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Is India overheating? Eight myths about inflationKalpana Kochhar & Charles Kramer

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Is the current inflation spiral primarily on account of agricultural shortages? Will the RBI's policy of raising interest rates kill the currentexpansion?

The pickup in headline inflation from about 4 per cent to over 6 per cent during the last 12 months, and the Reserve Bank of India's morein it in, have sparked a vigorous debate in India. In our view, inflation is a problem - and the RBI has been correct in taking steps to bunder control.

The debate has given rise to eight myths about inflation in India. It is useful to examine each of these myths so as to gain a clearer viewissues - and the appropriate policy response.

It's all about food prices. Inflation stripped of food and energy, or other volatile components, is still rising. For example, between Marcand March 2007, year-on-year wholesale price index inflation excluding food and energy rose from 2 per cent to 7.9 per cent.

The pickup in inflation is all due to base effects from last year's low inflation. The notion is that depressed inflation in early 2006exaggerates the rise in inflation during early 2007 on a year-on-year basis. But the three-month moving average of month-on-month, seadjusted inflation has risen by about 3 percentage points over the past year - the same as year-on-year inflation.

Inflation will fall back to a normal range on its own. Leading indicators of inflation point one way: continued price pressures. Excesscapacity has shrunk to a 14year low, according to the NCAER. In addition, there are signs of overheating in real estate and labour marksurveys showing the salaries of skilled workers rising by around 15 per cent annually.

Broad money growth has hardly slowed, still registering about 20 per cent year-on-year. With nominal GDP growing at about 14 per ceseems a classic case of too much money chasing too few goods - a recipe for inflation.

Fresh capacity will come onstream soon and alleviate constraints (or, what we really need are reforms to encourage supply).Investment and reforms are welcome - not just to combat inflation, but to generate growth and employment that can alleviate poverty aliving standards. However, they take too long to come onstream to dampen inflation now. Indeed, inflation has risen despite double-digin private fixed capital formation over 2002/03-2005/06, accompanied by an 8.5 percentage point rise in the ratio of overall investment t

Monetary tightening will kill the expansion. Keeping inflation under control, in fact, is key to sustaining the expansion. Waiting until irises to higher levels will only make the job of stabilising prices harder. The international experience on this score is clear: When inflatioexpectations get entrenched at high levels, central banks have to tighten even more sharply to get inflation down.

Administrative measures are as good as - or better than - monetary tightening for controlling inflation. Some administrative mecan work against inflation control in the long run by discouraging supply. Banning exports and futures trading for selected commoditiesexample, raises the cost of doing business and creates uncertainty about the regulatory environment. This can only discourage producworsening supply constraints.

A stronger rupee does nothing to control inflation. A stronger rupee helps reduce inflation because it lowers the import prices of oilraw materials and capital goods and this, in turn, lowers the cost of production. It also reduces the prices of import-competing goods, lik

A related myth is that a strong rupee will kill the economy by hurting exporters. A stronger rupee does reduce the rupee value of exportearnings - but it also reduces the cost of imported inputs, and to the extent that it dampens inflation, it limits the need for interest-rate hMoreover, exporters are in a robust position now: as an earlier article in this newspaper pointed out, among 808 companies surveyed, profits rose 67 percent in the October-December quarter.

Policy tightening will deny credit to small businesses and the common man, as well as hurt the poor. It is true that small busineand the common man have only limited access to credit. This is a serious problem, but not one that can be solved through easy monet

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policy.

The poor, meanwhile, not only have limited access to credit, but live on fixed incomes and have few or no assets to hedge against inflathat high inflation hurts them more than higher interest rates. Consistent with this idea, research by William Easterly and Stanley Fischeshown that in a range of countries, higher inflation is associated with a lower share of national income accruing to the poor, a higher porate, and a lower inflation-adjusted minimum wage.

In light of these realities, the RBI is right to have taken steps to rein in inflation. Compared with many other emerging countries, India haadmirable record of price stability. Maintaining this track record will pay benefits in terms of sustained growth with macroeconomic stabit will protect the most vulnerable Indians from the ravages of inflation.

Kalpana Kochhar is mission chief for India at the International Monetary Fund and Charles Kramer is a division chief responsthe Indian economy.

