Tag: tn ninan

TN Ninan on The Misery Index

More often than not, inflation and unemployment move in opposite directions. Why this should be so, and whether this actually is so, are questions that can get a lot of economists very hot under the collar very quickly! 

But every now and then, this relationship breaks down very quickly, and we’re then staring at a problem that economists refer to as stagflation. That, in effect, is when inflation is stubbornly high, but unemployment is also stubbornly high. TN Ninan, a columnist for the Business Standard, riffs on this and related concepts in an excellent recent column. 

In particular, he drags up an idea that most of us haven’t heard about lately, the misery index. Given what’s around us these days, though, you might want to construct such an index for the months to come! What is the misery index, you ask? Well, simply add up the rate of unemployment and the rate of inflation for any given economy! It’s a simple enough index to create, and you can learn a fair bit by taking a look at which countries are doing well (low on the misery index), and which countries are the unfortunate table-toppers. 

As the column points out, Turkey, Argentina and South Africa top these charts, and Brazil and Russia round off the current top five. But most major economies are inching up this particular chart, and this is something you want to keep an eye on in the days to come. Here is more information, if you’re interested in learning more about the misery index.

Now, as with ice-cream flavors, so also with indices such as these. You can add in different flavors and come up with many different variations. So it was only a matter of time before somebody thought of adding in interest rates to create a new version of the misery index. Imagine living in an economy with high inflation, high unemployment and high interest rates! And if you want a little-bit-of-everything-when-it-comes-to-macro index, well, throw in per capita growth rates too. Note that this last addition actually makes it rather less of a misery index, since high per capita growth is a good thing.

And finally, TN Ninan’s column also mentions another interesting, relatively recent idea that you might want to explore yourself: The Great Gatsby curve. Take a look at what it means, and reflect on how appropriate the name is.

Literature and economic theory – who’d have thunk it, eh?

Reflections on The Entrepreneurial State, by Mariana Mazzucato

The full title of the book is “The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths“, and the author is Mariana Mazzucato, Professor in the Economics of Innovation and Public Value at University College London (UCL), and Founder/Director of UCL’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose.

The key point made in the book is that entrepreneurship is not – and should not – the responsibility of the private sector. Indeed, it cannot be the responsibility of the private sector.

Early on in the book, she makes the strongest case there is to be made for her thesis, by arguing that the United States of America has known this, and practiced this, for years on end. The rest of the world, she says, would do well to emulate the USA:

If the rest of the world wants to emulate the US model they should do as the United States actually did, not as it says it did: more State not less.

LOCATION: 372 (Note that the location refers throughout to the Kindle version)

There are a lot of excellent reviews out there already. See this one in the New York Times, for example. It is a mostly favorable review. Or, if you want a slightly more critical one, see this one in The Guardian. Indeed, there are many others out there.

I want to focus on three key points in this essay: horizons, incentives and spillovers. Let’s tackle each in turn.

Horizons

Moonshots is a word that has become increasingly popular over the last two decades, and it refers to projects or even ideas that have a relatively low chance of succeeding. The payoff, if these ideas succeed, is so large that that it may compensate for the relatively low probability of this actually happening. That, of course, is exactly what expectations are all about.

But for a firm, particularly one that may not have the luxury of time and money on its side, placing bets on projects that may not work out – and indeed most of them will not – is a rather risky thing to do. Money is an obvious constraint, but a less obvious one is time.

Firms just do not have the luxury of waiting while a project turns out to be successful… eventually. These kind of moonshots, then, are perhaps best handled, for this specific reason, by the state.

In fact, the point is even more nuanced, because a firm is much more likely to (if at all) invest in a moonshot project based on a specifically desired outcome. The word project itself is an indication of this fact – this is not “blue sky research” that we are talking about.

But blue sky research is important!

A core difference between the US and Europe is the degree to which public R&D spending is for ‘general advancement’ rather than mission-oriented. Market failure theories of R&D are more useful to understand general ‘advancement of knowledge’–type R&D than that which is ‘mission oriented’ (Mazzucato 2015). Mission-oriented R&D investment targets a government agency programme or goal that may be found, for example, in defence, space, agriculture, health, energy or industrial-technology programmes (Mazzucato and Penna 2015).

