Inflation has been portrayed as the biggest challenge faced by Indian policy makers and its Central Bank, Reserve Bank of India, in recent times. The Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India and Professor of Economics at Cornell University, Kaushik Basu, recently presented his professional views on inflation – understanding and management, at the First Gautam Mathur Lecture on 18 May 2011. This is currently available for download as a working paper at the Ministry of Finance website. Various excerpts from this paper have made its way in some English newspapers and TV media. I will comment on this paper at length on a later date. Reading Basu’s paper makes me wonder whether monetary economists or other policy makers know what India is, who Indians are and what Indians actually do. In more abstract terms, do economists know the structure of the Indian economy? Do they know what motivates Indians? Is it primarily region, class, caste, religion, gender, education, self-interest, compassion, sympathy, fame, status? Although, to be fair to Kaushik Basu, he asks the RBI not to experiment and not to put up a façade of knowledge (which he frequently does). Without having a clear understanding of, what the 18^th century economist James Steuart calls, “the spirit of a people”, it is impossible to formulate effective policies. Moreover, the focus on employment generation has completely given way to inflation stabilisation, using sophisticated econometric techniques. Therefore, this blog post revisits James Steuart’s views on how “the spirit of a people” influences economic engineering. In the Indian context, the consequences of monetary intervention might not be those which are depicted in conventional models of inflation.

Sir James Steuart (1713-1780) published An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy in 1767 which was and has been overshadowed by Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations published in 1776. Steuart acknowledged the importance of devising context-specific economic policies. However, we must realise that context-specific economic policy is not antithetical to general economic theories. In other words, proposing economic theories and models of a general nature is not inherently a problem; but, when applied blindly, they cause havoc, which is often supressed in very clever ways. Steuart writes:

“Every operation of government should be calculated for the good of the people. . .that in order to make a people happy, they must be governed according to the spirit which prevails among them” (p. 21).

An ignorance or lack of understanding of this “spirit” can have disastrous consequences. We see some of them in the worsening urban-rural inequality, falling of inflation-adjusted per capita incomes in interior villages [EPW, 2011], agricultural distress and forced migration [P Sainath, The Hindu, 2011]. One of reasons why such skewed policies are implemented is because of the rationale provided by “pure economic theory”, which Basu seems to praise for its scientific rigor and [semblance of] truth. To be clear, “pure economic theory” is something which Steuart was against because it assumed a certain “spirit” and claimed to be universal thereby neglecting important specificities and characteristics pertaining to individual economies.

For Steuart, “the spirit of a people is formed upon a set of received opinions relative to three objects; morals, government and manners: these once generally adopted by any society, confirmed by long and constant habit, and never called in question, form the basis of all laws, regulate the form of every government, and determine what is commonly called the customs of a country” (p. 22). That is, education, religion, region, caste, gender, etc would significantly affect the “spirit” of India. Also, important characteristics such as the percentage of Indians employed in agriculture, in unorganised manufacture, in self-employment, in rural areas, using informal sources of finance, who are socially poor (less than 100 rupees a day), who actually invest in stock markets, who read English newspapers and so on affect the outcomes of economic engineering. Not paying heed to these significant characteristics is the same as formulating an inappropriate policy. Let me highlight once instance. The RBI conducts Inflation Expectations Survey to estimate how the expectations of the Indian populace change over time and this result forms an input into monetary policy making. Despite this, the RBI did not survey any Indian living in rural areas; they seem to neglect and forget the fact that the main producers live in rural areas and their chief occupation is agriculture! This certainly deserves to be questioned. Policies should not be formulated “at any point which regards the political oeconomy of a nation, without accompanying the example with some supposition relative to the spirit of the people” (p. 23). If the “spirit of the people” is not taken into account, as the example above indicated, such policies could prove to be harmful. This also calls for greater dialogue between economists and other social analysts (sociologists, cultural theorists, political scientists, anthropologists, social workers, etc) when engineering nation-wide socio-economic policies. Hence, Steuart writes that “in every step the spirit of the people should be first examined” (p. 25).