How to tackle inflationAjay Shah

February 08, 2007

Is the government getting needlessly hysterical about inflation? Many people think it is okay to tolerate some inflation if, in return, it is to sustain higher growth rates. Nothing matters as much for peace, prosperity and poverty alleviation as high GDP growth, so I would aadvocate any policy which delivers higher sustained GDP growth.

However, the link between inflation and growth is complex. High inflation does not give high growth. The growth miracles of Asia, wher7% growth was sustained over a 25-year period, were not associated with high inflation. In fact, countries with high inflation have tendehave low growth.

In the business cycle, an acceleration of inflation can support a temporary acceleration of growth. In India, expected inflation has goneroughly 3% in 2004 to roughly 7% today--a rise of 4 percentage points. Interest rates have risen by less than 4 percentage points. As a

consequence, real interest rates have actually gone down. Borrowing has become cheaper; we have a credit boom; and this is givingheightened GDP growth.

If inflation now stands still at 7%, this boost to GDP growth will fade away. Episodes where inflation went up are associated with a brieacceleration of GDP growth. A government can jolt an economy by raising the inflation rate. This heightened growth is not sustained.Conversely, achieving high sustained GDP growth is about fundamental issues of economic reform, and does not concomitantly requirinflation.

One of the great strengths of India is that the political system just does not accept high inflation. This is one area where politicians havahead of the intellectuals. Inflation of 3% is politically acceptable, and inflation above 5% sets off alarm bells.

The government that can jolt an economy by raising the inflation rate then has to go through the costly process of wringing out the inflaget back to 3%. Since there is no tradeoff between inflation and GDP growth, Parliament is right in demanding low inflation and high Ggrowth.

Currently, in India, we go through boom-and-bust cycles; sometimes GDP growth rates are very high and sometimes GDP growth ratesharply. This boom-and-bust cycle is unpleasant for every household. There is a powerful international consensus that stabilising inflatreduces this boom-and-bust cycle of GDP growth.

The ideal combination, which has been achieved in all mature market economies, is one involving low inflation, which is also predictabnon-volatile. Low inflation volatility induces low volatility of GDP growth.

Low and predictable inflation also reduces the number of mistakes made by entrepreneurs in formulating investment plans. What Indianot have is an institutional capacity for delivering predictable, non-volatile inflation of 3%.

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In socialist India, the way to deal with an outbreak of inflation was to do government interference in commodity markets. A few commothat "cause" inflation are identified, and the government swings into action: banning exports, giving out import licences, banning futuressending the police to unearth "hoarding", etc.

This is deeply distortionary. Milk exports were banned, and milk prices fell. But why should milk farmers pay for a macroeconomic probinflation? The cost of bringing down inflation needs to be dispersed all across the economy.

If milk prices had been allowed to rise, then more labour and capital would shift from unproductive cereals to high-value milk productiohas the potential to be the world's biggest exporter of milk. But this requires a sophisticated web of producers, supply chain, exportersfactories, etc.

This sophisticated ecosystem will not flourish when the government meddles in the milk industry. A meddlesome government will go ththe whiplash of doing an MSP one day because milk prices are low and banning exports another day because milk prices are high.

There is something profoundly wrong about a government that interferes in what can be imported and what can be exported. If the expball bearings were sometimes banned by the government, you can be sure there would be fewer factories to build ball bearings.

India is evolving from a socialist past into a mature market economy. How can predictable, non-volatile inflation of 3% be achieved? Ththat has been developed worldwide is to devote the entire power of monetary policy to this one task. In India, the RBI has a complex mspanning over many contradictory roles. This has led to failures on inflation control.

In a mature market economy, a modern central bank watches expected inflation with great interest. Active trading takes place on the sderivatives markets, for both ordinary bonds and inflation-indexed bonds. Using these prices, a modern central bank is able to infer exinflation.

When the short-term interest rate is raised or lowered, in order to respond to changes in expected inflation, there is a slow impact on theconomy, possibly spread over two to three years. A modern central bank has the economic knowledge required to watch out for expeinflation deep in the future, and respond to it ahead of time, so as to deliver inflation that is on target.

