry Green rejected it, perhaps because it was too simple and unpretentious. And it remained unpublished until I put it on my blog in March 2009.
Yes it is relevant to the trade-problem America may face today, and yes perhaps both Mr Trump and Mr Sanders were in my audience at Cato, I do not know.
From Twitter 09.11.2016: Trump sat toffishly dressed in an aisle seat, congratulated me and introduced himself, Sanders charged out at speed after a momentary word…I recall three interactions after the talk, one each with Trump and Sanders, or someone like them
from My American years
I have put these documents here now in 2017 after recollecting in 2016 during the American election campaign that both Bernie Sanders and Donald J Trump had been present at that trade policy conference in Washington in September 1983 and both had interacted with me briefly! Mr Sanders had expressed a momentary word of praise and had charged out of the large crowd at speed with I think a small retinue of staff. (I asked someone who that had been, and recall Vermont being mentioned, and recall the spectacles and the fierce earnest expression.) Mr Trump had sat in an aisle seat in the middle and he had looked at me and I at him (we were both relatively young men in that middle aged milieu) as I had walked up to the podium. He was toffishly dressed, looking somewhat out of place in a nerdy conference of academics, journalists, politicians and policy wonks. As I had come down from the podium he had stood up and introduced himself as “Donald J Trump”, and said “Manhattan real estate” possibly upon my enquiry; he praised my talk quite profusely and might have said something like he was surprised that “coming from the part of the world” I did I had grasped what I had done about America.
[I would have looked a year younger than this, Mr Trump a bit older than this…]
The encounter was no more than two a few minutes and ended with him saying “Remember the name”… which as it happens I did not even when I walked by his tall buildings in New York a decade later.
It was only when I heard his primary campaign speeches in the American Midwest about March 2016 that I said “Hey I said that”, and recalled my own argument and our meeting. Was the future American President conspicuous in that nerdy policy wonk conference of academics, congressional staff, journalists etc? I would say he was… in both dress and manner. “Make no mistake …a preppie by education, an American nationalist, a commonsense pragmaticist (Peirce)” I have said at Twitter, starting the hashtag mentioned. As it happened, earlier that summer I had stopped with my Sheltie puppy for a night at a motel in Little Rock, Arkansas, where Mrs Clinton was First Lady; a leprechaun could have told me, Hey, those two are going to square off in 2016… .
from Twitter 11 January 2019
Both of us were relatively young men in that crowd of journalists, policy wonks, congressional staffers, his stare at me was one of “Now who’s that, where’s he from?”; I noticed him at all because he was looking back at me, & I saw a brash well-dressed preppie, the jock at school.
Mr Trump had been at 2 o’clock to me staring back at me in the hall before my talk, and I have tried to recall the logistics: our panel had been asked to sit midway in the packed hall waiting our turn as a previous panel finished. Trump looked back to stare at me…
When our panel was called, Mr Trump’s eyes followed me as I walked past him up to the podium (Washington Capitol Hyatt 1983, perhaps a few black journalists or staffers, no one else of “colour” except myself), and I recall his face in the audience as I waited to speak & then did…
Ordinary workers were not being represented yet were massively affected by trade policy taken from econ textbooks, there was a disconnect, that was my 1983 Washington contribution, and I, under the bright glare of tv lights, had the whole hall in thrall, not just @realDonaldTrump.
As I walked down back from the podium, he stood up and introduced himself, and I was like “Ha! Gotcha, Preppie!”, he was profuse in his praise, and upon my enquiry introduced himself as “Manhattan real estate”, an oddity in that crowd… “Coming from the part of the world you do” was Mr Trump ‘s way of saying “How did you as an Indian manage to get all that about America?”, I had to leave, I had to meet someone at Baltimore airport, then drive to my visiting parents, left alone in Ithaca with my Sheltie..
“Remember the name” parting shot from Mr Trump as I left our conversation, I’d probably have had a job offer with him if I’d chatted on… but No Can Do.. I was visiting @Cornell, my Green Card was being processed by Virginia Tech… a manuscript in longhand.
And at @Cornell I was talking to Max Black, Wittgenstein’s pupil, then aged 74, and teaching a new course on History of Economic Thought that had been demanded of the Econ dept by History students led by Ms @AnnCoulter! .. a quiet pupil..
“Ordinary workers were not being represented yet were massively affected by trade policy taken from econ textbooks, there was a disconnect… my 1983 contribution to the American discn. #DemocraticDebate accepted this objective reason for the
@realDonaldTrump win” https://twitter.com/subyroy/status/1185057601026850816?s=20…
Jul 22
“Yes, they did get the idea from your paper” @Ibishblog tells me, to which I say Thanks… Back then there was no China issue but Japanese small cars… twitter.com/Ibishblog/stat…
.
October 10, 2008 — drsubrotoroy
Author’s note: March 21 2009: I am glad to see there is new interest in America in this short note I published here back in October. No American or other Western economist concerned with the financial crisis has apparently said the same thing. One factor causing this may be that much of what has been made to pass of as “economic research” in American academic economics departments in the last several decades has effectively amounted to being waste-paper.
America was at its best when it was open to mass immigration, and America is at its worst when it treats immigrants with racism and worse (for seeming “uppity”).
All those bad mortgages and foreclosures could vanish within a year or two by playing the demographic card and inviting in a few million new immigrants into the United States. They would pour in from China, Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Indonesia, Mexico, South America, South Africa, Nigeria, Egypt, Israel, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and yes, Pakistan too, and more. They would happily buy up all those empty houses and apartments, even in all those desolate dismal locations. If the USA’s housing supply curve has moved so far to the right that the equilibrium price has gone to near zero, the surest way to raise the equilibrium price would be by causing a new wave of immigration leading to a new demand curve arising at a higher level. But yes, nativist feelings of racism towards the outsider or the newcomer would have to be controlled especially in employment — racists after all are often rather “sub-prime” themselves and hence unable to accept characters who may be “prime” or at least less “sub-prime” from foreign immigrant communities. Restoring a worldwide idea of an American dream fuelled by mass immigration may be the surest way for the American economy to restore itself.
Subroto Roy, Kolkata, India
February 22, 2008 — drsubrotoroy
Growth & Government Delusion:
Progress Comes From Learning, Enterprise, Exchange, Not The Parasitic State
By Subroto Roy
First published in The Statesman, Editorial Page Special Article,
February 22, 2008
P Chidambaram, Montek Ahluwalia and Manmohan Singh, like their BJP predecessors, delude themselves and the country as a whole when they claim responsibility for phenomenal economic growth taking place. “My goal is to continue to maintain growth but at the same time the government reserves the right to make rapid adjustments depending upon the evolving international situation” is a typical piece of nonsensical waffle.
Honest Finance Ministers in any country cannot take personal responsibility for rates of economic growth nor is any government in the world nimble, well-informed and intelligent enough to respond to exogenous shocks in a timely manner. The UPA and NDA blaming one another for low growth or taking credit for high growth merely reveal the crude mis-education of their pretentious TV economists. There are far too many measurement and data problems as well as lead-and-lag problems for any credibility to attach to what is said.
Per capita real GDP
Indian businessmen and their politician/ bureaucratic friends seem to think “growth” refers to nominal earnings before tax for the corporate sector, or some such number that can be sold to visiting foreigners to induce them to park their money in India: “You will get a 10 per cent return if you invest in India” to which the visitor says “Oh that must mean India has 10 per cent growth going on”. Of such nonsense are expensive Davos and Delhi conferences made.