LOCATION: 1549

Governments need to focus, for the sake of their own economies, their domestic firms and their long term growth, on focusing on moonshot projects, precisely because firms are reluctant to do so. The state needs, in other words, to take risks that private firms will not.

Saying this is easy, but how to go about doing this?

That is, if governments need to tackle long-term low-probability-of-success and uncertain-outcome initiatives that are important, but unlikely to be taken up by the private sector, the question that then arises is: how?

Mazzucato offers two points in this regard that I found interesting:

Block (2008, 188) identifies the four key characteristics of the DARPA model:

1. A series of relatively small offices, often staffed with leading scientists and engineers, are given considerable budget autonomy to support promising ideas. These offices are proactive rather than reactive and work to set an agenda for researchers in the field. The goal is to create a scientific community with a presence in universities, the public sector and corporations that focuses on specific technological challenges that have to be overcome.

2. Funding is provided to a mix of university-based researchers, start-up firms, established firms and industry consortia.

3. There is no dividing line between ‘basic research’ and ‘applied research’, since the two are deeply intertwined. Moreover, the DARPA personnel are encouraged to cut off funding to groups that are not making progress and reallocate resources to other groups that have more promise.

4. Since the goal is to produce usable technological advances, the agency’s mandate extends to helping firms get products to the stage of commercial viability. The agency can provide firms with assistance that goes well beyond research funding. Part of the agency’s task is to use its oversight role to link ideas, resources and people in constructive ways across the different research and development sites.

LOCATION: 1808

In effect, she is suggesting that government alone cannot do this, it needs to be a “scientific community” that is decentralized, has autonomy, sets the agenda, and applies Darwinian principles (see point 3). Hmm, sounds familiar. Different context, but a similar lesson!

And elsewhere in the book, her example of how Japan did this in the 1970’s is instructive:

The general point can be illustrated by contrasting the experience of Japan in the 1970s and 1980s with that of the Soviet Union (Freeman 1995). The rise of Japan is explained as new knowledge flowing through a more horizontal economic structure consisting of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), academia and business R&D. In the 1970s Japan was spending 2.5 percent of its GDP on R&D while the Soviet Union was spending more than 4 per cent. Yet Japan eventually grew much faster than the Soviet Union because R&D funding was spread across a wider variety of economic sectors, not just those focused on the military and space as was the case in the Soviet Union. In Japan, there was a strong integration between R&D, production and technology import activities at the enterprise level, whereas in the Soviet Union there was separation.

LOCATION: 1142

And…

Equally important were the lessons learned by Japanese people that went abroad to study Western technologies for their companies, and relationships between those companies and US firms. These companies benefited from the lessons of the US (hidden) ‘Developmental State’, and then transferred that knowledge to Japanese companies which developed internal routines that could produce Western technologies and eventually surpass them.

LOCATION: 1156

So, bottom-line: the state has to get in this business, but it can’t “go” it alone. There needs to be a community of academicians, researchers, firms, scholars – and as the example of Japan shows, this community needs fostering, and horizontal collaboration.

Or, if you prefer to put it simply, this is going to be hard.

Incentives

Academia suffers from the same problem that government bureaucracy does in India: the incentives are all wrong. Both are about risk minimization.

A professor in a college has no incentive to try and do something new, something risky, something innovative. Why, if you think about it, should she? Your best case scenario is that it works, but you get no upside for it: remember, wages aren’t a function of what you do, they are a function of how long you have been in the system. Your worst case scenario is that what you tried to do blows up in your face. So why take the risk?

And it is the same, of course, with a government bureaucrat. And that makes the conclusion of the previous section even more problematic, for where, exactly, are you going to unearth government bureaucrats willing and able to make this happen?

I’m all for the state being more entrepreneurial. I buy into the idea. But I worry, especially in a country like India, about the feasibility of it, for hey, incentives matter!

