The slowdown in private investments is visible chiefly in the informal sector, not the corporate sector
It is now well recognised that there is an investment slowdown in India, which is delaying a full-blooded recovery in the economy. Private investments, the principle engine of growth, are out of steam. The fall is so severe that it has more than offset the government’s macroeconomic stimulus of increased public investments.
The slowdown started five years ago, and is, as Economic Survey 2018 notes, the most severe in India’s history. Investments peaked 11 years ago. The Survey recommends urgent prioritisation of investment revival to arrest more lasting growth impacts, with policy focus on both big and small companies, creating a conducive environment for the smaller industries to prosper and invest, with their ‘animal spirits’ conjured back. That will not be enough to restart the private investments cycle.
Why the slowdown
A day after the Survey came out, estimates of investments and savings in the financial year ended March 2017 were released. The private investments slowdown is statistically visible chiefly in the informal segment of the economy. The corporate sector is not the source of the decline.
Corporate investments have been on the upswing, rising through the five-year slowdown. Financial stress on company balance sheets and the severe bad debt problem is visible only once, when, in 2014-15, companies applied brakes on their investments. The rate rebound the subsequent year. By 2016-17, corporate investments were greater than at the time the slowdown started.
There is negligible change in the investment behaviour of public and private finance corporations. Public non-financial corporations reduced investments marginally. The government stepped up its investments, but its share of the pie is small (with multiplier effects on the rest of the economy).
The sharpest pullback has been by the household sector, its investments are down 6.6 percentage points since the start of the slowdown. Economy-wide investments are down 5.8 percentage points. The slowdown is mainly because of the household sector’s troubles.
The private investments slowdown, then, is a slowdown in the household sector’s investments. The bad bank loans mess appears to have restricted the funds supply to this sector, not corporates.
When will the slowdown end? The estimates show that the slowdown did not deepen in 2016-17, as investment rates for the household sector and the overall economy held steady. If and how demonetisation and the goods and services tax (GST) roll-out altered this, it remains to be seen. Because of the lag in estimation, only some of demonetisation’s initial impact could have got measured. The GST was rolled out in July 2017; the estimates cannot say anything about its impact.
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