What is supposed to be measured when we speak of economic growth? It is annual growth of per capita inflation-adjusted Gross Domestic Product (National Income or Net National Product would be better if available). West Germany and Japan had the highest annual per capita real GDP growth-rates in the world starting from devastated post-War initial conditions. What were their rates? West Germany: 6.6 per cent in 1950-1960, falling to 3.5 per cent by 1960-1970, and 2.4 per cent by 1970-1978. Japan: 6.8 per cent in 1952-1960; 9.4 per cent in 1960-1970, 3.8 per cent in 1970-1978. Thus, only Japan in the 1960s measured more than 9 per cent annual growth of real per capita GDP.
Now India and China are said to be achieving 9 per cent plus routinely. Perhaps we are observing an incredible phenomenon of world economic history. Or perhaps we are just being fed something incredible, some humbug. India’s population is growing at 2 per cent so even if the Government’s number of 9 per cent is taken at face-value, we have to subtract 2 per cent population growth to get per capita figures. Typical official fallacies include thinking clever bureaucratic use of astronomically high savings rates causes growth. For example, Meghnad Desai of Britain’s Labour Party says: “China now has 10.4 per cent growth on a 44 per cent savings rate… ” Indian savings have been alleged near 32 per cent. What has been mismeasured as high savings is actually paper expansion of bank-deposits in a fractional reserve banking system induced by runaway government deficit-spending in both countries.
Real economic growth arises from spontaneous technological progress, improved productivity and learning-by-doing of the general population. World economic history suggests growth occurs in spite of, rather than due to, behaviour of an often parasitic State. Technological progress in a myriad of ways and discovery of new resources are important factors contributing to India’s growth today. But while the “real” economy does well, the “nominal” paper-money economy controlled by Government does not.
Continuous deficit financing for half a century has led to exponential growth of public debt and broad money. The vast growth of bank-deposits has been misinterpreted as indicating unusual savings behaviour when it in fact signals vast government debt being held by nationalised banks. What Messrs Chidambaram, Ahluwalia,Manmohan Singh, the BJP et al have been presiding over is annual paper-money supply growth of 22 per cent! That is what they should be taking honest responsibility for because it certainly implies double-digit inflation (i.e. decline in the value of paper-money) perhaps as high as 14 or 15 per cent. If you believe Government numbers that inflationis near 5 per cent you may believe anything.
The mainsprings of real growth in the wealth of the individual, and so of the nation, are greater practical learning, increases in capital resources and improvements in technology. Deeper skills and improved dexterity cause output produced with fewer inputs than before, i.e. greater productivity. Adam Smith said there is “invention of a great number of machines which facilitate and abridge labour, and enable one man to do the work of many”.
Consider a real life example. A fresh engineering graduate knows dynamometers are needed in testing and performance-certification of diesel engines. He strips open a meter, finds out how it works, asks engine manufacturers what design improvements they want to see, whether they will buy from him if he can make the improvement. He finds out prices and properties of machine tools needed and wages paid currently to skilled labour, calculates expected revenues and costs, and finally tries to persuade a bank of his production plans, promising to repay loans from his returns.
Overcoming restrictions of religion or caste, the secular agent is spurred by expectation of future gains to approach various others with offers of contract, and so organize their efforts into one. If all his offers ~ to creditors, labour, suppliers ~ are accepted he is, for the moment, in business. He may not be for long ~ but if he succeeds his actions will have caused an improvement in design of dynamometers and a reduction in the cost of diesel engines, as well as an increase in the economy’s produced means of production (its capital stock) and in the value of contracts made. His creditors are more confident of his ability to repay, his buyers of his product quality, he himself knows more of his workers’ skills, etc. If these people enter a second and then a third and fourth set of contracts, the increase in mutual trust in coming to agreement will quickly decline in relation to the increased output of capital goods. The first source of increasing returns to scale in production, and hence the mainspring of real economic growth, arises from the successful completion of exchange.
Risk and enterprise
Transforming inputs into outputs necessarily takes time, and it is for that time the innovator or entrepreneur or “capitalist” or “adventurer” must persuade his creditors to trust him, whether bankers who have lent him capital or workers who have lent him labour. The essence of the enterprise (or “firm”) he tries to get underway consists of no more than the set of contracts he has entered into with the various others, his position being unique because he is the only one to know who all the others happen to be at the same time. In terms introduced by Professor Frank Hahn, the entrepreneur transforms himself from being “anonymous” to being “named” in the eyes of others, while also finding out qualities attaching to the names of those encountered in commerce.
Profits earned are partly a measure of the entrepreneur’s success in this simultaneous process of discovery and advertisement. Another potential entrepreneur, fresh from engineering college, may soon pursue the pioneer’s success and start displacing his product in the market ~ eventually chasers become pioneers and then get chased themselves, and a process of dynamic competition would be underway. As it unfolds, anonymous and obscure graduates from engineering colleges become by dint of their efforts and a little luck, named and reputable firms and perhaps founders of industrial families. Multiply this simple story many times, with a few million different entrepreneurs and hundreds of thousands of different goods and services, and we shall be witnessing India’s actual Industrial Revolution, not the fake promise of it from self-seeking politicians and bureaucrats.
see also 12 June 2009
https://independentindian.com/2009/06/12/mistaken-macroeconomics-an-open-letter-to-prime-minister-dr-manmohan-singh/
May 7, 2006 — drsubrotoroy
MODERN WORLD HISTORY
by Subroto Roy
First published in The Sunday Statesman, Editorial Page Special Article May 7 2006
MUCH as we in India might like to think we were the central focus of Britain’s national life in the 19th and 20th Centuries, we were not. India’s matters were handled mostly by a senior cabinet minister to whom the governor-general or viceroy reported. Though possession and control of India gave the British a sense of mission, self-importance and grandeur, and events in India (mostly bad ones) could hog the newspapers for a few days, it was never the case that India dominated Britain’s political consciousness or national agenda for any length of time. British prime ministers and diplomatists, from Pitt through Canning, Palmerston, Peel, Gladstone, Granville, Disraeli and Salisbury, mostly had other concerns of foreign policy, mostly in Europe and also in the Americas, Africa, and the Near and Far East. India was peripheral to their vision except as a place to be held against any encroachment.
A French historian used to begin lectures on British history saying “Messieurs, l’Angleterre est une ile.” (“Gentlemen, Britain is an island.”) The period of unambiguous British dominance of world diplomacy began with Pitt’s response to the French Revolution, and unambiguously ended in 1917 when Britain and France could have lost the war to Germany if America had not intervened. Since then, America has taken over Britain’s role in world diplomacy, though Lloyd George and Churchill, to a smaller extent Harold Wilson, and finally Thatcher, were respected British voices in world circles. Thatcher’s successor Major failed by seeming immature, while his successor Blair has failed by being immature to the point of being branded America’s “poodle”, making Britain’s loss of prestige complete.
Between Pitt and Flanders though, Britain’s dominance of world affairs and the process of defining the parameters of international conduct was clear. It was an era in which nations fought using ships, cannon, cavalry and infantry. The machine-gun, airpower and automobile had been hardly invented. Yet it is amazing how many technological inventions and innovations occurred during that era, many in Britain and the new America, vastly improving the welfare of masses of people: the steam-engine, the cotton gin, railways, electricity, telecommunications, systems of public hygiene etc. The age of American dominance has been one of petroleum, airpower, guided missiles and nuclear energy, as well as of penicillin and modern medicine.