In a blogpost I had written earlier this year about the budget, I had touched upon this point:

Here is Ninan’s solution:

“Is there a solution? Yes, railway engineers of old like the metro builder E Sreedharan, builders of government companies like D V Kapur and V Krishnamurthy, and agricultural scientists like M S Swaminathan have shown how they made a difference when given a free hand. Vineet Nayyar as head of Gas Authority of India was able to build a massive gas pipeline within cost and deadline in the 1980s. The officers who are in charge of Swachh Bharat and Ayushman Bharat, and the one who has cleaned up Indore, are others who, while they may not match China’s speed, can deliver. Perhaps all we have to do is to spot more like them and give them a free hand.”

But as any experienced HR professional will tell you, spotting them is very difficult, even in the corporate world. And as any corporate CEO will tell you, giving these talented folks a free hand is even more difficult. And as any student of government bureaucracy will tell you, achieving the intersection set of these two things in a governmental setup is all but impossible.

And so what we need to study and copy from China is not so much anything else, but lessons in achieving, and sustaining, excellence in government bureaucracy. Or, if you prefer, how to improve state capacity.

In short, quality of government, not size of government, is what matters for freedom and prosperity.

https://econforeverybodyblog.wordpress.com/2020/02/17/how-to-think-about-the-budget/

That point resonates even more in this context: fostering an ecosystem led by the government is dead in the water without either the proper incentives, or at least bureaucrats who are able to work through poorly designed incentives. It is a hard problem, state led entrepreneurship, and made harder by the problem of incentives.

Spillovers

Or externalities, if you prefer. It doesn’t matter how hard the problem is, the payoffs are worth it!

Ruttan (2006) argues that large-scale and long-term government investment has been the engine behind almost every GPT (general purpose technology) in the last century. He analysed the development of six different technology complexes (the US ‘mass production’ system, aviation technologies, space technologies, information technology, Internet technologies and nuclear power) and concluded that government investments have been important in bringing these new technologies into being.

LOCATION: 1570

(Note: emphasis added)

If those GPT’s are the outcome of general, as opposed to specific, R&D, sign me up. They are magnificent positive externalities. Indeed, elsewhere in the book, Mazzucato points to how almost everything produced by Apple today simply could not have been produced without an entrepreneurial state:

LOCATION: 2326

The final point that I’ll make relates to how Mazzucato proposes “capturing” some of these externalities:

Where an applied technological breakthrough is directly financed by the government , the government should in return be able to extract a royalty from its application . Returns from the royalties , earned across sectors and technologies , should be paid into a national ‘ innovation fund ’ which the government can use to fund future innovations . Granting a return to the State should not prohibit the dissemination of new technology throughout the economy , or disincentivize innovators from taking on their share of the risk . Instead it makes the policy of spending taxpayers ’ money to catalyse radical innovations more sustainable , by enabling part of the financial gains from so doing to be recycled directly back into the programme over time .

Location 3735

Mazzucato does present alternative schemes to the one shown above, but this is the one that strikes me as being the one with the most promise, if administered well, with appropriate risk-mitigation built in. But again, saying that is much easier than actually getting it done.

But all the being said, one simple fact is inescapable: India needs to be thinking about how to get something like this off the ground, and ASAP.

For that reason alone, more of us should be reading this book.

How to think about the budget

This Saturday, I will be a part of a panel discussion about the budget.

This is happening at a college here in Pune, and today’s blog post is an answer to the question that I have been asking myself for the past couple of days: is there anything that has been left unsaid about the budget? For if not, I speaking at that panel discussion is a waste of everybody’s time, including myself.

Here are, very briefly, the three things hat I think are most noteworthy about this budget:

  1. In much the same way that we have the removal of exemptions, but not really, not just yet, we also have an admission of the real extent of the fiscal deficit: but not really, not just yet.

