economic activity – Pertinent Observations

Commute Distance and Prosperity

There is an interesting report on The Hindu Blogs about commute distance and prosperity. Referring to a World Bank report in 2005, the blog post talks about richer people commuting longer distances to work. Rukmini S, who has written the piece, also finds from the latest NSSO data that richer states in India have a higher proportion of people commuting more than 5 km to work.

I didn’t like the visualization (or the lack of it) in Rukmini’s article, and hence this post. I thought the point about long commutes to work and richer states would be better made in a scatter plot, and that is what I produce here:

On the X axis is the proportion of the Urban population in each state that commutes over 5 km to work each way. The data is from the latest NSSO Survey (page 28-29). On the Y axis I have a measure of the level of economic activity in a state – the per capita Gross State Domestic Product. The advantage of this measure is that it takes out from the equation the size of the state itself, and instead focuses on the level of economic activity per person. The figures are from 2011-12 and the numbers are based on 2004-05 prices. The data is from the RBI website.

The correlation is clear – barring a few small states, the above plot clearly shoes that more the proportion of people that commute long distances to work, the greater the economic activity in that state. The question, however, is whether there is a causal effect and if so, in which direction – does people traveling longer distances cause greater economic activity or does greater economic activity lead to people commuting longer distances?

The world bank paper proposes that the more well to do commute longer distances only because the cost of local transport in Mumbai is high and the poor cannot afford that. This is a view that Rukmini endorses in her piece in the Hindu. The argument doesn’t particularly make sense, though. Do the world bank researchers intend to say that transport costs outstrip housing costs in prime areas in Mumbai? If so, it is extremely hard to believe.

At the state level, one possible reason why people in richer states travel more is because greater economic activity happens in bigger urban agglomerations. The economic activity of a town or village is a super-linear function of the number of people living there. And when you have larger urban agglomerations, people tend to live farther from their workplaces, and thus commute more.

Again – this is a chicken and egg problem – a level of economic activity in a town or village leads to increase in population, which results in greater commutes. Increase in population leads to even greater economic activity, and this sets off a virtuous cycle. The 20-fold increase in Bangalore’s population in the last 70 years can be attested to this cycle, and it is hard to put a direction of causation to it.

The above explanation, however, doesn’t explain the following graph. This graph is identical to the one above except that here we look at the proportion of rural residents who commute over 5 km to work. And this is again positively correlated with economic activity!

What can possibly explain this? One way to explain this is that when people stay close to a town or city with high economic activity, they might prefer to participate in that rather than working in the village itself, and thus they might be commuting longer distances. States with high economic activity are likely to have a larger number of villages close to urban/semi-urban centres of high economic activity, and thus people are likely to travel longer distances.

When more people are willing to travel longer distances for work, it leads to people coming together to work at a higher rate than it normally happens in a village, and this leads to higher economci activity! Again, it is hard to put a directionality to the causation!

The fundamental problem with the world economy

… is that wages are sticky.

With increased globalization, it has become significantly cheaper to produce certain goods and services in countries that were hitherto “low income” or “less developed’ or whatever you call it. In the past, in part due to protectionism at various levels and in part due to high transaction costs (transport, communication, etc.) “developed economies” such as the US or Europe had got adjusted to a reasonably high wage structure. In fact, it is possible that in the absence of trade with the rest of the world these countries might still be able to support that structure.

However, with the walls of protectionism and transaction costs falling, these traditionally high wage economies haven’t been able to compete with the up and coming economies where production costs are significantly lower. And because wages are sticky, i.e. it is impossibly hard to cut wages across the board, this has resulted in unemployment. Worse, a lot of other benefits (such as Social Security or Medicare in the US) have been set based on the high wage structure these countries used to enjoy.

And then you have unions, which makes it even tougher for you to cut wages which might make you competitive. It’s a combination of sticky wages and unionism that the various austerity measures in Greece haven’t managed to go through (of course, Greece has another set of problems in terms of law enforcement and tax collection).

