An issue that has attracted surprisingly little notice is the size and growth of the trade deficit. Even more worrisome is the flat trajectory for exports — which escapes notice because comparisons are with the corresponding month of a year earlier. But if one looks at the variations month-on-month, the loss of all momentum becomes obvious because exports from April to August have stayed constant at about $16 billion. Even the usual seasonal upswing after the summer slump is missing. In contrast, imports have been growing (hitting $29 billion in August), and the trade deficit, therefore, has grown from $10 billion in April to $13 billion in August — which makes for 30 per cent growth in four months. The full year could register a trade deficit of $150 billion. At 10 per cent of GDP, that would be the largest trade deficit in recent Indian history, and also the largest for any significant economy in the world.
These numbers have attracted next to no notice because remittances by Indians overseas and the surpluses on trade in services (IT software, BPO and the like) neutralise a good part of the deficit in the goods trade. Even after accounting for this, the deficit on the “current account” is more than 3 per cent of GDP — again, historically high for India. Even this has not rung any alarm bells because there is a surplus inflow on the “capital account”, accentuated in recent weeks by the surge in portfolio money. Net capital flows are more than the current account deficit, and the Reserve Bank, therefore, reports an addition to its foreign exchange reserves.
As A V Rajwade has been pointing out in his Monday columns in this newspaper, the issue when looking at the current account is not the financial question of whether the deficit is bridged easily or with difficulty (with equity inflows, debt and remittances), but whether the real economy is in balance. It is worth bearing in mind that the capital inflows push up the rupee’s value and so make life difficult for exporters — thus adding to the already yawning trade deficit. It makes no sense at all for the rupee to be stronger against the dollar than it was a decade ago, since Indian inflation has been greater than US inflation throughout the intervening period. On an inflation-adjusted basis, the rupee has moved up quite substantially against the dollar — at a time when the Chinese have done the exact opposite with the yuan, and improved the competitiveness of their exporters.
Second, as the world has realised in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008-09, financial flows are fickle; one day money can rush into a country, the next it can flow out with the same rapidity. All it takes is for some analyst in the financial capitals of the world to point out that India’s trade account does not look in great shape, and people who control money may start worrying about the rupee’s stability and trigger a quick capital outflow.
This may not happen in the foreseeable future because the Indian economy happens to be in a sweet spot, but that is no reason to not focus on the imbalances. In any trade-off between righting the real economy and paying heed to the financial sector, it should be obvious post-financial crisis that the thing to look at is the real economy. If this means having to push the rupee down, and if the only way to do that is to slow down capital inflows, then that is what has to be done — even if the stock market hates the idea.