    To the credit of Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman, in this Budget, she has taken significant steps to improve transparency by presenting a statement on the vexed issue of extra-budgetary spending/borrowing (see Annex V of speech Part A and Statement 27 of the Expenditure Profile). That shows a total of about 0.85 per cent of GDP of such expenditures/borrowing in both 2019-20 RE and 2020-21 BE, excluding the footnoted reference to amounts for public sector bank capitalisation. Much of this is for financing the food subsidy through the Food Corporation of India. If added to the “shown” fiscal deficits (FD) for these years, it would raise the ratios to 4.6 and 4.4 per cent, respectively.
    ..
    ..

  2. Revenue will be less than the government was hoping for, and as a consequence, it will not be able to spend as much as we would have hoped in an economic slowdown. We also remain dependent on disinvestments working out on a scale that has never before taken place. Read this article, by Vivek Kaul – especially the section titled “The Family Silver”. Note that this was written before the budget came out. This year’s budget is as optimistic, if not more, about income it hopes to earn through disinvestment.
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  3. We are, in the words of Shankar Acharya, lurching towards protectionism.

    For 25 years since 1991, successive Indian governments reformed our trade policies in favour of greater openness and engagement with world trade. Customs duties were greatly reduced and quantitative restrictions largely eliminated. As a result, our foreign trade — both exports and imports — expanded robustly, providing a significant boost to our economic growth and employment. Since 2017, we have reversed policy and retreated from engaging with the world economy. Our ministers and senior officials do not seem to appreciate that higher duties and restrictions on imports hurt our capacity to grow exports. No sizable, non-oil country has sustained high export growth while imposing significant duties and restrictions on imports. And no such country has sustained high overall economic growth without high export growth. We ourselves grew fastest when our exports expanded robustly (1992-97 and 2003-2012).

If you ask me, there really isn’t that much more to say about the budget, that is so noteworthy that it bears repetition and emphasis. In any case, I’d much rather think about the Economic Survey to reflect on that state of the economy, and what needs to be done about it. The budget, Andy Mukherjee says (and I agree), isn’t all that important.

But this past week, I read about Clayton Christensen and Andy Grove. Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, and one of the most respected thinkers on strategy, passed away recently. I had been reading essays and blog posts written in his honor, and came across an essay written by Clayton Christensen himself about the distinction between the “what” and the “how”.

I’ve thought about that a million times since. If I had been suckered into telling Andy Grove what he should think about the microprocessor business, I’d have been killed. But instead of telling him what to think, I taught him how to think—and then he reached what I felt was the correct decision on his own.

The essay is much more than that, and you might want to read it. But that part truly resonated with me: the how over the what.

Now, you might be wondering about what this has to do with the talk on Saturday – or indeed about anything at all.

Well, reading this post by T N Ninan in the Business Standard is what brought the anecdote above to mind:

So it might be a good idea for the next Economic Survey to deal with not just the many “What” and “Why” questions in economics, but also the “How”. There is no other way to understand how the impossible becomes possible — as more than a campaign slogan. India struggles with budgets and procedures, and still has a major corruption problem that can send a project off the rails. China has corruption, for sure, but no other economy with a per capita income of $10,000 is able to grow at 6 per cent, or anywhere near that rate.

Of all the articles I have read about the budget and the economic survey (and there have been a fair few of them) this was the one that resonated the most. Maybe because I just finished reading (and thoroughly enjoyed) In The Service of The Republic, or maybe because of other reasons. But all of those other articles are, using Ninan’s framework, about the “what”. This needs to be done, that needs to be done, if only we had this, that or the other.

And all of those things are true, to be sure. We would be better if all of those many, many things were around. But a la Grove: how, dammit?

Here is Ninan’s solution:

“Is there a solution? Yes, railway engineers of old like the metro builder E Sreedharan, builders of government companies like D V Kapur and V Krishnamurthy, and agricultural scientists like M S Swaminathan have shown how they made a difference when given a free hand. Vineet Nayyar as head of Gas Authority of India was able to build a massive gas pipeline within cost and deadline in the 1980s. The officers who are in charge of Swachh Bharat and Ayushman Bharat, and the one who has cleaned up Indore, are others who, while they may not match China’s speed, can deliver. Perhaps all we have to do is to spot more like them and give them a free hand.”