It was during the period 1791-1991, between the French Revolution and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, that world diplomacy created the system of “Western” nation-states, from Canning’s recognition of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia etc to the emergence of the European Union. There is today peace in Europe and it has become unthinkable there will be war between e.g. France and Germany except on a soccer pitch. Even the unstable Balkans have stabilised. The transition from British to American dominance occurred during and because of the 1914-1918 World War, yet that war’s causes had nothing to do with America and hence America’s rise has been somewhat fortuitous. The War superficially had to do with those unstable Balkans in the summer of 1914 and the system of alliances developed over the previous 100 years; beneath was the economic rise of the new Germany.
Austro-Hungary went to war against Serbia, causing Germany its ally into war with Russia, Serbia’s ally. Belgium’s neutrality was guaranteed through British diplomacy by the Treaty of London in 1839 signed by Austria, France, Britain, Russia and Prussia. This “scrap of paper” Germany tore up to invade Belgium on 4 August 1914, because it was easier to attack France through Belgium than directly as most French generals had expected. Though Germany had no dispute with France, France was Russia’s ally, and the Germans had long-feared fighting on two fronts against larger but more slowly mobilising forces. Violation of Belgian neutrality caused Britain into war with Germany. So all Europe was at war from which it would fail to extricate itself without American intervention. This arrived in 1917 though it too had been provoked by German submarines sinking American ships in the Atlantic. The actual impact of American forces entering the battlefields was small, and it was after the Armistice, when the issue arose of reparations by Germany to everyone and repayments by Britain and France to America, that America’s role became dominant. New York took over from London as the world’s financial capital.
Woodrow Wilson longed to impose a system of transparent international relations on the Europeans who had been used to secret deals and intrigues. He failed, especially when America’s Senate vetoed America’s own entry into the League of Nations. America became isolationist, wishing to have nothing more to do with European wars ~ and remains to this day indifferent towards the League’s successor. But the War also saw Lenin’s Bolsheviks grab power after Russia extricated itself from fighting Germany by the peace of Brest-Litovsk. And the Armistice saw the French desire to humiliate and destroy German power for ever, which in turn sowed the seeds for Hitler’s rise. And the War also had led to the British making the Balfour Declaration that a Jewish “National Home” would arise in Palestine in amity and cooperation with the Arabs. The evolution of these three events dominated the remainder of the 20th Century ~along with the rise and defeat of an imperialist Japan, the rise of communist China, and later, the defeat of both France and America in Vietnam.
Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September 1939, and Britain and France declared war on Germany on 3 September. The next day in faraway India, the British in a panic started to place Jinnah on an equal footing as Gandhi ~ astounding Jinnah himself as much as anyone since his few supporters had lost the 1937 elections badly, especially in the provinces that today constitute the country he wished for. After the defeat and occupation of Germany and Japan, America’s economic supremacy was unquestionable. Utterly exhausted from war, the British had no choice but to leave India’s angry peoples to their own fates, and retreated to their fortified island again ~ though as brown and black immigration increased with the end of Empire, many pale-skinned natives boarded ships for Canada, Australia and New Zealand. America came to have much respect for its junior British ally during the fight against Hitler and later in the political battle against the USSR. It was Thatcher who (after battling Argentina in the South Atlantic) led Reagan to make peace with Gorbachov. With the end of Soviet communism, Germany would be unified again. All across Christendom there was peace for the first time ever, and a militarily powerful nuclear-armed Israel had been created too in the old Palestine. In this new period of world history, the Security Council’s permanent members are the modern version of the “Great Powers” of the 19th Century. The American-led and British-supported destruction of Baathist Iraq, and threatened destruction of Khomeinist Iran mark the final end of the League of Nations’ ethos which had arisen from the condemnation of aggression. In Osama bin Laden’s quaint idiom, there seems a battle of “Crusaders” and “Zionists” against Muslim believers. Certainly Muslim believers (which means most Muslims as there are relatively few agnostics and atheists among them) think that it is obvious that the Universe was created, and that its Creator finally and definitively spoke through one human being in 7th Century Arabia. Many people from North Africa to the Philippines are not often able to conceive how things might have been otherwise. The new era of history will undoubtedly see all kinds of conversations take place about this rather subtle question.
January 31, 1998 — drsubrotoroy
Transparency and Economic Policy-Making
An address by Professor Subroto Roy to the Asia-Pacific Public Relations Conference, (panel on Transparency chaired by C. R. Irani) January 30 1998.
This talk is dedicated to the memory of my sister Suchandra Bhattacharjee (14.02.1943-10.01.1998).
1. I would like to talk about transparency and economic policy-making in our country. For something to be transparent is, in plain language, for it to be able to be openly seen through, for it to not to be opaque, obscure or muddy, for it to be clear to the naked eye or to the reasonable mind. A clear glass of water is a transparent glass of water. Similarly, an open and easily comprehensible set of economic policies is a transparent set of economic policies.
The philosopher Karl Popper wrote a famous book after the Second World War titled The Open Society and its Enemies. It contained a passionate defence of liberal institutions and democratic freedoms and a bitter attack on totalitarian doctrines of all kinds. It generated a lot of controversy, especially over its likely misreading of the best known work of political philosophy since the 4th Century BC, namely, Plato’s Republic .[1] I shall borrow Popper’s terms ‘open society’ and ‘closed society’ and will first try to make this a useful distinction for modern times, and then apply it to the process of economic policy-making in India today.
2. An open society is one in which the ordinary citizen has reasonably easy access to any and all information relating to the public or social interest — whether the information is directly available to the citizen himself or herself, or is indirectly available to his or her elected representatives like MP’s and MLA’s. Different citizens will respond to the same factual information in different ways, and conflict and debate about the common good will result. But that would be part of the democratic process.
The assessment that any public makes about the government of the day depends on both good and bad news about the fate of the country at any given time. In an open society, both good news and bad news is out there in the pubic domain — open to be assessed, debated, rejoiced over, or wept about. If we win a cricket match or send a woman into space we rejoice. If we lose a child in a manhole or a busload of children in a river, we weep. If some tremendous fraud on the public exchequer comes to be exposed, we are appalled. And so on.
It is the hallmark of an open society that its citizens are mature enough to cope with both the good and the bad news about their country that comes to be daily placed before them. Or, perhaps more accurately, the experience of having to handle both good and bad news daily about their world causes the citizens in an open society to undergo a process of social maturation in formulating their understanding of the common good as well as their responses to problems or crises that the community may come to face. They might be thereby thought of as improving their civic capacities, as becoming better-informed and more discerning voters and decision-makers, and so becoming better citizens of the country in which they live.
The opposite of an open society is a closed society — one in which a ruling political party or a self-styled elite or nomenclatura keep publicly important information to themselves, and do not allow the ordinary citizen easy or reasonably free access to it. The reason may be merely that they are intent on accumulating assets for themselves as quickly as they can while in office, or that they are afraid of public anger and want to save their own skins from demands for accountability. Or it may be that they have the impression that the public is better off kept in the dark — that only the elite nomenclatura is in position to use the information to serve the national interest.
In a closed society it is inevitable that bad news comes to be censored or suppressed by the nomenclatura, and so the good news gets exaggerated in significance. News of economic disasters, military defeats or domestic uprisings gets suppressed. News of victories or achievements or heroics gets exaggerated. If there are no real victories, achievements or heroics, fake ones have to be invented by government hacks — although the suppressed bad news tends to silently whisper all the way through the public consciousness in any case.
