The global economy seems to be making a gradual and uneven recovery from the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic largely on account of the extraordinary policy responses by monetary, fiscal and regulatory authorities and the continued covid19 onslaught at varied pace and forms in different parts of the world.
The focus of the economic stimulus in most nations had been on supporting the covid19 infected people in order to protect their health and sources of livelihood. Now the challenge is how to develop policies and strategies to bring heavily affected sectors back to health and normalcy. This requires that monetary and fiscal authorities may have to find critical trade-offs between the need for gradual withdrawal of exceptional measures taken up to confront covid19 exigencies and the pressure to speed up the rate of economic growth.
On one hand there is a need to deploy the resources for development purposes while on the other hand there is a the moral hazard of making various economic agents more reliant on policy stimuli and for longer duration, eventually locking in authorities into forbearance and liquidity traps.
In India, the a lot of extraordinary initiatives were taken to mitigate the impact of the pandemic including several innovative measures to ease balance sheet stress for borrowers and lending institutions. Along with these pandemic induced actions, there were continued efforts made to address systemic gaps and to develop and strengthen various parts of the financial system.
Explicit Signs of Recovery
The IIP is reported to have slipped by 1.9% in the month of November, 2020. However, the IHS Markit India Manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index in India which rose to a record level of 58.9 points in October 2020 continued to remain high in November and December 2020 at 56.30 and 56.40 respectively showing the consistent pattern of expecting an expansion of the manufacturing sector compared to the previous month. This may be considered as a remarkable improvement considering that it was at its lowest in April 2000 at 27.4 points.
The PMI indices is derived from a survey of 500 manufacturing companies and is based on five individual indexes with the following weights: New Orders (30 percent), Output (25 percent), Employment (20 percent), Suppliers’ Delivery Times (15 percent) and Stock of Items Purchased (10 percent), with the Delivery Times index inverted so that it moves in a comparable direction.
The IHS Markit India Services PMI marginally declined to 52.3 in December 2020 from 53.7 in the previous month but here also it is trending above the benchmark score of 50 which indicates expansion in services sector since October, 2020.
Further, Revenue collections have started improving. In October the GST collection was reported to be over Rs 1.05 lakh crore, crossing for the first time Rs 1 lakh crore mark since February 2020 when the covid19 syndrome made its presence felt in India. Not only that, the revenue collected under GST for the month of October 2020 is 10 per cent higher than Rs 95,379 crore collected in October 2019.
In November 2020 also, the GST collection was more than Rs. 1.04 lakh crore and in December 2020 it has even crossed Rs. 1.15 lakh crore which was the highest since the introduction of GST breaking the previous record of of Rs. 1.14 lakh crore (April 2019). What makes the December, 2020 performance look yet more impressive is that the revenues of April normally tend to be high since they pertain to the returns of March, which marks the end of financial year. This has been largely attributed to the rapid economic recovery post pandemic. Such developments are indicative of a sharp recovery in the Indian economy during the unlock phases.
India’s growth story still seems attractive
There were apprehensions raised that the global economy may be caught in a “liquidity trap” as most big central banks across the world had exhausted their monetary firepower in response to the covid19 crisis, dropping their real policy rates of interest (adjusted for inflation) to negligible levels. It was also observed that low global rates may also allow less-indebted countries with high growth prospects to take on debt for fiscal expansion that would have a multiplier effect on incomes.
However, in India the external debt as at the end of September Quarter in the year 2020 stood at US $556.2 billion (21.6 percent of the GDP) which was in fact slightly lower than US $ 557.6 billion during the same quarter in the year 2019. However there has been huge infusion of foreign funds in the form of FDI and FII investment in the Indian economy of late.
In the July-September quarter, FDI doubled year-on-year to $28.1 billion dollars this fiscal, from $14.06 billion in the same period last year. This also is indicative of an optimistic view having been taken by the foreign investors about India’s potential to come out of the blues and its resilience as seen through its great comeback effort.
Even as foreign portfolio investment (FPI) inflows across emerging economies witnessed a decline due to the pandemic, India recorded a surge to $13.5 billion, which in itself is a testimony to investor confidence in India’s growth story. This surge in foreign funds amid the pandemic has been possible because of the continuous effort of the government, businesses, and agencies to make India an attractive destination for investment.
Consumption demand a Game Changer?
Inflation in India is showing signs of slowing down as it eased out to 4.59% in December 2020 as compared to 6.93% in November and 7.61% in the month of October. In particular, the food inflation declined to 3.41% in December in 2020 from 9.5% in the month of November. This is a comforting situation considering that the policy rates remained at reduced level of 4 percent in the Monetary Policy resolution of the MPC in their meeting held in December 2020 . The RBI has also projected that the inflation may ease out to 4.6 per cent in the first half of the next fiscal.
Agriculture managed to achieve satisfactory rate of growth even during the pandemic times. The rural demand is expected to strengthen further, while urban demand is also picking up due to spurs in economic activity and employment, as COVID-19 displaced workers get back to their works corroborating with successive unlocking phases of the Indian economy.
RBI has projected that the real GDP growth may be negative by 7.5 per cent in the fiscal 2020-21 with a positive growth rate of 0.1 per cent and 0.7 percent in its third and fourth quarters respectively with a whopping 21.9 per cent and 6.5 per cent rate of growth expected in the first and second quarter of the next fiscal on year–to-year basis. This is even better than a contraction to the tune of 10.3% for the current fiscal projected by the IMF in October 2020!
To conclude, the signs of positive growth have been already noticed in the first fortnight of December, 2020 by the Reserve Bank of India and now the outlook may have only enhanced somewhat due to vaccine availability and the vaccination drive having already been kick-started. However, the various support measures may have unintended consequences as reflected, for instance, in the soaring equity valuations somewhat disconnected from economic performance. We may have to be cautious if such deviations from fundamentals persist, as they may pose risks to financial stability, especially if recovery is delayed due to any reason whatsoever.