Optimism about the potential for India's economic growth has grown steadily in recent years. In part, this is fueled by China's example of strong sustained growth, raising the obvious question of why India cannot do as well.
However, the optimism also reflects the fact that India's growth has accelerated over the past two decades. And while still well below the growth rate in China, this favorable performance contrasts with growth slowdowns in other regions. It has also enabled the emergence of a significant middle class in India.
How has India's Economic Performance differed from that of China?
Interestingly, India's economic performance has differed from that of China and other parts of Asia in at least two dimensions:
- First, India's success has not been based on strong growth in the manufacturing sector and in exports. Instead, it has reflected the very rapid expansion of the service-producing industries.
- Second, it has been associated with relatively modest levels of investment. Even incorporating recent data revisions, India's physical capital accumulation has not been impressive. And despite substantial increases in the number of Indians attaining higher education, illiteracy rates remain high.
In this paper, we build on a growth accounting framework to empirically examine these dimensions of India's recent growth. How has the growth been distributed among agriculture, industry, and the service-producing sectors? What are the major contributors to that growth: increased employment, physical capital, educational attainment, or improvements in the basic efficiency of resource use (total factor productivity)?
We are particularly interested in the sources of growth in the service-producing industries. Is it sustainable or should India place greater emphasis on the manufacturing sector and the promotion of rapid growth in export markets? Throughout the analysis, we are concerned about the quality of the available statistical data.
We seek to contribute to the existing literature in a variety of ways. The growth accounting framework, combined with our emphasis on data issues, pulls together concerns that have typically been treated separately, and that do not appear to have been consistently recognized. Our updated growth accounts are based on an extensive examination of the relevant underlying data series, enabling us to clarify a number of issues related to how the data are constructed.
The updated accounts incorporate recent data revisions, some of which are quite large. They also provide new estimates for the contributions to overall growth from changes in labor productivity within major economic sectors versus the gains from reallocating labor and capital among the sectors.
Furthermore, we have examined a variety of additional data in our analysis of the role of capital accumulation- providing estimates of the returns to schooling for human capital, and reporting on trends in sectoral saving and investment in physical capital.
The existing literature on productivity in India focuses either on the performance of the aggregate economy or manufacturing, the latter at the industry or firm level. But understanding India's evolving transformation from a primarily rural and agricultural economy to a more modern one requires analysis of both the evolution of productivity in all three key sectors- agriculture, industry and services- and the implications for aggregate productivity growth of the reallocation of resources out of agriculture to more productive activities in industry and services.
This is particularly essential for India where, in contrast with the typical pattern in East Asia (including China), the primary driver for growth has been services, not industry. Our paper fills this important gap by separating aggregate productivity growth into growth for each of the major sectors of the economy and by providing an estimate of the growth effects of factor reallocation among sectors.
What is the Growth of Different Sectors of the Indian Economy?
Services
A key finding of the paper is that services have shown very substantial productivity growth since the early 1980s- a result in sharp contrast to that obtained for other countries at a similar stage of development.
1. Business Services
We argue that the emphasis on business services as the driving force behind the expansion of the Indian economy is frequently overstated. Despite its extraordinary growth, the industry comprises only a small share of India's GDP and overall employment. In addition, business services provide jobs primarily for the relatively small proportion of the workforce that is highly educated.
2. High Skill Services
We find some evidence that the current emphasis on high-skill services is already encountering some shortages - a bidding up of the relative wage rate for secondary and university-level graduates.
3. Total Factor Productivity in the Overall Services Sector
Furthermore, high rates of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in the overall services sector, which includes such industries as trade, transportation and education where we would not expect to observe rapid TFP growth, raise concerns that growth of the sector may be overstated in the statistics.
Agriculture and Industry
Productivity gains in agriculture and industry have been modest, which is consistent with both the findings of prior studies of India and those for other comparable countries such as Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s. What distinguishes the Indian case is the relatively small output growth in the industry. As a result, the sector has not played a major role in reallocating workers out of agriculture where they are underutilized.
Manufacturing Sector
The growth of the manufacturing sector would provide a strong match for the skills of the Indian workforce. On savings and investment, we assess the quality of various estimates offered by the Central Statistical Organization (CSO) and argue that the overall rate of saving has expanded substantially in recent years.
Is the Growth Expansion creating adequate Employment?
In any case, India's growth expansion is not creating adequate job growth for the bulk of the population that is not particularly well-educated. Thus, it is important that India broaden the base of the current expansion by promoting programs that would increase India's attractiveness as a source of manufactured goods for the world market.
Is the supply of private savings in India adequate to support a significantly higher rate of growth in future years?
We conclude that the supply of private savings in India is adequate to support a significantly higher rate of growth in future years. From the perspective of physical capital formation, the problems are more concentrated in the extreme dissaving of the public sector and the apparent weakness of investment incentives on the demand side.
There is already extensive empirical literature- often using growth accounts- that examines India's past economic growth. Many of the studies address one or more of the following topics.
- First, a number of analysts have focused on characterizing India's economic performance at the most aggregate level.
- Second, analysts have examined the behaviour of particular sectors. A number of authors have studied productivity in manufacturing- reaching a wide range of conflicting conclusions.
However, as explained in detail by Goldar and Mitra (2002), differences in the findings can be largely attributed to a variety of measurement issues, such as the use of single versus double deflation to construct estimates of real growth in manufacturing value added.
Goldar (2004) provides a careful recent update showing that TFP growth in manufacturing appears to have slowed in the post-reform period. However, due to difficulties in measuring employment within individual industries; our analysis focuses primarily on the broader industrial sector.
Additional studies that focus on the performance of agriculture and India's services sector are discussed in later sections of this paper. Thus, this paper is comprised of four remaining sections.
- The next section details the construction of growth accounts for India, with considerable attention paid to the quality of the underlying data.
- The section following it presents and discusses the results.
- Section three examines a range of issues related to the role of capital accumulation in India's growth experience. It focuses first on human capital and then turns to an analysis of investment and saving behavior in India.
- Drawing from the preceding analyses, the final section discusses implications for Indian economic growth, going forward.
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