The IMF revised India's target GDP rate to 9.5% with many brokerage houses following suit. It also reported that growth would be largely consumption led . Clearly this is great news, where growth in US and China seems to be losing steam. But is the "largely consumption" led growth sustainable? Lets break down the numbers -
GDP growth has three components -
1. Due to Investment growth
2. Consumer spend
3. Net exports
In the case of US, where lot of core investment has already been made, the growth is largely consumption led. China is largerly export oriented economy and hence most of its growth is derived from exports and investments.
India differs from the two -
India has net negative exports and hence growth in India would be largely investment and consumption led. Also, since it is still a developing economy, investment growth forms a major component of GDP growth. Now, lets look at the two numbers broken down -
1. Investment - The investment to GDP growth is 34% which is quite good. However, this might largely be projects getting completed rather than new projects being started.
2. Consumption - In an economy such as India, where organized retail forms 4-5%, it is hard to track consumption growth. Consumption is tracked through quarterly GDP estimates - household expenditure. Secondly, we can use IIP data as a proxy. We break IIP data into consumer durables and consumer non-durables. Consumer goods data is very healthy at 6-7%, but if you further break it down - consumer durables is 20% and consumer non-durables is 2%. My index of sustainable consumer growth is non-durables growth. The reason being - consumer durable growth is driven by interest rates (one buys an automobile, as they feel interest rates might go up). Consumer non-durables is lifestyle augmentation - once you start consuming these, you can't really roll them back - they are not one-off purchases.
To maintain an 8-8.5% growth, we need consumption to grow at 6%. If you look at the historical pattern - it tends to lag and is more robust. Household consumption is also more stable than investment spending. When things go down, households preserve their consumption expenditure until their incomes start getting strained. On the way up, household expenditure does not go up all of a sudden, it gradually does. In the 2000 cycle, investment hit rock bottom in 2000, then gradually recovered by 2002, however consumption response to income growth came in late 2004 and gradually picked up in 2005.
Saturday, July 10, 2010
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)