In India's case, the RBI Act of 1934 predates modern monetary economics. In other countries, fundamental reforms have been undertaorder to refashion monetary institutions in the light of modern knowledge. As an example, in the late 1990s, when Tony Blair and GordBrown won the election, they refashioned the Bank of England as a focused central bank which has three core values:

Independence: the Bank of England sets the short rate without involvement from the Ministry of Finance.

Transparency: the entire process through which interest rate setting is done is fully transparent so that the financial markets know exactly what is being done and why.

Accountability: the Bank of England is accountable for hitting an inflation target. All tasks other than the inflation target were

removed from the Bank of England.

The bad drafting of the RBI Act of 1934 is the ultimate cause of the distress of milk producers today. These linkages are not immediatevisible, but they are very real. It is because India does not have a proper institutional foundation for monetary policy that we are reducedistortionary mechanisms for inflation control.

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How does one calculate inflation?

9 Aug 2004, 0455 hrs IST,TNN

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What is a price index? If you need to know how much the price of a particular commodityhas increased in, say, the last year it is a simple enough computation.

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However, if you need to give a figure for the increase in prices over a range ofcommodities,

things obviously get more complicated, since individual commodity price variations arelikely to be quite different. You could choose to say the price rise ranges from, say, 4% to

26%, but that is clearly less meaningful than if you could put a single number to it and say

prices have on the whole risen by 8.3%.

The purpose of a price index is to let you do just that. It does that by assigning different

weights to prices of various commodities, so that you can get a weighted average of theprice increases. The weights are needed because you surely wouldn't want the price of atube of shaving cream ticket to be equated in importance with the amount you spend on

petrol over a month.

Why do we need so many price indices?

There are different levels at which prices can be measured. The price of your vegetablesis different for the wholesaler who buys it from the farmer, the retailer who gets it from

the wholesaler and for you. We need different indices, therefore, to measure what is

happening to prices a each of these levels. In India we have the wholesale price index

(WPI) to track wholesale prices, as its name suggests, and three different consume priceindices to track prices facing different categories of consumers industrial workers,

urban non-manual employees and agricultural workers. The different CPIs are needed

because the prices facing different consumer groups are different. Thus, while urbanhouse rents may be of great significant to the first two groups, they would be of no

consequence to farm labour. Thus the composition of each CPI is different and should

ideally reflected the actual consumption patterns of the relevant consumer groups.

What is the inflation rate we keep readingabout?

What is generally reported is the annual point-to-point inflation rate, which measures the

change in the level of a price index over a full year. The CPIs in India are computed on amonthly basis, while the WPI is computed every week. Unless otherwise indicated, the

inflation rate being referred to is normally the one based on the WPI.

The year in this case would be 52 weeks.

Thus when the papers report that inflation for the week ended July 24, 2004 was 7.5%,

what this means is that the WPI for that week was higher by 7.5% than the one for the

week ended July 26, 2003. It is important to realise that the point-to-point inflation ratereflects only the difference in prices over two specific weeks. Hence, if the inflation rate

moves up from one week to the next, it need not mean that prices have actually moved

over that period.

It may equally be because there was a fall in the corresponding period of the previous

year.

This also explains why economists prefer to deal with average annual inflation rates

rather than with point-to-point rates. Since the former involve averages of the index over

longer periods, temporary blips are evened out, giving a more realistic picture of thetrend.

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What is the composition of the WPI?

The WPI has an All Commodities Index, which consists of four three major groups -

Primary Articles; Fuel, Power, Light & Lubricants; and Manufactured Products. These

are again broken up into smaller sub-groups. For instance, the primary articles groupwould have food articles, non-food articles and minerals. Each of these sub-groups would

have several individual commodities in them.

All told, the current WPI tracks prices of 435 commodities, of which 98 are primaryarticles, 19 fall in the fuel, power, light & lubricants group and 318 are in the

manufactured products group.

The WPI has been periodically revised from the time it was first constructed in the 1930s

and for obvious reasons the weights have moved progressively in favour of manufactured

products.

The current index, which uses 1993-94 as its base year, has weights of 22.025 for primary

articles, 14.226 for fuel etc and 63.749 for manufactured products.