What India must do to become an affluent country
Martin Wolf writes on FT on what India must do to catch up with China and become an affluent country in a generation. Compared to China, in my mind, India enjoys the advantage of being a democratic country (Indians may not feel the same way), but its caste system, poor infrastructure, and bureaucracy are really dragging its feet.
I am a true believer of competitions, including competitions between countries. Without China’s fast growth since 1978, India may not have had the urge to initiate its own reform in mid 90s; and without India rising in IT and innovation, China may still have specialized in manufacturing only. Competition can produce win-win situation. Most politicians focus on how to grabbing a bigger share of the same pie; economists, fundamentally optimists, focus on how to create a much bigger pie, even sharing a smaller part of it.
What India must do if it is to be an affluent country
What will the world economy – indeed, the world – look like after the financial crisis is over? Will this prove to be a mere blip or something more fundamental? Much of the answer will be provided by the performance of the two Asian giants, China and India. Rightly or wrongly, it is widely accepted that China will continue to grow very rapidly. But what is the likely future for India?
I attended debates on this question in Mumbai and Delhi two weeks ago. The occasion was the launch of a report prepared by the Centennial Group for this year’s Emerging Markets Forum.* It addresses a provocative question: what would need to change if India were to become an affluent country in one generation? The answer is: a great deal. But one thing is clear: after the performance of the past three decades, the goal is not laughable.
Since 1980 the average living standards of Chinese and Indians have, for the first time in the histories of these two ancient civilisations, experienced a sustained and rapid rise. In one generation, India’s gross domestic product per head rose by 230 per cent – a trend rate of 4 per cent a year. This would seem a fine accomplishment if China’s had not increased by 1,090 per cent – a trend rate of 8.7 per cent. Yet even if India has lagged behind, the change has been large enough for aspiration to replace resignation as the ethos of a large and rising proportion of Indians.
The recent past offers at least four further reasons for optimism. First, the rate of growth has been accelerating: over the five years up to and including 2008, the average annual rate of economic growth was 8.7 per cent, up from 6.5 per cent at the previous peak in 1999. Second, vastly higher savings and investment underpin this acceleration, with gross domestic savings up to 38 per cent of GDP in the financial year 2007-08. Third, India’s economy has globalised, with the ratio of trade in goods and services up to 51 per cent of GDP in the last quarter of 2008, up from 24 per cent a decade before. This was not far behind China’s 59 per cent of GDP (see chart below).
Finally, the democratic political system, for all its frailties, works. Indian democracy is a wonder of the political world. What happened in the past election seems a big development – the re-election of a Congress-led government, with a big increase in the party’s seats. It is widely believed that this reflects a choice of competence over caste and secularism over sect. Not least, the electorate registered approval of the competence and integrity of Manmohan Singh, the prime minister. I have been lucky to have known Dr Singh for three and a half decades. I admire nobody more. I only hope he is prepared to use his possibly final period in office boldly.
So what needs to happen if Indians are to enjoy an affluent lifestyle? The answer, suggests the report, is that India must sustain growth at close to 10 per cent a year over a generation. This is not inconceivable: China has managed that, from a lower base, over three decades. But it is a massive task, particularly for so huge, diverse and complex a country. Extraordinary change would have to occur, inside India and in India’s relationships with the world.
For this to be conceivable, at least four things would have to happen: the world must remain peaceful; the world economy must remain open; India must avoid the stagnation into which many middle-income countries have fallen; and, finally, the resource and environmental implications of its rise to affluence must be managed.
Moreover, India itself must overcome three big challenges: maintaining, indeed strengthening, social cohesion at a time of economic and social upheaval; creating a competitive and innovative economy; and playing a role in its region and the world commensurate with the country’s size and rising importance. In fundamental respects, India must turn itself into a different country.
Not least, as the report makes clear, India would have to be governed quite differently. In India a vigorous, albeit too often corrupt, democratic process has been superimposed on the “mindsets, institutional structures and practices inherited from the British Raj”. India has prospered despite government, not because of it. It is a miracle that the giant has fared as well as it has. But if this country is to prosper it must create infrastructure, provide services, promote competition, protect property and offer justice. The country must move from what the report calls “crony capitalism and petty corruption” to something different. The quality of government, widely believed to be deteriorating, must, instead, radically improve.
Just how far the transformation would have to go is shown by the “seven inter-generational issues” on which this report focuses: first, tackling disparities, not least among social groupings, but without further entrenching group-based entitlements and group-based politics; second, improving the environment, including the global environment; third, eliminating India’s pervasive infrastructure bottlenecks; fourth, transforming the delivery of public services, particularly in India’s ill-served cities; fifth, renewing education, technological development and innovation; sixth, revolutionising energy production and consumption; and, finally, fostering a prosperous south Asia and becoming a responsible global power.
