Recently Yahoo News on-line reported the following:
India Making Mistake Believing ‘Hype’ About Growth, Rajan
Says
Anup Roy and Dan Strumpf
Tue, March 26, 2024 at 12:39 a.m. PDT
(Bloomberg) -- India is making a big mistake believing the
“hype” around its strong economic growth since there are significant structural
problems that need to be fixed for the country to meet its potential, former
central bank Governor Raghuram Rajan said.
The biggest challenge a new government must grapple with
after elections is improving the education and skills of the workforce, Rajan
said in an interview. Without fixing that, India will struggle to reap the
benefits of its young population, he said, in a country where more than half of
the 1.4 billion population are below the age of 30.
“The greatest mistake India can make
is to believe the hype,” he said. “We’ve got many more years of hard work to do
to ensure the hype is real. Believing the hype is something politicians want
you to believe because they want you to believe that we have arrived.” But it
would be a “serious mistake for India to succumb to that” belief, he added.
Dismissing Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s ambition to make India a developed economy by 2047,
Rajan said it was “nonsense” to talk of that goal “if so many of your kids
don’t have a high school education” and drop-out rates are high.
“We have a growing workforce, but it is a dividend only if
they’re employed in good jobs,” he said. “And that’s, to my mind, the possible
tragedy that we face.” India needs to firstly make the workforce more
employable, and, secondly, create jobs for the workforce it has, he said.
Rajan cited studies showing a drop in the learning ability
of Indian school children to pre-2012 levels after the pandemic, and that only
20.5% of grade three students could read a grade two text. Literacy rates in
India also remain below other Asian peers like Vietnam.
“That is the kind of number that should really worry us,” he
said. “The lack of human capital will stay with us for decades.”
India needs to do a lot more work to get to 8% growth on a
sustainable basis, Rajan said, dampening some of the recent optimism about the
economy’s prospects.
Foreign investors have been flocking to India to take
advantage of the rapid expansion, which the government predicts will reach more
than 7% in the coming fiscal year, making it the fastest-growing major economy
in the world.
Rajan said policy choices made by the Modi government to
spend more on subsidies for chip manufacturing than the annual budget for
higher education were misguided. The subsidies to semi-conductor businesses to
set up operations in India was an estimated 760 billion rupees ($9.1 billion),
compared with 476 billion rupees allocated for higher education.
Chip Manufacturing
The government was too focused on high-profile projects like
chip manufacturing instead of doing the work to fix the education system so it
can produce well-trained engineers needed for those industries, he said.
“The ambition of the government is real, to become a great
nation,” he said. “Whether they pay attention to what needs to be done is a
different question. I worry that we’ve become more fixated on prestige
projects, which suggest more great nation ambition, such as chip manufacturing,
while leaving the underpinnings that will contribute to a sustainable chip
manufacturing industry.”
A professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth
School of Business, Rajan is a well-known commentator on the global economy and
an outspoken critic of India’s policies. He left the Reserve Bank of India for
academia in 2016 after his term as governor wasn’t extended, having come under
attack from hardline politicians for his views.
He recently co-authored a book titled Breaking the Mould:
Reimagining India’s Economic Future and has been releasing a series of videos
on his LinkedIn profile to provide perspective to India’s growth outlook.
Beyond improving education, Rajan highlighted a number of
policy priorities for the new administration, including reducing inequality and
increasing labor intensive production. He also said India’s governing system
was too centralized, and devolving control to states will help improve
development.
“What we need is a pragmatic approach,” Rajan said. Quoting
China’s former leader Deng Xiaoping, who spearheaded that country’s economic
reforms, Rajan said if India learns anything from China, it should be that “it
doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, it matters whether it catches
mice,” he said.