Such is the way of government propaganda in almost every country, even those that pride themselves on being free and democratic societies. Dostoevsky’s cardinal advice in Brothers Karamasov was: “Above all, never lie to yourself”. Yet people in power tend to become so adept at propaganda that they start to deceive themselves and forget what is true and what is false, or worse still, cannot remember how to distinguish between true and false in the first place. In an essay thirty years ago titled Truth and Politics, the American scholar Hannah Arendt put it like this:
“Insofar as man carries within himself a partner from whom he can never win release, he will be better off not to live with a murderer or a liar; or: since thought is the silent dialogue carried out between me and myself, I must be careful to keep the integrity of this partner intact, for otherwise I shall surely lose the capacity for thought altogether.”[2]
3. Closed societies may have been the rule and open societies the exception for most of human history. The good news at the end of the 20th Century is surely that since November 7 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell, the closed society has officially ceased to be a respectable form of human social organization. The age of mass access to television and telecommunications at the end of the 20th Century may be spelling the permanent end of totalitarianism and closed societies in general. The Berlin Wall was perhaps doomed to fall the first day East Germans were able to watch West German television programs.
Other than our large and powerful neighbour China, plus perhaps North Korea, Myanmar, and some Islamic countries, declared closed societies are becoming hard to find, and China remains in two minds whether to be open or closed. No longer is Russia or Romania or Albania or South Africa closed in the way each once was for many years. There may be all sorts of problems and confusions in these countries but they are or trying to become open societies.
Under the glare of TV cameras in the 21st Century, horrors like the Holocaust or the Gulag or even an atrocity like Jalianwalla Bag or the Mai Lai massacre will simply not be able to take place anywhere in the world. Such things are not going to happen, or if they do happen, it will be random terrorism and not systematic, large scale genocide of the sort the 20th Century has experienced. The good news is that somehow, through the growth of human ingenuity that we call technical progress, we may have made some moral progress as a species as well.
4. My hypothesis, then, is that while every country finds its place on a spectrum of openness and closedness with respect to its political institutions and availability of information, a broad and permanent drift has been taking place as the 20th Century comes to an end in the direction of openness.
With this greater openness we should expect bad news not to come to be suppressed or good news not to come to be exaggerated in the old ways of propaganda. Instead we should expect more objectively accurate information to come about in the public domain — i.e., better quality and more reliable information, in other words, more truthful information. This in turn commensurately requires more candour and maturity on the part of citizens in discussions about the national or social interest. Closed society totalitarianism permitted the general masses to remain docile and unthinking while the nomenclatura make the decisions. Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor said that is all that can be expected of the masses. Open society transparency and democracy defines the concept of an ordinary citizen and requires from that citizen individual rationality and individual responsibility. It is the requirement Pericles made of the Athenians:
“Here each individual is interested not only in his own affairs but in the affairs of the state as well; even those who are mostly occupied with their own business are extremely well-informed on general politics – this is a peculiarity of ours: we do not say that a man who takes no interest in politics is a man who minds his own business; we say that he has no business here at all.”[3]
5. All this being said, I am at last in a position to turn to economic policy in India today. I am sorry to have been so long-winded and pedantic but now I can state my main substantive point bluntly: in India today, there is almost zero transparency in the information needed for effective macroeconomic policy-making whether at the Union or State levels. To illustrate by some examples.
(A) Macroeconomic policy-making in any large country requires the presence of half a dozen or a dozen well-defined competing models produced by the government and private agencies, specifying plausible causal links between major economic variables, and made testable against time-series data of reasonably long duration. In India we seem to have almost none. The University Economics Departments are all owned by some government or other and can hardly speak out with any academic freedom. When the Ministry of Finance or RBI or Planning Commission, or the India teams of the World Bank or IMF, make their periodic statements they do not appear to be based on any such models or any such data-base. If any such models exist, these need to be published and placed in the public domain for thorough discussion as to their specification and their data. Otherwise, whatever is being predicted cannot be assessed as being very much more reliable than the predictions obtained from the Finance Minister’s astrologer or palmist. (NB: Horse-Manure is a polite word used in the American South for what elsewhere goes by the initials of B. S.). Furthermore, there is no follow-up or critical review to see whether what the Government said was going to happen a year ago has in fact happened, and if not, why not.
(B) The Constitution of India defines many States yet no one seems to be quite certain how many States really constitute the Union of India at any given time. We began with a dozen. Some 565 petty monarchs were successfully integrated into a unitary Republic of India, and for some years we had sixteen States. But today, do we really have 26 States? Is Delhi a State? UP with 150 million people would be the fifth or sixth largest country in the world on its own; is it really merely one State of India? Are 11 Small States de facto Union Territories in view of their heavy dependence on the Union? Suppose we agreed there are fifteen Major States of India based on sheer population size: namely, Andhra, Assam, Bihar, Gujarat, Haryana, Karnataka, Kerala, MP, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, UP and West Bengal. These States account for 93% of the population of India. The average population of these 15 Major States is 58 million people each. That is the size of a major country like France or Britain. In other words, the 870 million people in India’s Major States are numerically 15 Frances or 15 Britains put together.
Yet no reliable, uniformly collected GDP figures exist for these 15 States. The RBI has the best data, and these are at least two years old, and the RBI will tell you without further explanation that the data across States are not comparable. If that is the case at State-level, I do not see how the national-level Gross Domestic Product can possibly be estimated with any meaningfulness at all.
(C) Then we hear about the Government Budget deficit as a percentage of GDP. Now any national government is able to pay for its activities only by taxation or borrowing or by using its monopoly over the domestic medium of exchange to print new money. In India today, universal money-illusion seems to prevail. It would not be widely recognised by citizens, journalists or policy-makers that, say, 100,000 Rupees nominally taxed at 10% under 20% inflation leaves less real disposable income than the same taxed at 20% with 5% inflation. This is in part because inflation figures are unknown or suspect. There is no reliable all-India or State-level consumer price index. The wholesale price index on the basis of which the Government of India makes its inflation statements, may not accurately reflect the actual decline in the purchasing power of money, as measured, say, by rises in prices of alternative stores of value like land. The index includes artificially low administered or subsidized prices for petroleum, cereals, and electricity. To the extent these prices may be expected to move towards international equilibrium prices, the index contains a strong element of deferred inflation. One urgent task for all macroeconomic research in India is construction of reliable price-data indices at both Union and State levels, or at a minimum, the testing for reliability by international standards of series currently produced by Government agencies.
Without reliable macroeconomic information being spread widely through a reasonably well-informed electorate, the Government of India has been able to wash away fiscal budget constraints by monetization and inflation without significant response from voters. The routine method of meeting deficits has become “the use of the printing press to manufacture legal tender paper money”, either directly by paying Government creditors “with new paper money specially printed for the purpose” or indirectly by paying creditors “out of loans to itself from the Central Bank”, issuing paper money to that amount. Every Budget of the Government of India, including the most recent ones of 1996 and 1997, comes to be attended by detailed Press discussion with regard to the minutae of changes in tax rates or tax-collection — yet the enormous phenomena of the automatic monetization of the Government’s deficit is ill-understood and effectively ignored. Historically, a policy of monetization started with the British Government in India during the Second World War, with a more than five-fold increase in money supply occurring between 1939 and 1945. Inflation rates never seen in India before or since were the result (Charts 0000), attended by the Great Famine of 1942/43. Though these were brought down after succession of C. D. Deshmukh as Governor of the Reserve Bank, the policy of automatic monetization did not cease and continues until the present day. Inflation “sooner or later destroys the confidence, not only of businessmen, but of the whole community, in the future value of the currency. Then comes the stage known as “the flight from the currency.” Had the Rupee been convertible during the Bretton Woods period, depreciation would have signalled and helped to adjust for disequilibrium. But exchange-controls imposed during the War were enlarged by the new Governments of India and Pakistan after the British departure to exclude convertible Sterling Area currencies as well. With the Rupee no longer convertible, internal monetization of deficits could continue without commensurate exchange-rate depreciation.