I take two big things from the analysis in this report, one for India and another for the world.
For India, I conclude that even sustaining recent performance is going to be very hard. The era when the country could prosper just by stopping government from getting in the way is ending. India now requires efficient, service-providing government by competent technocrats and honest politicians. Of course, many foolish interventions still need to be removed. The government also needs to refocus its limited energy and resources on its essential tasks. But it must be able to perform these tasks far more effectively than it can today.
What I take for the world is that India, for all the huge challenges it confronts, is likely to continue its rise, if more slowly than the report assumes. The job of adjusting the familiar western ways of thinking about the world to the new realities has hardly begun. Within a decade a world in which the UK is on the United Nations Security Council and India is not will seem beyond laughable. The old order passes. The sooner the world adjusts, the better.
Remembering Peter Bernstein
I have planned to send out this earlier, but somehow I forgot. Peter Bernstein, one of the few shining stars in investing, co-founder of Journal of Portfolio Management, and author of nearly a dozen popular investment books, including Against the Odds, passed away in June. Here is a piece remembering him from WSJ (the highlights are mine). I truly enjoyed this piece, and his wisdom.
Mr. Bernstein saw the boom and bust of the 1920s first-hand in New York. In 1929, Mr. Bernstein’s father, Allen, sold the family leather factory “for a price he never dreamed he would get” and put all the proceeds into the stock market, buying “other people’s companies at prices they never dreamed they would see, either,” Mr. Bernstein recalled, paraphrasing his father.
Then the stock market crashed, nearly wiping out the family.
Mr. Bernstein never forgot the lesson. Seven decades later, he wrote: “What we like to consider as our wealth has a far more evanescent and transitory character than most of us are ready to admit.” He urged investors to regard their gains as a kind of loan that the lender — the financial market — could yank back at any time without any notice.
A classmate of John F. Kennedy in Harvard College’s class of 1940, Mr. Bernstein entered finance in 1941, joining the research department of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
After the U.S. was attacked by Japan, Mr. Bernstein tried to enlist as a pilot in the Air Force, but his poor eyesight made him ineligible. Instead, he served as an intelligence officer for the Office of Strategic Services in London during the Blitz, where he said he learned mental resilience.
In his almost 70-year career, he taught economics at Williams College, worked as a portfolio manager at Amalgamated Bank and ran the investment-counseling firm of Bernstein-Macaulay, co-founded by his father and Frederick Macaulay, who invented the modern discipline of bond investing.
In 1974, as Wall Street was suffering its worst market decline since 1929, Mr. Bernstein co-founded the Journal of Portfolio Management to improve risk management with insights from academic research.
His introduction to the maiden issue reads as if it were written yesterday: “How could so many have failed to see that all the known parameters were bursting apart?…It was precisely our massive inputs and intimate intercommunication that made it impossible for most of us to get to the exits before it was too late.”
He was the author of 10 books, five of which he published after the age of 75. Two of them, “Capital Ideas,” a history of modern finance, and “Against the Gods,” a dazzling survey of probability and risk, were international best sellers. With his wife and business partner, Barbara Soskin Bernstein, Mr. Bernstein also published “Economics & Portfolio Strategy,” a biweekly newsletter.
Mr. Bernstein generally shunned making black-and-white predictions, but in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in early 2008, he warned that “we are going to have an extremely risk-averse economy for a long time….The people who think we will have turned [the corner economically] in 2009 are wrong.”
Late in his life, Mr. Bernstein often joked that he had made his living for decades by repeatedly “telling people what they know only too well already.”
In 1970, he asked rhetorically, “What are the consequences if I am wrong?” and said “no investment decisions can be rationally arrived at unless they are [based upon] the answer to this question.” He counseled investors to take big risks with small amounts of money rather than small risks with big amounts of money.
The same focus on the consequences of error was one of the main themes of “Against the Gods,” which he published more than a quarter-century later.
Also in 1970, Mr. Bernstein wrote: “We simply do not know what the future holds.” Over the ensuing decades, he returned again and again to that phrase in his speeches, articles and books, because he felt it captured the central truth about investing.
Asked in 2004 to name the most important lesson he had to unlearn, he said: “That I knew what the future held, that you can figure this thing out. I’ve become increasingly humble about it over time and comfortable with that. You have to understand that being wrong is part of the [investing] process.”