Translation
（彭博）—前央行行長拉古拉姆·拉詹 (Raghuram Rajan) 表示，印度正在犯下一個大錯誤，它相信圍繞其強勁經濟增長的 “炒作” ，因為該國需要解決重大結構性問題才能發揮其潛力。
拉詹 (Rajan)在接受採訪時表示，選舉後新政府必須應對的最大挑戰是提高勞動力的教育和技能。 他表示，如果不解決這個問題，印度將很難從年輕人口中獲益，因為印度
14 億人口中有一半以上的年齡在
30 歲以下。
他說: 「印度可能犯的最大錯誤就是相信炒作」;
「為了確保炒作的內容成真，我們還有很多年的努力要做。 政治家希望你相信炒作，因為他們希望你相信大家已經成長」。 但他補充說，「如果印度順從這種信念將是一個嚴重的錯誤」。
拉詹不認同總理莫迪希望到2047 年令印度成為發達經濟體的雄心壯志，他表示， “如果這麼多孩子沒有接受過高中教育” ，而且輟學率很高，那麼談論這一目標是「無稽之談」 。
他說: 「我們的勞動力不斷增長，但只有當他們從事好工作時，這才是紅利」。 「在我看來，這就是我們可能面臨的悲劇」。 他又說，印度首先需要提高勞動力的就業能力，次要為這勞動力創造出就業機會。
拉詹引用的研究顯示，疫情過後，印度學童的學習能力下降至 2012 年之前的水平，並且只有
20.5% 的三年級學生能夠閱讀二年級的課文。 印度的識字率也仍低於越南等其他亞洲國家。
他說: 「這個數字應該真正讓我們擔心」;
「人力資本的缺乏將伴隨我們數十年」。
拉詹表示，印度需要做更多的工作才能實現可持續的 8% 成長，這說話削弱了近期對經濟前景的樂觀情緒。
外國投資者紛紛湧入印度，以利用印度經濟的快速擴張，印度政府預計下一財年印度經濟成長率將達到7%以上，使其成為世界上成長最快的主要經濟體。
拉詹表示，莫迪政府做出的政策選擇是錯誤的，即晶片製造補貼的支出超過了高等教育的年度預算。 印度為半導體企業開展業務提供的補貼估計為 7,600 億盧比（91 億美元），而分配給高等教育的補貼為
4,760 億盧比。
晶片製造
他說，政府過於關注晶片製造等受矚目的項目，而不是致力於修復教育系統，以便培養這些行業所需有足夠訓練的工程師。
他說: 「政府的雄心壯志是真誠的，去成為一個偉大的國家」。 「他們是否關注需要做的事情乃是另一個問題。 我擔心我們變得更加注重面子項目，這些項目隱射了更多一個大國的雄心，例如芯片製造，但這同時偏離了可為持續芯片製造行業做出貢獻的基礎」。
拉詹是芝加哥大學 Booth商學院的金融學教授，是著名的全球經濟評論員，也是印度政策的率直批評者。他因其觀點而受到強硬政客的攻擊,
2016年當他在印度儲備銀行行長的任期沒有延長後，他離開並進入學術界。
他最近與人合著了一本題為《打破陳規：重新構想印度經濟未來》的書，並在他的 LinkedIn 個人資料上發布了一系列短片，為印度的成長前景提供看法。
除了改善教育之外，拉詹還強調了新政府的一些政策優先事項，包括減少不平等和增加勞力密集生產。 他也表示，印度的治理體系過於集權，將控制權下放給各邦將有助於改善發展。
拉詹說: 「我們需要的是務實的方法」。 拉詹引用了曾帶頭中國經濟改革的前領導人鄧小平的話說，如果印度向中國學習什麼東西，那就應該是「不管黑貓白貓，重要的是它抓到老鼠」。
So, while foreign investors are
flocking to India to take advantage of the rapid expansion predicted to reach
more than 7%, former India’s central bank Governor says that India is making a
big mistake in believing the “hype” around its strong economic growth since
there are significant structural problems in India. In mine mind, usually
education and health care are the two most important areas in which a
government needs to focus upon and spend a large amount of money. It is
shocking to know that, as Rajan points out, literacy rate in India is below
other Asian peers like Vietnam. Perhaps India’s leaders are holding the view that they should focus on earn money now, and to use the earning to solve social problems
afterwards.