The Reserve Bank was originally supposed to be a monetary authority independent of the Government’s fiscal compulsions. It has been prevented from developing into anything more than a department of the Ministry of Finance, and as such, has become the captive creditor of the Government. The RBI in turn has utilized its supervisory role over banking to hold captive creditors, especially nationalized banks whose liabilities account for 90% of commercial bank deposits in the country. Also captive are nationalized insurance companies and pension funds. Government debt instruments show on the asset side of these balance-sheets. To the extent these may not have been held had banks been allowed to act in the interests of proper management of depositors’ liabilities and share-capital according to normal principles, these are pseudo-assets worth small fractions of their nominal values. Chart 0000 shows that in the last five years the average term structure of Government debt has been shortening rapidly, suggesting the Government is finding it increasingly difficult to find creditors, and portending higher interest rates.
General recognition of these business facts, as may be expected to come about with increasing transparency, would be a recipe for a crisis of confidence in the banking and financial system if appropriate policies were not in place beforehand.
(D) As two last examples, I offer two charts. The first shows the domestic interest burden of the Government of India growing at an alarming rate, even after it has been deflated to real terms. The second tries to show India’s foreign assets and liabilities together – we always come to know what is happening to the RBI’s reserve levels, what is less known or less understood is the structure of foreign liabilities being accumulated by the country. Very roughly speaking, in terms that everyone can understand, every man, woman and child in India today owes something like 100 US dollars to the outside world. The Ministry of Finance will tell you that this is not to be worried about because it is long-term debt and not short-term debt. Even if we take them at their word, interest payments still have to be paid on long-term debt, say at 3% per annum. That means for the stock of debt merely to be financed, every man, woman and child in India must be earning $3 every year in foreign exchange via the sale of real goods and services abroad. I.e., something like $3 billion must be newly earned every year in foreign exchange merely to finance the existing stock of debt. Quite clearly, that is not happening and it would stretch the imagination to see how it can be made to happen.
In sum, then, India, blessed with democratic political traditions which we had to take from the British against their will — remember Tilak, “Freedom is my birthright, and I shall have it” — may still be stuck with a closed society mentality when it comes to the all-important issue of economic policy. There is simply an absence in Indian public discourse of vigourous discussion of economic models and facts, whether at Union or State levels. A friendly foreign ambassador pointedly observed an absence in India of political philosophy. It may be more accurate to say that without adequate experience of a normal agenda of government being seen to be practised, widespread ignorance regarding fiscal and monetary causalities and inexperience of the technology of governance remains in the Indian electorate, as well as among public decision-makers at all levels. Our politicians seem to spend an inordinate amount of their time either garlanding one another with flowers or garlanding statues and photographs of the glorious dead. It is high time they stopped to think about the living and the future.
[1] Renford Bambrough (ed.) Plato, Popper and Politics: Some Contributions to a Modern Controversy, 1967.
[2] Philosophy, Politics and Society, 2nd Series, Peter Laslett & W. G. Runciman (eds.), 1967.
[3] Thucydides, History of the Pelopennesian War, II.40.
May 18, 1993 — drsubrotoroy
Author’s Note May 2007: Between January 1993 and about May 1993 I was a Consultant to the International Monetary Fund, Washington, DC. The IMF does not usually hire consultants, and I was hired thanks to a recommendation by Gopi Arora to Hubert Neiss. At the request of Saudi IMF Executive Director Mohammad Al-Jasser, I did an interdepartmental comparative study — the only one until that time and perhaps since — of exchange-rates and exports of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. What follows is a part of that relating to exports. A little of it was published in an ICRIER study in New Delhi the following year, on India-United States trade.
EXPORTS FROM THE SUBCONTINENT
This study reports the main results of a study of exports from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh to their largest world markets in the period 1962-1991.
Method
Panels of two-level Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) data were gathered as reported to the United Nations Statistical Office, Geneva in its Trade Analysis and Reporting System. These gave original data of all imports from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as reported by each of the United States, Britain, Japan, Germany and France (G-5 countries) over the 30-year period 1962-1991 in c.i.f. terms. These countries constitute almost 75 percent of the subcontinent’s total export market, and possibly more if indirect exports via third countries like Hong Kong and Singapore are accounted for.
The import-demand data reported by each of these countries provide the most reliable and uniform data source available.
To detect any possible trends in real growth or decline, the nominal data reported over this 30 year period were deflated to constant 1990 prices, using price-series obtained from the World Bank’s Quarterly Review of Commodity Markets December 1992. This source provides a manufactured goods unit value index for the G-5 countries, as well as individual price series for petroleum and commodities excluding energy. The latter is divided into foods (divided into beverages, cereals, fats & oils, and other), non-food agricultural, timber, and metals & minerals. It is considered the most reliable price-series data of its kind available. All figures given below are in constant 1990 U. S. dollars.
Overall, one firm regionwide fact to emerge about the subcontinent’s exports to the major industrial countries has to do with the enormous real growth of clothing, especially in the decade 1982-1991. Not only has there been remarkable growth in real terms of clothing exports from the entire region, but there has been relatively higher growth in Pakistan compared to India, and higher growth in Sri Lanka and Bangladesh compared to Pakistan.
India to the United States
India’s main exports to the United States have changed in product composition over the period 1962-1991, though not in ways predicted or hoped for by national economic plans. Between 1962-1971, the main exports other than textile manufactures (SITC 65) were agricultural: tea, coffee & spices (SITC 07), fruit and vegetables (SITC 05), sugars (SITC 06), fish and preparations (SITC 03), and crude matter(SITC 29). Between 1972-1981, the mix was transformed by growth of exports of polished diamonds (SITC 66) and clothing (SITC 84), which together with textile manufactures have dominated Indian exports to the United States since.
Between 1982-1991, the same mix continued to dominate with the significant addition of petroleum and products (SITC 33) which was the single largest export from India to the United States in each year between 1982 and 1985.[1] Textile manufactures were the dominant export until 1978 and have been in the top four throughout the period. But there has been steady decline in real terms. The decline has been from annual averages of $740 million (c.i.f.) in 1962-71, to $406 million in 1972-1981, to $285 million in 1982-1991. India has also steadily lost market-share in total textile imports into the United States, dominating the market with an average annual market-share of 19.5 percent in 1962-1971, reduced to 10.1 percent in 1972-1981, reduced further to 4.84 percent in 1982-1991.
Clothing during the same period has shown high real growth, going from an annual average of $7 million in 1962-1971 to $178 million in 1972-1981, to $538 million in 1982-1991. Average annual market-share of total U.S. imports has gone from 0.10 percent in 1962-1971, to 2.11 percent in 1972-1981, to 2.34 percent in 1982-1991. While this has been small growth from the point of view of the United States market, the movement has been large relative to initial conditions from the point of view of Indian exporters. It is not apparent whether the decline in textile manufactures has been independent of the growth of clothing or whether there has been value-increasing substitution from textile manufactures into clothing. Comparative experience with Germany suggests there has not been such substitution.
