The Indian rupee has weakened rapidly in recent months, with the exchange rate against the US dollar dropping by 11 percent, to around 60 rupees, since early May. As a symbol of India’s economic strength, the rupee’s fall has provoked more than the usual hand-wringing and angst at home and abroad.
There is indeed reason to be worried, but not because the rupee’s value has declined. In fact, the slide has been long in coming, and recent market uncertainty has merely been a wake-up call.
The real reason to worry is that India has lost international competitiveness and has been buying time by borrowing from fickle lenders. Growth momentum has fizzled and, with inflation persistently high, Indian producers are struggling to compete in world markets. The current-account deficit is increasing relentlessly, owing to a widening trade deficit (now at 13 percent of GDP), raising the danger of a balance-of-payments crisis.
Indian GDP grew at heady rates of 8 to 10 percent per year between 2004 and 2007, a period that seemed to herald a decisive break from the anemic “Hindu rate of growth.” Reforms had unleashed new entrepreneurial energies and the prospect of a brighter future lifted people’s aspirations.
With foreign manufacturers piling in to satisfy a new hunger for consumer durables, India turned its gaze outward. The global economy — in a phase of buoyant expansion — welcomed India’s information technology services. Bangalore (the information-technology hub), Bollywood and yoga became symbols of India’s soft power. That was the moment to invest in the future.
However, the opportunity was wasted. Infrastructure did not keep pace with the economy’s needs. And, more deplorably, educational standards lagged. For a country positioning itself as a leader in the global knowledge economy, neglecting investment in education was a grave error, with other countries now staking a claim to the role to which India aspired. And, even when times were good, India never gained a foothold in the global manufactured-goods trade. Today, domestic investment has plummeted, exports are languishing, and GDP growth is down to around 4.5 percent per year.
Moreover, India has developed a tendency for chronic inflation, owing to an unhappy combination of supply bottlenecks (caused by poor infrastructure) and excessive demand (thanks to persistent public deficits). Budget deficits offered what appeared to be a free lunch, as the resulting inflation eroded the real value of public debt, while the government had privileged access to private savings at near-zero real interest rates.
With so much largesse to spread around, the government became a source of contracts with annuity-like earnings, which offered robust returns for those with political access. That weakened the incentives for entrepreneurship. And, as India’s external position deteriorated, the rupee became significantly overvalued between early 2009 and late last year, trading in a narrow range while domestic inflation galloped ahead in a global environment of relative price stability.
Amid weakening competitiveness, the rupee was propped up by increasingly unstable foreign sources of funds. Traditionally, nearly half of India’s trade deficit has been financed by remittances from Indian expatriates. Part of this flow is steady, because it supports families at home; but much of it is opportunistic investment seeking real returns. According to recent data, remittances have slowed or even fallen slightly.
Similarly, long-term foreign investors have had reason to pause. This is not surprising, given the slowdown in consumption growth (car sales, for example, are suffering a prolonged decline). India has been left to finance its external deficit increasingly through short-term borrowing, the most capricious form of international capital.
As the late Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Rudi Dornbusch once warned, a crisis takes longer than expected to arrive, but moves faster than anticipated when it does. India may be particularly vulnerable, because all players there have been complicit in a silent conspiracy of denial. An overvalued exchange rate strengthens repayment capacity, so international bankers cheer it on — until they cut and run. And the Indian government played a large part in fueling rupee appreciation by easing companies’ ability to borrow abroad.
Indeed, at a time when restricting access to short-term international funds has acquired intellectual respectability, the government’s reluctance to enforce curbs has been puzzling. The IMF, which now supports selective imposition of capital controls, seems unconcerned: the rupee, its annual review concludes, is fairly valued. This benign assessment is consistent with the IMF’s record of overlooking gathering crises.
With an overvalued rupee, there are no good policy choices. To avert a disorderly fall, short-term macroeconomic management requires officially engineered depreciation through administrative methods and restraints on external borrowing. A depreciated rupee should help revive Indian exports and lift growth. However, in the absence of complementary action, depreciation — whether engineered or market-driven — will make matters worse.
To dampen the additional inflationary pressures implied by a weaker rupee, more aggressive fiscal retrenchment is needed. Even so, a depreciated rupee will increase the burden of repaying foreign debt, and deepen the woes of domestic companies and banks.
To reclaim its promise, India must foster a new generation of productivity growth. The time for action is now. Unfortunately, a serious crisis may be required to initiate that response.
Ashoka Mody, a former mission chief for Germany and Ireland at the IMF, is currently a visiting professor of international economic policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Princeton University.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Because much of what former US president Donald Trump says is unhinged and histrionic, it is tempting to dismiss all of it as bunk. Yet the potential future president has a populist knack for sounding alarums that resonate with the zeitgeist — for example, with growing anxiety about World War III and nuclear Armageddon. “We’re a failing nation,” Trump ranted during his US presidential debate against US Vice President Kamala Harris in one particularly meandering answer (the one that also recycled urban myths about immigrants eating cats). “And what, what’s going on here, you’re going to end up in World War
Earlier this month in Newsweek, President William Lai (賴清德) challenged the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to retake the territories lost to Russia in the 19th century rather than invade Taiwan. He stated: “If it is for the sake of territorial integrity, why doesn’t [the PRC] take back the lands occupied by Russia that were signed over in the treaty of Aigun?” This was a brilliant political move to finally state openly what many Chinese in both China and Taiwan have long been thinking about the lost territories in the Russian far east: The Russian far east should be “theirs.” Granted, Lai issued
On Tuesday, President William Lai (賴清德) met with a delegation from the Hoover Institution, a think tank based at Stanford University in California, to discuss strengthening US-Taiwan relations and enhancing peace and stability in the region. The delegation was led by James Ellis Jr, co-chair of the institution’s Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region project and former commander of the US Strategic Command. It also included former Australian minister for foreign affairs Marise Payne, influential US academics and other former policymakers. Think tank diplomacy is an important component of Taiwan’s efforts to maintain high-level dialogue with other nations with which it does
On Sept. 2, Elbridge Colby, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy and force development, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal called “The US and Taiwan Must Change Course” that defends his position that the US and Taiwan are not doing enough to deter the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from taking Taiwan. Colby is correct, of course: the US and Taiwan need to do a lot more or the PRC will invade Taiwan like Russia did against Ukraine. The US and Taiwan have failed to prepare properly to deter war. The blame must fall on politicians and policymakers