Often, the attitudes of policy makers indicate how much their academic knowledge is irrelevant for practical economic and social problems. The reliance on “pure economic theory” is nothing but an intellectual looking, mathematically replete and made-difficult-to-understand version of free markets, because efficiency and rationality are our new gods! As Keynes writes in his preface to The General Theory, “the difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.” Today, these “old ideas” are not only fashionable and ‘scientific’ (and often unsuited to India), but they are also communicated relentlessly to the new generations through schools and universities. In conclusion, it is scary to realise that India’s policy making is done by those who are “strangers” to the Indian realities. Steuart warns us that “when strangers are employed as statesmen, the disorder is still greater, unless there be extraordinary penetration, temper, and, above all, flexibility and discretion” (p. 27).

The recurrent hikes in fuel prices over the last one year are a cause of concern. For, fuel is a basic commodity and it enters as an input directly or indirectly into the production of all commodities – agriculture, manufacturing and services. About a year back, an “expert” committee headed by Kirit S Parikh recommended a partial deregulation/liberalization of fuel prices. This has eased the financial burden of the government. In addition, economists have posited that deregulation will enable markets to become efficient (subsidies and taxes distort efficiency). In any case, the role of the government has been changing rapidly too – from that of a provider to that of an enabler (to quote our Chief Economic Advisor, Kaushik Basu).

A couple of days back, our esteemed Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Montek Singh Ahluwalia told the media that the recent hikes in fuel prices was a strategic move. According to him, the hike in prices of petroleum products would help ease inflation in the long run as it would suck money from the system. This post examines this statement by trying to understand the mechanism of inflation.

INFLATION

Inflation, as we know, refers to a continuous increase in the price level over a period. To make sense of this seemingly simple statement, we must have a clear understanding of the two concepts based on which we understand inflation. It is on the basis of this understanding that policy decisions are made both by the RBI as well as the Central Government to control inflation. The two concepts are:

(1)   Time: the price rise has to be continuous over a certain period.

(2)   Index number: inflation is studied by making use of these special averages

Time

How much time must elapse before we can characterise the price increase in an economy as inflationary? In theory, economists solve this problem of having to fix the time period by introducing the distinction between short-run and long-run. However, this distinction does not solve the problem, but only adds to the complexity. What do we understand by short-run? Does it refer to one week, one month, 6 months or one year? Interestingly, there is no fixed answer to this. The distinction between short-run and long-run shows how creative economists are, although its utility is questionable. Short-run refers to the time during which the variables under consideration do not have adequate time to adjust or settle (at their equilibrium positions). Whereas, long-run refers to a period (point?) when all the adjustments are over and all the variables have settled. How convenient! The long-run will remain a mirage.

Given these unsettled issues, how does our Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commissions confidently maintain that fuel price hikes will ease inflationary pressures? This statement is meaningless because the long-run is a fictitious concept. Such statements indicate the misplaced confidence economists possess as well as the poverty of economic theory.

Index numbers

Price level is what we examine in theory when trying to understand inflation. In applied work, we trace changes in indices such as WPI and CPI (which is a proxy for the general price level in an economy) in computing inflation. The construction of a good index number is a difficult task. Selection of relevant variables, choice of base year, the kind of index number to use – Paasche, Laspeyre or Fisher – are some of the issues which have to be tackled. A detailed discussion of index number will feature as a blog post in the future.

Ahluwalia, one of our economic planners, maintains that fuel price hikes will ease inflation in the long run. The explanation he provides for this occurring is both logically and factually incorrect. He said that fuel price hikes “suck excess money out of the system.” Firstly, this statement is based on a particular view or understanding of inflation, namely the neoclassical one. Inflation is seen by this group as a result of excess money in the economy. In the words of economics textbooks, which do an excellent job at indoctrination, inflation occurs when too much money chases too few goods. It is this factually incorrect view which dominates academia as well as the policy arena. In fact, it is this view which is widely communicated in the media as well. Several economists have questioned this notion but with limited success. For, if inflation is not a monetary phenomenon, how will the central banks survive? In any case, this view is not a correct representation of reality because manufactured products and services are not priced on the basis of demand (unlike agricultural prices which are largely demand-determined). [See Who prices the Products? and On Prices/Values] If the prices increase from non-monetary factors, such as production conditions, expensive labour, from a higher profit margin, corruption or rise in fuel prices, how will removal of money reduce inflation? In fact, how does one arrive at a benchmark for computing ‘excess” money? Fuel price hikes, on the other hand, will threaten the livelihood of both the poor consumers and poor producers.