India to Britain
India’s exports to Britain are marked by textile manufactures (SITC 65) and tea, coffee & spices (SITC 07), being among the top five exports throughout the entire period 1962-1991.
However, both of these traditional exports have declined in real terms. Annual average imports into Britain of textile manufactures from India were $253 million (c.i.f.) in 1962-1971 down to $179 million in 1972-1981 and $161 million in 1982-1991. India’s share of Britain’s imports of textile manufactures fell from 15.5 percent and 16.0 percent in 1962 and 1963 to 3.4 percent and 4.0 percent in 1990 and 1991.
Annual average imports into Britain of tea, coffee & spices from India were $269 million in 1962-1971 down to $87 million in 1972-1981 and $66 million in 1982-1991. Clothing (SITC 84) exports to Britain have shown high real growth, from annual averages of $4 million in 1962-1971 to $86 million in 1972-1981 to $200 million in 1982-1991. Of remaining exports to Britain, in the period 1962-1971 agricultural outputs like animal feed (SITC 08), tobacco (SITC 12) and crude matter (SITC 29) as well as leather goods (SITC 61) were the main product groups.
The next period 1972-1981 saw the growth of clothing (SITC 84) to a position of dominance among all Indian exports to Britain, and some growth in non-ferrous metals (SITC 68) mainly copper and aluminium alloys. The latest period 1982-1991 has seen some growth of non-traditional engineering exports to the top ranks, mainly transport equipment (SITC 73), metal manufactures (SITC 69) and non-electrical machinery (SITC 71). Clothing and textiles, however, continued to dominate more than 44 percent of all exports.
India to Japan
The main feature of India’s exports to Japan over the entire period 1962-1991 is the dominance of iron ore (SITC 28) throughout. Annual average imports of iron ore into Japan from India were $401 million in 1962-1971, rising to $556 million in 1972-1981, and $572 million in 1982-1991.
The period 1962-1971 saw, in addition to iron ore, export of raw cotton and jute fibres (SITC 26), crude agricultural matter (SITC 29), crude fertilizer (SITC 27), animal feed (SITC 08), sugar (SITC 06), ferrous alloys (SITC 67), and fish and preparations (SITC 03). The period 1972-1981 saw very high growth of exports of fish and preparations (SITC 03) and polished diamonds (SITC 66), as well as some growth of textile manufactures (SITC 65). Starting from almost zero, India’s market-share of Japanese imports of fish grew to an annual average of 7.31 percent during the period 1969-1985, before falling back to 2.7 percent in the 1990s. The latest period 1982-1991 has seen the dominance of polished diamonds equalling that of iron ore, as well as significant growth in clothing (SITC 84) and petroleum (SITC 33). The main exports of India to Japan are at present polished diamonds, iron ore, fish, ferrous-alloys and clothing. It seems plausible that India’s pattern of exports to Japan has been related to the high growth transformation of Japan’s economy during this time.
India to Germany and France
As with Japan, India’s exports to the Federal Republic of Germany show unique aspects related in all likelihood to the high growth transformation of the German economy during this period. Remarkably, textile yarn and fabric (SITC 65) from India to Germany has shown large real growth during 1962-1990. German imports of Indian textile manufactures were at an annual average of just $55 million for 1962-1971; this increased to an annual average of $163 million for 1972-1981 and to $255 million for 1982-1990. Although this has not been enough to offset the large declines of Indian textiles in the United States and British markets, it may suggest that rapid domestic growth in one large importing market can reduce the impact of loss of competitiveness in a different market. Clothing (SITC 84) has shown extremely high real growth relative to initial conditions. German imports of clothing from India were at an annual average of under $4 million in 1962-1971, rising to annual averages of $96 million in 1972-1981 and $282 million in 1982-1990. The simultaneous growth of textile manufacture and clothing exports from India to Germany may suggest that there has not been value-adding substitution from the former to the latter. Other than clothing, the product composition of Indian exports to Germany has not seen much drastic change.
In 1962-1965, iron ore (SITC 28) was the single largest export only to become abruptly insignificant, possibly implying new sources had been found by importers. Besides textile manufactures, three other traditional exports — leather goods (SITC 61), tea, coffee & spices (SITC 07), and crude matter (SITC 29) — have been among the top Indian exports to Germany throughout the period 1962-1990. Of these, leather goods have shown real growth from annual averages of $34 million in 1962-1971, to $55 million in 1972-1981, to $86 million in 1982-1990. Polished diamonds (SITC 66) also have been a major export to Germany since as early as 1964, with significant growth in the latest period 1982-1990.
India’s exports to France show certain similarities with the pattern to Germany on a smaller scale. Textile yarn and fabric (SITC 65) has shown growth in real terms from annual averages of $18 million in 1962-1971, to $51 million in 1972-1981 to $63 million in 1982-1991. (The growth of textile exports to Germany and France together have not offset the declines to the United States and Britain — average annual exports to the four countries totalling $1.07 billion for 1962-1971, $0.80 billion for 1972-1981, and $0.76 billion for 1982-1991.) Clothing exports to France have shown enormous growth relative to initial conditions, moving from annual averages of under $3 million in 1962-1971, to $57 million in 1972-1981 to $108 million in 1982-1991. Besides textile and clothing, Indian exports to France have included leather goods (SITC 61), crude matter (SITC 29), polished diamonds (SITC 66) and animal feed (SITC 07). In 1982 and 1985, France also reported petroleum imports as the single largest product from India.
Pakistan to the United States and Britain
In the period prior to 1972, Pakistan’s exports to traditional markets in the United States and Britain were dominated by raw jute and cotton fibres (SITC 26) and cotton and jute manufactures (SITC 65).
Since 1972, cotton manufactures (SITC 65) have shown remarkable real growth, and along with clothing (SITC 84) have dominated Pakistan’s exports to these markets. Annual average imports of cotton manufactures from Pakistan into the United States and Britain were $87 million and $76 million respectively in 1973-1981, rising to $182 million and $117 million respectively in 1982-1991.
Pakistan’s share of total textile imports rose from an annual average of 2.3 percent in 1973-1981 to 2.9 percent in 1982-1991 in the United States market, and from 1.8 percent to 1.9 percent in the British market. This contrasts with India’s declining textile exports to the same markets in the same period.
Average annual clothing imports from Pakistan into the United States and Britain were $22 million and $11 million respectively during 1973-1981, rising to $164 million and $62 million respectively during 1982-1991. During the period, Pakistan’s market-share of clothing imports has risen from 0.2 percent to 1.0 percent in case of the United States, and from 0.3 percent to 1.9 percent in case of Britain. Again, these are small changes for the importing markets but large changes from the point of view of exporters relative to initial conditions.
Other than textiles and clothing, significant movement in Pakistan’s exports to the United States and Britain is found in instruments, watches and clocks (SITC 86) to the United States, which went from an annual average of $10 million during 1973-1981 to $26 million in 1982-1991.
Pakistan to Japan, Germany and France
Pakistan’s exports to Japan have been dominated by cotton yarn and fabric (SITC 65) and cotton fibres (SITC 26), both showing strong real growth. The first has gone from an annual average of $79 million in 1973-1981 to $304 million in 1982-1991, the second from $48 million to $75 million in the same time period. Other exports to Japan include fish (SITC 03), leather goods (SITC 61), and petroleum and products (SITC 33).
