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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Salt to the wound -Prabhat Patnaik

Salt to the wound -Prabhat Patnaik

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published Published on Feb 10, 2017   modified Modified on Feb 10, 2017
-The Indian Express

Government could have undone the damage of demonetisation through the budget. The opportunity has been missed in deference to the whims of global finance.

Since 97 per cent of the value of demonetised currency has returned to the banks, causing, contrary to the government’s expectations, very little extinction of currency, it is obvious that demonetisation has totally failed to achieve its purported objective of denting the black economy. It has, however, contracted aggregate demand, slowing overall growth and particularly damaging the informal sector where the poor are congregated.

It has done so by transferring a vast amount of purchasing power from people’s pockets, from where it would have been spent, to the vaults of banks where it is lying idle.

The budget, coming in its wake, was an opportunity to partially undo the damage caused by demonetisation, by boosting demand in the economy through larger government expenditure, and doing so in a manner that augmented the welfare of those most hurt. The government was even rumoured to be toying with such an idea; many saw a hint of it in the Economic Survey’s talk of a basic minimum income for all (though this can have disastrous effects if it becomes a substitute for, rather than a complement to, existing programmes like the MGNREGS, subsidised public distribution of foodgrains and public provisioning of services). The budget, however, instead of countering the recessionary effects of demonetisation, has actually added to them.

The rate of growth of total government expenditure has been halved, from about 12 per cent between 2015-16 and 2016-17 (RE) to just 6 per cent between 2016-17 (RE) to 2017-18 (BE). As a proportion of GDP, total expenditure is slated to fall between 2016-17 and 2017-18. True, since the current budget has been presented at the beginning and not the end of February, the data for the third quarter of 2016-17 are incomplete. This, together with the effects of demonetisation, makes all the budget figures dubious. But no matter what the precise figures, the fact that the budget, far from countering the recession, will contribute towards its persistence is quite clear.

What is remarkable is not just that the budget does nothing to offset recession, but that it could have done so quite easily if only it had wished to. The means for doing so were literally in the government’s hands. The banks are awash with deposits forced out of the public, on which they have to pay interest. On the other hand, borrowers whom they consider “creditworthy” are not exactly knocking on their doors for loans, so that they literally earn nothing on these deposits. Their profitability is thus threatened, because of which the Reserve Bank is placing government securities out of the stock in its possession with banks in return for their idle cash, thereby lowering its own profitability.

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The Indian Express, 9 February, 2017, http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/demonetisation-damage-budget-black-moneytrump-economy-salt-to-the-wound-4514658/


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