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Friday, April 20, 2012

The politics of the monetary policy debate

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has finally succumbed to the increasingly mainstream demand for lowering interest rates. In its mid-quarterly monetary policy review, it has lowered the repo rates by a substantial margin of fifty basis points.

Conventional wisdom would have it that the RBI makes its interest rate decisions on objective considerations based on clearly defined parameters. Even assuming the inevitable discretionary judgement that goes with such decisions, the broadly technocratic nature of such decisions are widely accepted. It is also assumed that these decisions stabilize the economy as a whole. The twin objective is to keep inflation anchored and boost economic growth.

However, a closer analysis of this decision reveals a deeply institutionalized political and social bias. Two observations from the debate that preceded and also followed this decision.

1. In recent months, there has been a growing belief that the RBI holds the key to restoring India's economic growth. In fact, this belief has come to dominate opinion makers across the world. The apparent simplicity of tweaking a single number, the repo rate, to alter the fortunes of the economy has obvious attractions to all parties - academicians, businesses, governments, and media. It provides an easy opportunity for all and sundry to weigh in with their two ounces of wisdom. Unfortunately, it also takes away from focussing on the real issues at hand and holding governments accountable for their role in restoring economic growth. It takes the pressure off from governments in having to deal with more fundamental structural distortions and need for more reforms.

This impression is also reinforced by a cognitive bias, the availability heuristic. The RBI's interest rate decisions are discrete and high-profile events, very frequently deployed (especially in the past few years), and is associated with clear economic growth implications. Rate hikes increase the cost of capital while reductions have the opposite effect. It therefore becomes very easy for everyone to associate a tight monetary policy stance with growth suffocation.

2. The inflation Vs growth trade-off in monetary policy management, in the Indian context, has critical political overtones. Corporate India is directly and immediately hurt by the high interest rates. It therefore becomes natural for them to lobby aggressively to lower interest rates. They argue that the downside risks to economic growth associated with higher rates are much higher than its corresponding inflation risks.

However, monetary loosening, especially when inflationary forces remain unhinged and the economy is running at its potential output frontier, poses significant inflation risks. And inflation, as the episodes of runaway spikes in food prices in recent years indicate, can very adversely affect the poor. They disproportionately bear the costs of inflation compared to the non-poor and corporates.

In simple terms, leave alone its technical merits, a rate cut now reflects a conclusive preference for one political view over another. The balance sheet squares up clearly - high interest rates increases the cost of production for corporate India, while inflation has only marginal immediate impact; inflation hurts the poor directly while the effect of high interest rates is negligible. In terms of the magnitude of short to medium-term effects, lowering of interest rates and a possible rise in inflation will impact the poor more adversely than corporates and non-poor.     

3. Finally, as I have blogged earlier, RBI's recent tight monetary policy stance goes much beyond inflation control. In recent years, the Indian economy has been growing at a rate much higher than its potential GDP growth rate. In the absence of policies and investments that ease supply-side bottlenecks, this potential growth rate has remained stagnant. Therefore, it became necessary for the RBI to cool down the economy, so as to prevent the build up of inflationary pressures. However, popular debates and mainstream discussion on monetary policy have tended to gloss over this and focus on the growth inhibiting role of high interest rates.    

In the final analysis, these prejudices and biases are reflective of the dynamics that skew the priorities in the formulation of public policies and their implementation in India.

Postscript - I missed linking to this post by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson which highlights how monetary policy in the US too appears to have become beholden to the interests of Wall Street. 

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