What does our planner mean when he talks of the “system”? A closed economy? An open one? Will the money not still be circulating in the economy even after the fuel price rise? Without clarifying the above mentioned issues, the statement made by the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission holds no ground, however scientific it might sound! Such statements only reinforce the arrogance of economists and the poverty of economics!

This post is different from the others because it deals with the contributions of a single economist. Knut Wicksell was a Swedish economist who made significant contributions to capital theory, monetary economics and fiscal policy. Despite being grouped under the neoclassical or the Austrian school because of his affinities to ‘marginal’ analyst, Wicksell was a socialist and a radical. He advocated policies which involved the government in a big way. And owing to his varied interests in poetry, mathematics, feminism, mathematics, politics, etc he became a Professor of Economics and Fiscal Law at Lund University only when he was fifty. A few of his well known students are Erik Lindahl, Gunnar Myrdal and Bertil Ohlin. They are considered to be part of Stockholm or Swedish school of economic thought.

In the passages below, only a few of his contributions will be elaborated. He has also made lasting contributions to the theory of interest, revitalised quantity theory of money, introduced mechanisms linking the real and monetary sector, etc.

Wicksell demonstrated that problems could arise if capital is treated just like other ‘factors of production’ – land and labour. Cambridge capital controversies dealt with many of these problems. “Knut Wicksell (1851–1926) himself casts doubt on the specification of the value of capital, along with the physical quantities of labour and land, as part of the data of the system. ‘Capital’ is but a set of heterogeneous capital goods. Therefore, unlike labour and land, which ‘are measured each in terms of its own technical unit . . . capital . . . is reckoned . . . as a sum of exchange value’ (Wicksell, 1901, 1934, p. 49). But capital goods are themselves produced commodities and, as such, their ‘costs of production include capital and interest’; thus, ‘to derive the value of capital goods from their own cost of production or reproduction’ would imply ‘arguing in a circle’ (ibid., p. 149).” [Segura and Braun 2004]

Like other contemporaries of his, Wicksell did not write about unemployment. This was because the existence of unemployment was considered to be a paradox, an anomaly for neoclassical economists. As they could not comprehend why resources (here, labour) would be left idle! The central problem in (neoclassical) economics was not to provide or create uses for factors, but only to allocate the factors among various uses. As Bo Sandelin, editor of Wicksell’s papers and the author of A History of Swedish Economic Thought writes in the introduction that “the fundamental question in economics was how to manage an economy with scarce resources.” Strange indeed!

Wicksell was a strong proponent of the marginal productivity theory of distribution. A corollary of this theory is the the sum of all the marginal products of the factors should be equal to the total product, known as the product exhaustion theorem. However Wicksell demonstrated that the operation of this theory depends on the returns to the scale. That is, only under constant returns to scale will the marginal products exactly add up to the total product. And that for both decreasing returns and increasing returns, the product will not be completely exhausted.

The Swedish school made another important contribution to economic theory. They introduced the categories of ex ante and ex post. These categories, we know are used widely today and were the result of the School’s dissatisfaction with the equilibrium analysis. Apart from these ways of thinking, Myrdal has provided us with the concept of circular and cumulative causation as well. These categories provide us with alternative modes of conceptualising or thinking about economic problems.

Relying solely on textbooks reduces our extent of reach. We often fail to come across interesting and heterodox economists. But, history of economic thought provides us with ample personalities to look into. Wicksell is one among them. Also, some of their categories provide us with alternatives, which remain unfinished. For instance, after going through some of the secondary and primary works on/by Wicksell, he appears exceedingly interesting and aware of the implications of certain simplifying assumptions. He pointed out the ‘necessity’ of the constant returns to scale assumption, which economics faithfully aligned with for a considerable period. This was challenged within the mainstream only with the entry of the endogenous growth theories, which emphasised increasing returns.