And so, in short

1. Wages are sticky. Even though your current wages are not competitive enough, you can’t cut wages

2. That leads to high unemployment

3. That leads to lower economic activity and thus depression

4. The government needs to spend more to “stimulate” the economy, but hasn’t collected enough in good times. And the “level” of the economic cycle itself has gone down now. And the government itself has other obligations linked to the high wage levels

And so it goes. One thing I can think of is “devaluation” (in these times of floating currency rates, that term has lost all meaning), but then now these countries import so much that will again not be a good idea.

Fun!

PS: please note that this post has been filed under “Arbit”

Letting the rupee float

I’m midway through Shankar Acharya’s Op-Ed in today’s Business Standard, and I realize that along with the interest rate, the exchange rate (USD/INR) is another instrument that the RBI could possibly use in order to control money supply and the level of economic activity in India. Let me explain.

Given that mad growth in petroleum prices have been fundamental to growth in inflation, and that high petroleum prices also impact the oil marketing companies and the government negatively, and that we import most of our petroleum needs, letting the rupee rise above its current level is a mechanism of reining in “realized petroleum prices”. If we were to let the rupee rise, inflation would get tamed (due to imports becoming cheaper), the government’s fiscal deficit would come down (subsidy will be reduced), but exporters will get shoved, and that can depress economic activity in the country. So letting the rupee rise is similar to increasing interest rates.

There are people who question whether the RBI should be controlling exchange rates at all, and wonder if it would be better if it were to float freely. I’ve also taken that view on several occasions in the past, but now that I think of it, there are liquidity concerns. USD/INR, EUR/INR, GBP/INR, etc. have no way near the kind of liquidity that exchange rates between two “developed currencies” (USD/EUR or USD/JPY) have. In other words, the amount of trade that happens in USD/INR is much lower than that of say USD/JPY.

Given this lack of liquidity, if let to float fully, there is a danger that the USD/INR rates can fluctuate wildly. Higher volatility in rates means higher hedging costs for both exporters and importers, and given that our foreign trade is fairly high, a wildly fluctuating exchange rate does no good in policy formulation. From this point of view, it is important that short-term volatility in the exchange rates is curbed, and to that extent I support the RBI’s decision to intervene in the FX markets.

However, if there is a sustained pressure on either side (say the exchange rate trades for a sustained period at the edge of the “band” that the RBI is allowing the rupee to float in), the RBI should buckle and shift their bands, and let the markets have their way. While short-term volatility is not great, distorting market signals is worse.

An analogy that comes to mind is circuit breakers in the Indian stock market. Earlier, these circuit breakers were in place for all stocks (basically, they dictate that if the stock price fluctuates by more than a certain amount in a certain time period, trading in the stock will be halted for a certain amount of time). However, recent regulations have removed these circuit breakers for stocks on which derivatives are traded, which are the more liquid stocks. The circuit breakers, however, are still in place for the less liquid stocks

It’s a similar story in the FX markets. Given that USD/INR is still not too liquid (in terms of volumes), it is important that we have circuit breakers (i.e. RBI intervention). Once it reaches a certain “critical mass” (in terms of volumes ), however, the RBI can step away and let the rupee float.

(I haven’t looked at any data while writing this. All judgments are based on my perception of how certain numbers shape up)

Liquidity

We live in an era of unprecedented liquidity. Think about the difference from just about ten years ago. Back then, there was a much larger amount of cash reserve that one had to keep in one’s home, or on one’s person. There were no ATMs. There were no credit cards. All purchases needed to be meticulously planned, and budgeted for.

Now, because we don’t need to carry as much hard cash, there is so much more money in the banking system. While that gives depositors the nominal daily interest rate (at some obscenely low rate), there is much more money available with the banks to lend out, which increases the total amount of economic activity by nearly the same amount.

Just think about it. It’s fantastic, the effect of modern finance. And I don’t disagree with Paul Volcker when he says that the most important contribution of modern finance has been the ATM.

PS: My apologies for the break in blogging. I was in and around Ladakh for a week (yes, I was there when the cloudburst happened) and there were some problems with my laptop when I returned because of which I wasn’t able to blog. Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to my one-post-a-day commitment. And I have lots of stories to tell (from my Leh trip) so hope to keep you people busy.