Indias structural opportunity in a new age of financial repression ForumIAS Blog

Currently, an important gap in India’s capital market is future markets. Good market in index futures would help in risk management and provide greater liquidity to the market. A decision to present futures trading has been taken and the legislative changes needed to implement this decision have been submitted to parliament. Major developments occurred in trading methods which were highly antiquated earlier. The National Stock Exchange was established in 1994 as an automated electronic exchange. The initiation of electronic trading by the NSE generated competitive pressure which forced the BSE to also introduce electronic trading in 1995.

financial repression upsc

Also if India becomes a global hub for supply chains, there will be opportunities for other countries in the region as well. Dr Indrajit Coomaraswamy analyses Sri Lanka’s economic crisis and the debt restructuring needed for IMF to release the $2.9 billion package. The Malhotra Committee had suggested opening up the insurance sector to new private companies as early as 1994. It took five years to build an agreement on this issue and legislation to open up insurance, allowing foreign equity up to 26 per cent was finally submitted to Parliament in 1999.

To tackle this, the East Asian economies undertook financial repression. Investment, especially private investment, is the “key driver” that drives demand, creates capacity, increases labour productivity, introduces new technology, allows creative destruction, and generates jobs. Punjab’s education budget, over the last 42 years (1980–2022), was less than the recommended norms and requirements and, hence, inadequate.

The foreign owned AMCs are the ones which are now setting the pace for the industry. They are introducing new products, setting new standards of customer service, improving disclosure standards and experimenting with new types of distribution. The practice of reform of the capital market was started in 1992 along the lines recommended by the Narasimham Committee. It was intended to remove direct government control and replacing it by a regulatory framework based on transparency and disclosure supervised by an independent regulator. Forex market reform took place in 1993 and the successive adoption of current account convertibility were the acmes of the forex reforms introduced in the Indian market.

[Economic Survey] Ch4: Monetary Policy Trends, Reforms, RBI Restructuring program

Otherwise, history tells us that countries have brought down their public debt numbers through some combination of financial repression, austerity, higher taxes and inflation. Third, during covid, banks in the developed world were encouraged to lend despite lockdown-led recessions. In India, broad money growth returned to its pre-covid level in February 2022, while in the developed world, it remains above its pre-covid levels.

Discuss the problem of intergenerational inequity arising out of internal public debt. Explain how Keynesian speculative demand for money is restated in regressive expectation model. Ok discuss the problems faced by commercial bank due to rise in NPAs. The latter shows a much slower growth which is to be attributed to lower credit expansion and greater currency withdrawal. When we look at the recent data, there is a distinct difference between the rate of growth of Reserve Money and Money Supply . M3, also called as broad money includes M2 in addition to long-term deposits.

Hence the quantity is adjusted to achieve the desired level of interest rate. India gave funds to Sri Lanka as part of its “Neighbourhood First” policy. However, the infrastructure in both countries has tended to be very poor until recently, so the transaction cost of doing cross-border business has been high.

The combined official fiscal deficit of the Union plus state governments was at its lowest level in many decades. In simple terms, financial repression means that savers are not adequately compensated for their savings. Second, Indian policymakers should partially protect the economy from the pro-inflation policies of the developed world’s repressionary monetary system. Two, Indian policymakers are not prepared to let the exchange rate be constrained from capital flows. It is evidenced by the rapid rise in India’s foreign exchange reserves since 2014.

Finally, implementing the FFC recommendations will lead to states accounting for a large share of total tax revenue. This has the important implication that, going forward, India’s public finances must be viewed at the consolidated level and not just at the level of the central government. If recent trends in state-level fiscal management continue, the fiscal position at the consolidated level will be on a sustainable path.

None can dispute the beneficial impact of bank nationalisation on the Indian economy but let us not forget that everything is transient in its time and place. There are obvious unwanted consequences and developments that call for change now. The recommendations of the Narasimham Committees on banking sector reforms in the 1990s deserve a closer look.

