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Poverty, Inequality, and Growth in India: 2011-2018

NCAER hosted  a seminar by Dr Surjit S. Bhalla, Executive Director for India, Nepal and Bhutan at the International Monetary Fund, based on his joint paper with Karan Bhasin and Arvind Virmani, “Poverty, Inequality and Growth in India: 2011/12-2017/18.” Dr Sudipto Mundle, Distinguished Senior Fellow at NCAER, was the discussant. The seminar was attended by members of the NCAER Research Team, and invited guests from various eminent institutions across Delhi.

Good quality, reliable and timely statistics are critical inputs into informed public policy formulation. There has been a growing debate regarding the quality of India’s economic statistics over the last few years. The purpose of this paper is to address some of the issues around the debate on growth and the quality of statistics. This debate has centered on the lack of robustness of national accounts data. In addition, there is a wide, and widening, divergence in the consumption estimates of NSO and the national accounts. The 2017-18 Indian NSO Consumption Expenditure Survey revealed a first-ever absolute decline in per capita consumption between 2011/12 and 2017/18.

The Bhalla, Bhasin and Virmani paper estimates poverty, inequality, and growth between 2011/12 and 2017/18 by looking at all available data, including the two India Human Development Surveys collected by NCAER and Maryland, night-lights data, NSO data, and administrative data.

Surjit S. Bhalla is Executive Director for India, Nepal, and Bhutan at the IMF.  He was earlier a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council and Chairman of Oxus Research & Investments in New Delhi. He is a member of NCAER’s Governing Body.  Bhalla has worked as a research economist at the Rand Corporation, the Brookings Institution, in the research and treasury departments of the World Bank, and as a consultant to Warburg Pincus. He has worked on Wall Street at Deutsche Bank and at Goldman Sachs. He is the author of several academic papers and books, Imagine There’s no Country (2002), Devaluing to Prosperity (2012), and The New Wealth of Nations (2017). His first book, Between the Wickets: The Who and Why of the Best in Cricket (1987), developed a model for evaluating performance in sports. Bhalla is a regular contributor to Indian newspapers, magazines, and television on financial markets, economics, politics and cricket. He is a contributing editor for the Indian Express.  Bhalla has a PhD in Economics from Princeton University, a MPA from Princeton, and a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University.

The 8th NCAER C. D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture 2020

India in a Changing World

by

David Lipton
First Deputy Managing Director, The International Monetary Fund

Dr David Lipton, First Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund delivered NCAER’s 8th C D Deshmukh Memorial Lecture. Held in NCAER’s new, world-class, T2 Conference Centre, the Lecture was attended by a distinguished audience including economists, civil servants, prominent media persons, industry analysts, and students.

Dr Shekhar Shah, Director-General of NCAER delivered the introductory remarks. Dr Lipton began his lecture by lauding Dr CD Deshmukh as a towering figure who, as RBI governor and later finance minister, had helped guide India’s economy through the immense challenges of independence. He also revealed that Dr Deshmukh holds a significant place in the annals of the IMF as a senior member of India’s delegation to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference, which laid the foundations of the post-war economic order. In fact, John Maynard Keynes had actually recommended Dr Deshmukh’s name for running the IMF!

Dr Lipton then outlined the various challenges and uncertainties confronting the global economy, including most recently the spread of the coronavirus epidemic that has adversely affected global value chains. He cited ‘secular stagnation’ as a major policy problem across economies, which was being reflected in other challenges like anaemic productivity growth, falling inflation, and weakening global trade. Although these problems are the legacy of the global financial crisis, they are also the new normal in a maturing, globalised world characterised by ageing societies.

In his Lecture which can be viewed here, Dr Lipton asserted that if India can address these challenges, it could “help invigorate global growth, transform global patterns of trade, and spur investment and innovation.” He argued that with the right policies—and a supportive global environment—India could become a source of “secular dynamism,” which could become the needed counterweight to the secular stagnation of the advanced economies. Highlighting that India was till recently the fastest growing large economy in the world, Dr Lipton hailed it for its potential to play an increasingly important role in the global economy, fuelled by its young and growing population and reservoir of untapped demand

Dr Lipton also touched upon the waning effect of the IT Revolution and the possible impact of innovations like big data and artificial intelligence on productivity. Reiterating India’s crucial role in this exercise, Dr Lipton pointed out that India had always worked hard to tackle its home-grown challenges of development, most significantly through reforms to produce high growth and lift millions out of poverty. Moreover, as one of the largest exporters of information, computer and telecommunications services, India has also shown the light to other countries, paving the modern path to development. Advising it to optimise its demographic dividend, Dr Lipton also averred that India needs to focus on key areas such as reviving the agricultural sector, stimulating consumer demand, especially in rural areas, accelerating export growth, and countering rising unemployment. He expressed concern at the decline in labour force participation, particularly among India women, who could prove to be a source of economic dynamism if provided the right opportunities.