Pakistan’s exports to Germany and France have been dominated by clothing (SITC 84) and cotton yarn and fabric (SITC 65). Average annual exports of clothing have grown from $19 million in 1973-1982 to $86 million in 1982-1991 in case of Germany, and from $8 million in 1973-1981 to $55 million in 1982-1991 in case of France. In the same periods, average annual exports of cotton yarn and fabric went up from $34 million to $66 million in case of France, and went down from $107 million to $99 million in case of Germany.
Other exports from Pakistan to Germany and France have included leather goods (SITC 61), cotton fibres (SITC 26), sugar (SITC 06) and petroleum and products (SITC 33).
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka’s exports to the major industrial countries are marked by drastic decline in exports of tea (SITC 07) and rapid growth of exports of clothing (SITC 84).
Sri Lankan tea exports were at an annual average of $175 million to Britain and $49 million to the United States during 1962-1971, reduced to $38 million and $24 million respectively in 1972-1981, reduced to $23 million and $16 million respectively in 1982-1991. Between 1980 and 1991, Sri Lanka’s market-share of total British tea imports fell from 11 percent in 1980 to 7 percent in 1991. Evidently this loss of market-share was not India’s gain, as India’s share of the same market fell even more drastically, from 33 percent in 1980 to 17 percent in 1991. India and Sri Lanka traditionally dominated the world market for tea. Major competitors since then have been China, Indonesia, Kenya and Malawi.
Sri Lanka’s exports of clothing to the United States, Germany, Britain and France have grown very rapidly, making clothing the dominant export of Sri Lanka in the last decade. Average annual exports of clothing rose from $39 million in 1972-1981 to $361 million in 1982-1991 in case of the United States; from $10 million to $70 million in case of Germany; from $3 million to $27 million in case of Britain; from $2 million to $20 million in case of France. Although rates of value-added growth will be lower in view of Sri Lankan imports of raw materials (from India and Pakistan), clothing has clearly shown phenomenal growth relative to initial conditions.
Besides tea and clothing, significant movement in Sri Lanka’s exports over the long run appears in polished diamonds (SITC 66). Sri Lankan exports amounted to annual averages of $5 million and $4 million to Japan and the United States respectively in 1962-1971; $32 million and $17 million respectively in 1972-1981; and $38 million and $32 million respectively in 1982-1991. Value-added may be considerably lower given imports of rough diamonds via Belgium and India.
Bangladesh
Like India and Pakistan, Bangladesh’s exports to the United States have been dominated by clothing (SITC 84) and textile yarn and fabric (SITC 65). As with India, textile manufactures have fallen drastically in real terms while clothing has shown enormous growth relative to initial conditions. While it is possible again that there has been value-increasing substitution from one towards the other, this appears unlikely as Bangladesh’s textile manufactures are mainly jute products. Average annual exports of textile manufactures from Bangladesh to the United States fell from $130 million in 1972-1981 to $75 million in 1982-1991, while clothing exports rose from near zero in 1972-1981 to an annual average of $249 million in 1982-1991. Unofficial (smuggled) trade across the India-Bangladesh border is reported to be high, and it is possible Indian exporters have sought to sidestep United States quotas by going through Bangladesh which does not face quotas.
The remaining significant movement in Bangladesh’s exports to the United States has been in fish (SITC 03), which has risen from an annual average of $8 million in 1972-1981 to $35 million in 1982-1991.
Bangladesh’s main exports to Britain have included jute fibres (SITC 26), textile manufactures (SITC 65) and fish (SITC 03). Average annual exports of jute fibres went from $19 million in 1973-1981 to $8 million in 1982-1991; textile manufactures went from $20 million in 1973-1982 to $21 million in 1982-1991; and fish went from $3 million in 1973-1981 to $18 million in 1982-1991. The remaining significant movement in Bangladesh’s exports to Britain include the appearance of transport equipment (SITC 73) as the top export at an average annual amount of $121 million in each year 1978-1980, followed by its equally sudden disappearance. And clothing exports have shown rapid growth from near zero to average annual exports of $50 million in the period 1988-1991.
Bangladesh’s exports to Japan have been dominated by fish and preparations (SITC 03), with average annual exports growing rapidly from $11 million in 1973-1982 to $54 million in 1982-1991. Other exports to Japan have included textile manufactures (SITC 65), petroleum and products (SITC 33), leather goods (SITC 61) and raw jute (SITC 26).
Bangladesh’s exports to Germany and France are marked by the rapid recent growth of clothing from negligible amounts to an annual average of $60 million in case of Germany and $52 million in case of France in 1987-1991. Other exports to Germany and France have included fish (SITC 03), textile manufactures (SITC 65), and leather goods (SITC 61).
[1]Some discrepancy exists in the data as India does not report any exports of petroleum to either the USA or France in these years.
April 22, 1988 — drsubrotoroy
A note on the welfare economics of regional cooperation
Subroto Roy
April 22 1988
(Statement at a conference on regional cooperation in Asia and Latin America held at the East West Centre, Honolulu, April 1988)
How should we evaluate the success of efforts at regional cooperation? When we look at different attempts at cooperation around the world, what general principles and observations might we bring to bear from within the discipline of economics? I propose to try to answer this broad normative question, and at the same time to report on certain aspects of the interesting and informative papers given by Dr. Ffrench-Davis, Dr. Wong, and Dr. Bhuyan on Latin America, ASEAN, and South Asia respectively.
It may be helpful to remind ourselves at the outset of the textbook classification of forms of economic cooperation. This usually traces a route from the least orderly and least integrated to the most orderly and most integrated — from the free-trade area to the customs union to the common market to the economic union. The free-trade area has no intra-area tariffs and therefore has a free flow of goods, although each member can have what tariffs it pleases with the rest of the world. The customs union maintains the free flow of goods of a free-trade area and in addition has a common tarriff barrier with the rest of the world. The common market is a customs union and in addition has free flow of factors like labour and capital. The economic union is a common market which in addition has a common currency and a uniform monetary and fiscal policy, and which probably must have a common federal government as well.
Now we learn about one thing through comparison and contrast with other things. Thus efforts at cooperation in South Asia and Latin America and ASEAN are fittingly compared and contrasted both with one another as well as with efforts, say, in post-War Europe. It has been generally believed too that more integration is a good thing. So for instance, while the European Community still remains something between a customs union and a common market, the European experiment as a whole has been motivated by a desire (or perhaps by wishful thinking) to form an economic union like that of the United States. And it is the U. S. — whose Constitution in 1789 started with the words: “We the people…, in order to form a more perfect union….” — which surely remains the best example the world has yet seen of an effective economic and political union. Yet even in the U. S. the process took a hundred years and a lot of bloodshed. In many places in the south today, the Civil War between 1861 and 1865 is still referred to as the “War between the States”. A lesson from the American experience may be that an important and yet intangible benefit of attempts at integration, regardless of how much integration it actually leads to, may be the prevention of unnecessary war. No matter how far the European Community is from its explicit goal of an economic and political union, or how wishful such a goal might be, or how much is wasted in resources by the bureaucracy in Brussells, if European cooperation has helped to reduce to zero the probability of a third European war in the twentieth century, it may have contributed to the economic welfare of Europe.