What is the need for moderating the Reserve Money growth?

The non-banking financial companies play a critical part in credit intermediation in India, with an active participation in credit lending to the segments that are largely left out by the formal… The outlook is favourable for the current account deficit and its financing. A likely surfeit, rather than scarcity, of foreign capital will complicate exchange rate management. Reconciling the benefits of these flows with their impact on exports and the current account remains an important challenge going forward.

This is reflected in near-constant share of private sector banks in deposits and advances. The East Asian model or state-sponsored capitalism, is an economic system where the government invests in certain sectors of the economy in order to stimulate the growth of new industries in the private sector. There is substantial variation in the performance of the public sector banks, so that they should not be perceived financial repression upsc as a homogenous block while formulating policy. Companies who want to access the capital market needed prior permission of the government which also had to approve the price at which new equity could be raised. While new issues were strictly controlled, there was insufficient regulation of stock market activity and also of various market participants including stock exchanges, brokers, mutual funds, etc.

financial repression upsc

Madras University saw an accumulated deficit of over ₹100 crore, forcing it to seek a ₹88 crore grant from the State government. The Ministry of Education continues to push higher education institutions to increase their intake capacity by 25% (in a push to implement the 10% quota for economically weaker sections). Discuss the various problems plaguing India’s higher education and highlights the need for major reforms in India’s higher education. India’s COVID -19 vaccine policy betrays a lack of vision and social responsibility. The crisis of COVID-19 vaccines in India is a consequence of government policies dating back decades.

Creation of an efficient, productive and profitable financial sector. It is obvious once one eschews India’s exceptionalism and accepts that it is just another emerging market economy that grew on the coattails of globalisation with the minimal reforms. However, this outsized adjustment had already taken place by 2010 and since then, corporate investment has flatlined at current levels. In other words, India ran a looser fiscal policy compared to the rest of Asia in normal times, but is likely to run a tighter fiscal policy than its regional peers in a crisis year. The Indian government has till now come up with an insipid fiscal response to the ongoing economic crisis.

Recent Reforms in Financial Sector

If banks hold their assets in the form of government securities, it will give a little interest to them. In addition, the bureaucracies of these East Asian economies were referred to as “embedded autonomy”. This allowed the state to be autonomous, yet embedded within the private sector and enabled the two to work together to develop policies or change course if the policies did not work. While these economies were generally successful in encouraging savings, the cost of capital was rather high.

  • Expenditure control, and expenditure switchingfrom consumption to investment,will be key.
  • Will expand the mobile banking network and Banking Correspondent network.
  • And outdated technological and institutional structures that made the capital markets and the rest of the financial system highly inefficient .
  • This dual approach is also apparent in the reforms tried in India.

Twenty Two years of serving socio-economic and electoral research fraternity in india and abroad. India could bolster the Make in India’’initiative, which requires improving infrastructure and reforming labor and land laws by complementing it with the‘’Skilling India initiative. This https://1investing.in/ would enable a larger section of the population to benefit from the structural transformation that such sectors will facilitate. Registered manufacturing, construction and several service sectors — particularly business services — perform well on these various characteristics.

Did You Know: What is Double Financial Repression? | RBI Grade B 2021

The capital requirement for narrow banks is less onerous than loan-book-expanding banks. Arguably narrow banking can actually be a source of regular dividend return to the government if not outright capital return. Explain how changes in short- term monetary policy affect high-powered money and money multiplier. In case of perfect capital mobility, explain the difference of the impact of an increase in money supply on GDP under two alternative exchange rate regimes – one fixed and the other flexible.

East Asian Model for India

M1, also as called narrow money and includes coins and notes that are in circulation and other money equivalents that can be converted easily to cash. If inflation is to be kept under control, the authorities need to have control over liquidity or money. There is a need to understand that the process of money creation is a process of credit creation.

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