By Sunanda Sen, guest blogger
Part three of a three-part series, a version of which was published in Economic and Political Weekly on September 21, 2019. Find Part 1 here and Part 2 here.
Part 3: Pattern of stagnation in India’s real economy
As already emphasised in the preceding sections of this commentary, a country’s GDP growth alone hardly indicates the country’s level of development, which include employment, social security and absence of poverty. Recognising above is important in the context of the ailing Indian economy that is currently subject to concerns more pressing than the plunging financial sector.
Mention can be made here of the structural changes in the Indian economy, with changing relative contributions of its three major sectors.Those include the share for services moving up to 50% and above since the early 1990s and the respective industry and agriculture shares stalling around 25% and 19% or less since then.
The employment situation as currently prevail in the Indian economy include 90% or more people struggling to eke out a survival in the informal sector while the organised formal sectors within industry and services offer 10% or less of jobs, thus pushing the majority of the working population to the dark terrains of the unorganised and informal jobs.
As for the sectoral pattern of employment, agriculture has remained the largest provider, at 48.9% of aggregate employment in the economy during 2011–2012. Almost all of above are purely in an informal capacity, thus fetching little of the benefits which are usual when labour is formally recruited. As for jobs available in the industrial sector, the organised sector (dealing with the registered factories employing 10 or more workers) provides less than 11% of aggregate employment in the country. Of above more than four-fifths are employed on a purely contractual or temporary basis with none of the benefits that normally accompany formal jobs. A recent estimate points at the low employment elasticity of aggregate output at 0.08%, which today is even lower than 0.18% during 2009–2011. Much of the above is due to the lower absorption of labour in the production process due to the use of capital-intensive technology. In addition, growth rates are found to be higher in the capital as well as the skill intensive products – as compared to the average growth for industry as a whole.
The service sector, currently providing more than one-half of the GDP, has only a marginal contribution in employment. Data available from the Labour Bureau indicate that of an aggregate 140–150 million jobs in the services sector during 2015, only 26 million were with the organised sector. The remaining jobs, mostly in petty production units and self-employment, include, in our view, large numbers with disguised unemployment in the informal sector.
Services in the organised sector also include the ‘sunrise sector’, comprising of the Information Technology-Business Processing Organisations ( IT-BPO). Their contribution to jobs has been rather minimal, as can be expected in terms of their use of capital and skill intensive technology. Growth in India’s services sector is concentrated in activities related to finance, real estate and business services (FINREBS). It needs to be noticed that the FINREBS has a rising share, both in relation to the service sector itself, as well as relating to the GDP. In fact shares of the FINREBS not only have escalated over time but have continued to rise, even with declining GDP growth rates. Thus the growth of the service sector including the FINREBS, as can be expected, while contributing to GDP growth, have failed to contribute much in terms of employment or real activity, an aspect which helps to understand the underlying paradox of high GDP growth with unemployment.
The sectoral contributions as above brings home an explanation of the slow growth in jobs and related poverty– and that too for the majority of the labour force employed in the informal sector who are denied of sustainable wages and benefits as well as job security.
Need for an expansionary policy
While there is an urgent need for public expenditure as investments as well as social sector outlays, the Indian government abides by its self-imposed limits on fiscal deficit to GDP ratios, which restrains additional public expenditure. The dictum is provided by the Fiscal Restraint and Budget Management Act (FRBMA) of 2003 which was voluntarily enacted by the ruling government, largely to attract foreign investments. Given that the theory of ‘austerity’ as a measure of investment revival by controlling inflation is much discredited at levels of analysis and policies, we find no reason why the country should continue to stick to such measures.
It needs to be recognised that official expenditure remains a pre-requisite to stimulation of private spending, especially in the current context of a demand deficient domestic economy as in India. A departure, if effected, from the ineffective policy prescriptions of the mainstream economic theories of fiscal restraint can be expected to generate a climate of expansion within the country.
Considering the gravity of the situation, this is the moment for a call to the state to act and not just protect finance capital which include the speculators who operate in stock markets, the super-rich who are disgruntled and pose the threat to move offshore to avoid the newly imposed surcharges on higher income slabs, to provide relief to the bankers misallocating funds in search of quick and illegitimate gains, or even to protect and incentivise the corporate sector, the former for a negligence to the much too small a benevolence they were subject to in terms of their obligations to fulfil the CSR, and the latter as investment inducements.
We can conclude that it will be a limited exercise on part of the officialdom to view the financial market performance as a true gauge of performance of the economy as a whole.
Indeed, the Indian economy is in dire need for an alternate course of action. The state must focus and restore the real economy with channels to revive investment, employment and other social goals for the majority.
Pt. 3 of 3
Sunanda Sen is a former professor at the Centre for Economic Studies and Planning, Jawaharlal Nehru University.
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