References

Pressman, Steven (2004), Fifty Great Economists, Routledge: India.

Groenewegen, P and Vaggi, G (2006), A Concise History of Economic Thought: From Mercantilism to Monetarism, Palgrave Macmillan.

De Marchi, N and Blaug, M (1991), Appraising Economic Theories: Studies in the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes, Edward Elgar.

Segura, J and Braun, C (2004), An Eponymous Dictionary of Economics: A Guide to Laws and Theorems Named After Economists, Edward Elgar.

The rate of Inflation is of great concern to the Central Bank of a country as well as to its Government.

This concern of the authorities is what makes ‘inflation targeting’ important. But should it be the only concern?

What is ‘Inflation targeting’?

Inflation targeting is a framework for operating monetary policy. The first authority to formulate it was the Reserve Bank of New Zealand in the early 1990s. It is undertaken by the monetary authorities and it tries to keep the price stable without adversely affecting output and employment. [Khatkhate 2006]

On Phillips curve

The Phillips curve represents the relationship between the rate of inflation and the unemployment rate. Although several people had made similar observations before him, A. W. H. Phillips published a study in 1958 that represented a milestone in the development of macroeconomics. Phillips discovered that there was a consistent inverse, or negative, relationship between the rate of wage inflation and the rate of unemployment in the United Kingdom from 1861 to 1957. When unemployment was high, wages increased slowly; when unemployment was low, wages rose rapidly. [Hoover]

Inflation targeting has gained a lot of importance, mainly owing to the downward slope of the Phillips curve.

On NAIRU

NAIRU or Non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment was introduced by Milton Friedman and Edmund Phelps during the 1970s.

NAIRU is a steady state unemployment rate above which inflation would fall and below which inflation would rise.

The natural rate of unemployment is a key concept in modern macroeconomics. Its use originated with Milton Friedman’s 1968 Presidential Address to the American Economic Association in which he argued that there is no long-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment: As the economy adjusts to any average rate of inflation, unemployment returns to its “natural” rate. Higher inflation brings no benefit in terms of lower average unemployment, nor does lower inflation involve any cost in terms of higher average unemployment. A second important unemployment rate is the “Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment,” or NAIRU. This is the unemployment rate consistent with maintaining stable inflation. According to the standard macroeconomic theory enshrined in most undergraduate textbooks, inflation will tend to rise if the unemployment rate falls below the natural rate. Conversely, when the unemployment rate rises above the natural rate, inflation tends to fall. Thus, the natural rate and the NAIRU are often viewed as two names for the same thing, providing an important benchmark for gauging the state of the business cycle, the outlook for future inflation, and the appropriate stance of monetary policy. [FRBSF Economic Letter 1998]

A digression

I am digressing from ‘inflation targeting’ and am going to talk about a welcome proposal by the Indian Government.

In a bid to obtain a `true picture’ of the effect of price changes on the economy, the Union Finance Ministry has proposed the inclusion of services in the Wholesale Price Index (WPI) which is used to measure point-to-point inflation. In India, the services sector accounted for 54 per cent of the GDP during the previous fiscal year. [The Hindu 2007]

In an earlier post of mine, I had argued for a restructuring of the WPI.

Conclusion

Giving too much significance to the ‘Inflation rate’ without adequate and corresponding developments in food supply, public distribution systems, etc will not help combat the problems of unemployment. Thus the fiscal and monetary authorities must ensure that such areas are targeted during a ‘rise in inflation’.

Increasing interest rates and importing food grains so as to bring down inflation rates will not succeed as the ‘inflation’ is basically caused by distributional inefficiencies.

References

1) Deena Khatkhate, Inflation Targeting, Dec 9 2006, EPW.

2) Kevin D. Hoover, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.

      3) Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, The Natural Rate, NAIRU, and Monetary Policy, 1998.

Further Reading

1) The Phillips curve by Bradford DeLong.

2) The NAIRU by Bradford DeLong.

3) History and Theory of the NAIRU: A Critical Review by Espinosa and Russell.

      4) Why inflation still matters, Frontline, Jayati Ghosh, 2006.