Dr Lipton rounded off his lecture by recommending greater participation of India in global value chains to emerge as a hub for international manufacturing companies, and the need for other critical measures like infrastructural investments, and reduction of tariff and non-tariff barriers to enable the emergence of larger and more productive manufacturers.

About David Lipton 

David Lipton is the First Deputy Managing Director of the IMF, appointed initially in 2011 and then reappointed for a second term in 2016. Prior to the Fund, he was Special Assistant to President Obama, and served as Senior Director for International Economic Affairs with the National Economic Council and National Security Council at the White House. He was earlier a Managing Director at Citi and its Head of Country Risk Management.

Dr Lipton served in the Treasury Department of the Clinton administration from 1993 to 1998; as Under Secretary for International Affairs, and before that as Assistant Secretary, he helped lead the Treasury’s response to the Asian financial crisis and its effort to modernise the international financial architecture. He was earlier a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC. From 1989 to 1992 he served as economic adviser to the governments of Russia, Poland, and Slovenia. For the first eight years of his professional career he was on the staff of the IMF, working on economic stabilisation in emerging market and low-income countries.

He earned his PhD and MA from Harvard University and a BA from Wesleyan University

About C D Deshmukh

NCAER instituted the C. D. Deshmukh Memorial Lecture in 2013 in memory of one of India’s most eminent early economists and a founding father of NCAER. Chintaman Dwarakanath Deshmukh was the first Indian to be appointed Governor of the Reserve Bank of India in 1943, was part of the official Indian delegation to the 1944 Bretton Woods Conference that led to the creation of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, and served as Governor of RBI until 1949. He served as the Union Finance Minister during 1950 to 1956 and was a founding member of NCAER’s first Governing Body in 1956. He later served as Chairman of the University Grants Commission and the Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University, during which time he also founded the India International Centre.  He was honoured by the President of India with the Padma Vibhushan in 1975. NCAER is privileged to honour the memory of C. D. Deshmukh as part of its own legacy.

A Glass Half Full: Changes in Indian Standards of Living since 2012

NCAER is organizing a seminar by Professor Sonalde Desai on “A Glass Half Full: Changes in Indian Standards of Living since 2012”. Dr Partha Mukhopadhyay, Senior Fellow at Centre for Policy Research, will discuss the paper.

The National Sample Survey (NSS), the flagship survey providing information on standards of living in India, has recently come under criticism as the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) chose not to release the results of the 2017-18 NSS Consumption Expenditure Survey. The NSSO has noted that the data quality for this survey is unreliable.  One of the challenges facing the interpretation of consumption data over this period is the difficulty in disentangling long-term, secular changes in consumption expenditure from the short-term shock caused by the November 2016 demonetisation, which led to a cash shortage and is believed to have adversely affected the incomes of small businesses, informal workers, and others dependent on cash, and therefore their consumption.  In her paper, Desai uses data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) to provide an independent assessment of changes in living standards for 4,828 households in the states of Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand during 2011-12 and 2017, and compares these to the changes in living standards between 2004-05 and 2011-12, based also on the IHDS.

Sonalde Desai holds a joint appointment as Professor at NCAER and Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She is the Director of NCAER’s National Data Innovation Centre. At NCAER and Maryland, she leads the India Human Development Survey, India’s only nationally representative longitudinal, household panel dataset, with IHDS1 in 2004-05, IHDS2 in 2011-12, and IHDS3 scheduled to start data collection in 2020. IHDS data have been used by over 9,000 users worldwide and has led to nearly 500 papers and dissertations. Desai is a demographer whose work deals with social inequalities based on gender and class in education, employment and maternal and child health, and locates such inequalities within the political economy of the country or region. While much of her research is on India and South Asia, she has also done comparative studies in Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Desai has published widely in a number of sociology and demography journals, including the American Sociological Review, Demography, Population and Development Review and Feminist Studies. She has a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University, an MA in Sociology from Case Western., and a BA in Sociology from the University of Bombay.