Now the prospect of pointless war within the European Community has become ludicrous but this may not be so elsewhere. Neither Dr. Ffrench-Davis nor Dr. Wong has found it necessary to say anything about military tensions, so it is possible that the prospect of needless wars within Latin America or within ASEAN has become as ludicrous as in Europe, and it is possible that regional institutions have helped towards that. If so, that should be registered on the credit-side of the balance sheet when we are evaluating the success of LAFTA or ASEAN or the Andean Pact. But certainly the same cannot be said in South Asia, where military tensions between India and Pakistan have seldom been far from the surface.
In fact the South Asian case is interestingly seen from another angle as well. For consider the basic fact that the main economic point of regional cooperation is to improve mass welfare via increasing trade. Yet Dr. Bhuyan reports that trade has yet to be put on the SAARC agenda in any serious way. The leaders of the SAARC nations have been talking about meteorology and drug abuse and the rights of children and science policy and solar technology and all kinds of other worthy issues, but they have not been talking about abolishing quotas and reducing tariffs on one another’s goods. In terms of the textbook classification, regional cooperation in South Asia in the late 1980s has not yet reached even the starting point of discussing a free-trade area. Yet paradoxically just about forty years ago, the same nations which today find it so difficult even to talk about improving trade, were completely united and integrated from an economic point of view — not merely in a free-trade area or customs union or a common market but in a full-fledged economic union. The departure of Britain from the subcontinent and the political partition between India and Pakistan did not logically entail that the economic union which South Asia had been for numerous centuries had to be completely destroyed. Yet that is what happened. The welfare costs of the lack of foresight on all sides at the time have not yet been calculated.
Drawing these thoughts together then, my first general observation is quite an obvious one. Efforts at regional cooperation can lead to more and better contacts, information, and channels of communication – between heads of governments, finance ministers, businessmen, private citizens, and so on. There is, in short, an increase in trust. Or to put it in economists’ language, there is a reduction in transactions costs or an increase in the stock of what may be called the “informational capital” available to traders and potential traders. Regardless of whether tariffs do in fact come to be reduced and trade increased, the stock of trust or informational capital is valuable. The maintenance of this stock may require expenditures on bureaucracies, conferences etc. (expenditures which Dr. Wong reports to be small in case of ASEAN). But if these expenditures have quietly reduced or are reducing the probability of needless wars between the member-states of LAFTA or ASEAN or SAARC (and here we might recall just how many needless wars were fought in European history between countries at the same so-called “stage of development” as those now in Asia and Latin America) then the expected utility of the bureaucracies may be certainly positive and perhaps rising.
Military conflicts or civil wars destroy not only physical and human capital but this kind of informational capital as well. It is this stock of informational capital which was destroyed with the breakup of the economic union in South Asia forty years ago, and which the South Asian nations are now finding so hard to rebuild. The same can be said perhaps of China and Taiwan, North and South Korea, and so on.
Next, I would like to return to the basic rationale of regional cooperation being to increase welfare via increasing trade via lowering tariffs, probably reciprocally but perhaps even unilaterally. It is to encourage as much improved efficiency in production and hence in consumption as possible; or in Jacob Viner’s terms to have as much “trade creation” and as little “trade diversion” as possible. Such a purpose would or should take as axiomatic Adam Smith’s remark: “Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.” (Wealth of Nations, IV.viii.49). Yet, at the same time, the fact of the matter is that it is national governments, and not business firms let aside ordinary households and consumers, who are involved in attempts at regional cooperation. Stated in terms of a principal-agent problem, it is governments who are the agents while the mass of individual taxpayer/consumers are the principals.
The situation is such that the agents can probably get away quite well without attending to the interests of their principals in matters of mutual tariff-reduction. But if they do want to attend to the interests of their principals, what Smith’s remark does is give them a simple rule of thumb to apply: does such-and-such a policy proposal have a reasonable chance of helping the ordinary consumer? That is to say, will it enlarge the budget-set of the average household? Or in other words, will it reduce the average household’s expenditures and/or increase the average household’s income?
Improving trade necessarily implies exploiting comparative advantages better, and hence it implies increasing specialization. So if the basic purpose of regional cooperation is indeed to improve economic welfare via more trade, and if this purpose is indeed to be seriously served, then the process of obtaining the greater specialization will necessarily imply the decline of some industries and the rise of other industries in each participating economy.
If country A and country B are both involved in import-substitution, and country A’s industry 1 is relatively less inefficient than country B’s industry 1, then the economic integration of A and B will imply that country A’s industry 1 will rise and country B’s industry 1 will decline, while country B’s industry 2 will rise and country A’s industry 2 will decline.
Again I am saying something which is obvious from an economist’s standpoint. I do so for the following reason. It is clear from Dr.Wong’s paper that the leaders of ASEAN seem to be relatively serious about tariff-reduction. They may not have succeeded as much as they would have liked but they see and understand the fundamental purpose of regional cooperation. The spirit is willing but the body is weak. It would seem from Dr. Ffrench-Davis’s paper too that mutual tariff-reduction has also been a central part of the discussion surrounding Latin American cooperation, and Dr. Ffrench-Davis himself has decried the slowing down of reciprocal trade in the 1980s. However Dr. Bhuyan’s report suggests that, with trade off the SAARC agenda and all kinds of other activities on it instead, SAARC is in danger of becoming merely another vehicle for the ever-expanding role of the State in South Asia. If I might generalize on a remark Sven Arndt made yesterday: if the domestic policies of individual countries are an unsound basis for economic development, then no amount of regional cooperation will have any significant beneficial effect. Indeed it might even worsen things by distracting attention from fundamental problems, increasing centralization and politicization of economic decisions, and so on.
A few small points to end with.
1. Dr. Ffrench-Davis refers, I think in a neutral way but I am not sure, to “regional investment planning” in the Andean Pact. Dr. Bhuyan refers, I think with approval, to “balanced regional industrialization through agreed specialization… the idea is to allot particular industries to particular countries in which they have special interest” (p. 17). I have not been able to see how the increasingly centralised allocation of resources entailed by such a policy is conducive to the basic purposes of regional cooperation. Greater specialization is indeed a natural corollary of economic integration. But the forces of trade, and not the SAARC headquarters in Kathmandu, surely need to be allowed to determine its direction.
2. Both Dr. Ffrench-Davis and Dr. Bhuyan refer to stronger and weaker, or bigger and smaller, members of a regional grouping. And Dr. Bhuyan suggests “that a straightforward liberalization of trade by dismantling all trade barriers may benefit the larger countries more than the smaller ones” (p. 12). I am not at all sure that this is right. For example, in the Heckscher-Ohlin model the scale of an economy is not relevant to the gains from trade — one country may have absolutely greater amounts of every single factor than another, and yet trade may benefit both because they have relatively different amounts of the factors. (Similarly in the Ricardian model, one country may have an absolute advantage in the production of both goods, and yet trade may still be beneficial because the countries differ in the relative advantage of the production of each good.)
Thus, in conclusion, all three reports we have been given of efforts at regional cooperation in Asia and Latin America are interesting and informative. Once again it would seem ASEAN has been leading the way in getting the basic economics as right as possible given what is politically feasible. And here again we have to think not of ASEAN’s absolute success, but its success relative to other attempts, including I would say the European Community). Latin America does not seem to have been very far behind in the matter of getting the basic economics right. While South Asia, which not long ago was in fact the most closely integrated economy of all, sadly seems to lag far behind both in thinking and in achievements.
Independent Indian: Work & Life of Professor Subroto Roy 