OUR THOUGHTS:- For long and particularly since 1991 reforms, FDIs were held as “gold” in the new emerging economics. However, FDIs do come with their fair share of opportunities and issues.
Our leaders have chased FDIs through various means but the era of FDIs as the beacon of sunshine on emerging market is loosing sheen. The economy needs fundamental restructuring and needs a strong domestic base.
The ebbs and flows of global economy must not render Indians unemployed. For that, we need rethinking, restructuring and a different paradigm altogether.
Read the article below to understand how exit of FDIs and specifically exit of big-firms from India affecting jobs and which requires us to question whether we should see development through the prism of FDI or do wee need an alternative that is more resilient.
The most recent labour statistics, for August 2021, released by the Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) shows that the unemployment rate has increased from around 7% in July to 8.3% for August 2021.
In absolute terms, employment shrunk from 399.7 million in July to 397.8 million, that is, 1.9 million jobs were lost in one month.
Sectoral analysis shows that most of the jobs lost were farm jobs; while non-farm jobs did increase to absorb some of these, the quality of new jobs generated is a matter of concern.
While employment in agriculture fell by 8.7 million, nonfarm jobs increased by 6.8 million, mainly in business and small trade, but the manufacturing sector shed 0.94 million jobs.
Thus, much of the labour shed by agriculture has been absorbed in low-end service activities.
Employment sustainability
During normal times, seasonal labour released from agriculture gets accommodated in the construction sector, even though the ideal situation would be their movement to the factory sector.
But, currently, the construction sector itself is shedding jobs, forcing workers to find employment in the household sector and lowend services.
This nonavailability of sufficient jobs in manufacturing and higher end services could be the dampener for economic recovery in the subsequent quarters of the current fiscal year.
Elementary economic theory suggests that raising the level of investments is the key to output and employment growth. While public investments are important, especially in the current context of sluggish aggregate demand, there is a dire need to complement public investments with even more private investments.
The economy has been waiting for private investments to flow in for quite some time, but their levels have been very low, accentuating the unemployment situation.
Resorting to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to augment domestic capital formation is an approach that India has been pursuing by making ‘ease of doing business’ more enticing.
While inward FDI does generate jobs both directly and indirectly through an increase in production activities (which increases demand for labour), the magnitude of employment generated especially in the manufacturing sector, needs closer scrutiny.
Further, the sustainability of increased employment is often threatened as it depends on the business avenues which other competing economies open up leading to corporate restructuring at the global level and firm exits from erstwhile locations.
An exit and disruptions
Tepid employment growth in the manufacturing sector is not a recent phenomenon in India.
However, some subsectors within the manufacturing sector have generated both direct and indirect employment by attracting FDI and entering into global networks of production. A prominent segment, often projected as a driver of the manufacturing sector’s output and employment growth, is the auto sector.
Estimates show that the automobile sector employs 19.1 million workers, directly and indirectly.
Currently, more than 70% of the auto component companies are small and medium enterprises. It was expected that by 2022, the employment in this sector would reach 38 million with a higher generation of indirect employment.
However, three factors have created roadblocks to the expansion of the sector.
First, due to the novel coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown, aggregate demand in the economy is low, which is being reflected in vehicle sales.
Second, the shortage of semiconductors continues to impact production even when customer sentiments are slowly turning positive.
Third, the recent exit of Ford from the Indian market would release a large number of employees, who would be in search of jobs that are hard to find.
The exit of Ford raises some important issues regarding the unbridled attraction of FDI.
While FDI might help in creating a manufacturing ecosystem in certain locations, the uncertainties of global corporate restructuring and changes in the economic environment in the lead firm’s home economy are factors to reckon with.
More frequent global production rearrangements are becoming a part of the strategy of big firms in this phase of globalisation, as markets tend to be more volatile due to repeated demand fluctuations.
Other examples, We have had the experience of Nokia, which at its peak, in its Sriperumbudur factory (Tamil Nadu) was one of the world’s largest mobile phone plant, with 8,000 permanent employees working three shifts, producing more than 15 million phones a month and exporting products to over 80 countries.
But in 2014, Nokia halted its production operations from this location, disrupting the livelihoods of thousands of workers.
Recently, Citibank announced that it would shut India retail banking business as part of a global decision to exit 13 markets. The U.S.based bank wants to focus on a ‘few wealthy regions’ around the world.
Citibank’s exit from the retail segment is after more than three decades; the bank has 35 branches employing approximately 4,000 people in the consumer banking business.
Closely following this, after 25 years of operations is auto manufacturer Ford deciding to exit India. This will affect about 4,000 direct employees as it stops making cars at its factories in Sanand, Gujarat, and Chennai, Tamil Nadu.
Estimates show that another 35,000 indirect employees would also be lost at various levels, creating a massive disruption in the local economy.
Impact on job generation
The exits of high-profile global firms affect employment generation in two ways.
First, it creates apprehensions among potential investors about choosing that location for greenfield investments or for scaling up existing facilities. Such circumstances generally lead to a ‘wait and watch’ approach, affecting private investments even if an economy claims to have the tag of investor friendliness. A downturn in private investments leads to slower employment growth.
Second, the process of the ‘destruction’ of jobs through exits creates mismatches in the labour market. That is, there is a sudden release of high skilled workers which could block possible new entrants who have already invested in their skills; this leads to a levelling down of wages which occurs when highend services firms exit. When large assembly firms exit there would be a big influx of lowskilled workers to other sectors as the same sector might not be able to absorb the workforce released.
This churn in the labour market aggravates an existing unemployment problem. A waning of permanency.
The euphoria on the inflow of FDI and associated benefits needs to be tempered with the reality of the emergence of modern transnational corporations (TNC) with ‘agility, rapidity and mobility’.
When these TNCs emerge as key players in an industry, a proliferation of mergers and consolidations across national and international borders might be frequent. These are efforts to open up new opportunities in new markets. Such waves of expansions and contractions are aimed at acquiring new markets and new trade opportunities.
This process of an internationalisation of production is driven by the big firms by investing in and out of developing economies.
Growing scepticism towards more open trade policies and the rise of protectionism have increased the risk and unpredictability of policy environments, leading to deeper reflection on both existing and new investments by global firms.
Thus, the ‘next to near’ permanency of large foreign firms operating for decades is slowly waning. It is here that domestic capital formation and private investments should step in. We are still waiting for it to happen.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.