But as any experienced HR professional will tell you, spotting them is very difficult, even in the corporate world. And as any corporate CEO will tell you, giving these talented folks a free hand is even more difficult. And as any student of government bureaucracy will tell you, achieving the intersection set of these two things in a governmental setup is all but impossible.

And so what we need to study and copy from China is not so much anything else, but lessons in achieving, and sustaining, excellence in government bureaucracy. Or, if you prefer, how to improve state capacity.

In short, quality of government, not size of government, is what matters for freedom and prosperity.

Because we could analyze the budget and its numbers all we like, but without the Grovesian “how”, the “what” is essentially theory without practice.

For just one extremely effective example of the “how”, see this.

So how did China get so very lucky?

Indeed, we may now be living at the peak of the influence of the so-called Class of 1977. A September press conference ahead of the celebration of the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China gathered together three of China’s top economic technocrats: central bank governor Yi Gang, Finance minister Liu Kun, and National Bureau of Statistics director Ning Jizhe. In an unusually personal moment for such an event, they mentioned that all three of them had taken the college entrance exams in 1977.

That is from Andrew Batson’s blog post titled “A Very Fine Reallocation of Resources“. An opportunity for some of her best and brightest to learn, and therefore apply meaningful change to their society, is one important factor in China’s rise. Du Runsheng, whose write-up I linked to above,  is just one example. There are many, many more.

More important than the budget is the Economic Survey, and I think T N Ninan is right, the next Economic Survey ought to focus on the how, not so much the what.

All that being said, here is a list of articles I enjoyed reading about the Union Budget:

Lessons from 1966 and 1991 for this year’s budget.

Contrary to the received wisdom that she should take steps to increase demand, I think she should do what was done in 1966 for exactly the same reasons: being broke. No fiscal boosters to artificially increase demand.

That said she should also do what the 1991 budget did: free businesses from random, illogical and counter-productive controls.

In short, we need a sensible combination of the1966 and 1991 approaches, namely, deep fiscal prudence (1966) and a withdrawal from the economic stage (1991).

Spend less and increase non-tax revenue significantly – and that’s pretty much the best way to judge if this is a good budget or not, says T C A Srinivasa Raghavan.

Surjit Bhalla’s summary of the good, the bad and the ugly in this year’s budget. I am slightly confused about exactly what his idea of the “good” was. For me, personally, it is the government being clearer about it’s actual expenditure.

Vivek Kaul provides an excellent summary in four parts over on NewsLaundry.

Deepak Nayyar is less than impressed with the budget.

Rathin Roy remains worried about the artihmetic.

 

India: Links for 2nd December, 2019

What else?

  1. “The non-government part tends to form 87-92% of the economy. In the July-September period, it formed nearly 87% of the economy. If 87% of the economy is growing at 3.05%, the situation is much worse than it seems.”
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    Vivek Kaul about the GDP data is worse than it looks.
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  2. “At its core, Indian industry is cooling rapidly, with industries like coal, steel, cement and electricity having contracted in October. Eight core infrastructure industries have not grown in the first seven months of this year. Manufacturing, led by the automobile industry, has contracted, and mining stopped growing in the second quarter. Energy utilities and construction saw their growth rates almost halving from the same quarter a year ago. Another three months of declines will officially qualify as a manufacturing recession.”
    ..
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    The R-word is being heard, louder and louder.
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  3. “The good news is that GDP growth in the next quarter or the fourth quarter could well be a wee bit higher. The pop thesis is that given the lower base of the previous year, growth could be statistically higher—a bit like standing next to Leonardo DiCaprio, who is six feet tall, and then next to Tom Cruise, who is 5 feet 7. The bad news is that the slowdown is not going away anytime soon. ”
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    Shankkar Aiyyar, in top form.
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  4. ““Besides monetary easing by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the government needs to simplify the goods and services tax (GST) and introduce a new direct tax code to clear the tax jungle created by our ancient income-tax law and rules,” he says.”
    ..
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    The “he” in this case being Arvind Virmani.
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  5. This may be behind a paywall for you, in which case, my apologies. But the final link in this set is from TN Ninan over at Business Standard.