For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org or on 91-11-2345-2722.

A Glass Half Full: Changes in Indian Standards of Living since 2012

NCAER is organizing a seminar by Professor Sonalde Desai on “A Glass Half Full: Changes in Indian Standards of Living since 2012”. Dr Partha Mukhopadhyay, Senior Fellow at Centre for Policy Research, will discuss the paper.

The National Sample Survey (NSS), the flagship survey providing information on standards of living in India, has recently come under criticism as the National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) chose not to release the results of the 2017-18 NSS Consumption Expenditure Survey. The NSSO has noted that the data quality for this survey is unreliable.  One of the challenges facing the interpretation of consumption data over this period is the difficulty in disentangling long-term, secular changes in consumption expenditure from the short-term shock caused by the November 2016 demonetisation, which led to a cash shortage and is believed to have adversely affected the incomes of small businesses, informal workers, and others dependent on cash, and therefore their consumption.  In her paper, Desai uses data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS) to provide an independent assessment of changes in living standards for 4,828 households in the states of Bihar, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand during 2011-12 and 2017, and compares these to the changes in living standards between 2004-05 and 2011-12, based also on the IHDS.

Sonalde Desai holds a joint appointment as Professor at NCAER and Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland. She is the Director of NCAER’s National Data Innovation Centre. At NCAER and Maryland, she leads the India Human Development Survey, India’s only nationally representative longitudinal, household panel dataset, with IHDS1 in 2004-05, IHDS2 in 2011-12, and IHDS3 scheduled to start data collection in 2020. IHDS data have been used by over 9,000 users worldwide and has led to nearly 500 papers and dissertations. Desai is a demographer whose work deals with social inequalities based on gender and class in education, employment and maternal and child health, and locates such inequalities within the political economy of the country or region. While much of her research is on India and South Asia, she has also done comparative studies in Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa. Desai has published widely in a number of sociology and demography journals, including the American Sociological Review, Demography, Population and Development Review and Feminist Studies. She has a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University, an MA in Sociology from Case Western., and a BA in Sociology from the University of Bombay.

For queries, please contact Ms Sudesh Bala at sbala@ncaer.org or on 91-11-2345-2722.

Immigration, Nationalism and the Economics of Global Movement

NCAER hosted a book talk by Neeraj Kaushal, Professor of Social Policy at Columbia University, on her latest book, Blaming Immigrants: Nationalism and the Economics of Global Movement (January 2019; Columbia University Press). Mr Sanjoy Hazarika, Director of the Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, and Mr Pramit Pal Chaudhuri, Senior Editor, Hindustan Times, offered their comments after the book talk. The seminar was attended by members of NCAER Research Team and invited guests.

Citing examples from around the globe, Dr Kaushal discussed the growing discontent towards immigration globally. Immigration is shaking up electoral politics around the world and more and more countries around the globe are enforcing restrictions.  In her presentation, Dr Kaushal concentrated on whether immigrants are the cause or a scapegoat of the discontent.  Based on her  book on immigration, covering both US and other immigration, she pointed out the core causes of rising global disaffection with immigrants and her views on the common complaints against immigration. She found that it is neither the volume nor pace of immigration that is fueling disaffection, but it is the willingness of nations to accept, absorb, and manage new immigration. In her presentation, she demystified common misconceptions about immigration, showing that the level of global mobility is historically typical and that most immigration occurs through legal frameworks.  She also highlighted that the U.S. system, far from being broken, works quite well most of the time, its unique features are replicated by many countries, and the recent and proposed anti-immigrant measures in the US are likely to cause human suffering without deterring potential migrants. She said that a lot can be learnt from the immigration related experiences of other countries and that immigration should be looked into as an opportunity and not a threat.

Neeraj Kaushal is Professor of Social Policy and Chair of the doctoral program at the Columbia School of Social Work. She is also a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. An economist by training, she has been writing on global immigration issues for three decades.  In addition to Blaming Immigrants, she has authored or co-authored over 60 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters on immigrants and other vulnerable populations. She writes a monthly column in the Economic Times. She holds a BA and an MA in economics from Delhi University and a PhD in economics from the City University of New York.

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