Nos. 44-46, April 2008

Nos. 44 - 46
(April 2008):

Introduction

I. Economics as Mechanics

II. How Capitalism Emerged in Europe

III. Colonial Rule: Setting the Pattern

IV. India's Runaway 'Growth'

 1. Missing Links

 2. The External Stimulus and Its Implications

 3. Private Corporate Sector-Led Growth and Exclusion

 4. The Condition of the People

 5. The Agrarian Impasse and Its Implications

V. Unlocking the Productive Potential of the Entire Labour Force

India’s Runaway ‘Growth’: Distortion, Disarticulation, and Exclusion
IV. (2) The External Stimulus and Its Implications

Essentially, the current phase of dramatic GDP growth has not been fueled by internal forces, but by the external environment. (All the regions of developing countries, including sub-Saharan Africa, saw an upturn in growth starting around 2003. Thus India’s surge, while sharper than most other developing countries’, is part of a broader phenomenon.) This expansion is not fundamentally transforming the Indian economy and society; rather, it has greatly accentuated its distortions. Moreover, given that the world economy is in a volatile state, and on the brink of a major crisis, the external stimulus to India’s growth may turn into a destabilising factor.  

Let us look at how this environment has been created. Over the years, the activities and behaviour of international monopoly capital have changed in significant ways. One thing is not new: Capital, as always, is driven by the need to accumulate more capital. Much as sharks must keep moving or sink, capitalists must keep accumulating or go under. However, since the rise of monopoly capital, the world’s chieftains of capital have been faced with a strange problem. They enjoy vast surpluses; but, as a long-term trend, they find less avenues to invest these surpluses profitably. If they put up more productive capacity, they would need to reduce prices in order for all that production to be absorbed; that would mean lower profit margins – which goes against the nature of monopoly capital. On the other hand, if they do not invest these surpluses, they cannot accumulate further. This peculiar disease of plenty gives rise to a long-term tendency toward stagnation.

Within this long-term tendency there are bouts of hectic investment, such as the boom of dotcom-telecom investment of the late 1990s, but when these bouts of excess halt they leave business even more wary of investment. Rather than quote left-wing economists, we will rely in the following account largely on the Economist, perhaps the leading voice of international capital. It reported in 2005: “For the past three years, while profits have surged around the globe, capital spending has remained relatively weak. As a result, companies in aggregate have become net savers on a huge scale. Their thrift may explain why bond yields are so low [i.e., interest rates are low because firms are flush with funds]. Since 2000, the corporate sector in the developed countries have switched, as a group, from being big borrowers to being net savers: i.e., their profits exceed their capital spending. The total increase in companies’ net saving in the past four years has been more than $1 trillion, three per cent of annual global GDP and five times the increase in net saving by emerging economies over the same time period.... If company bosses recognise that the current consumer boom is built on shaky foundations – in particular, rising house prices – they are likely to be reluctant to invest.”¹ In the U.S., business expenditure stopped falling in 2004 and began rising again, but it remained weak compared to earlier recoveries. This reluctance to invest has inevitable consequences: “America’s long-term potential rate of growth is falling, to perhaps its lowest pace in over a century”.²

And yet corporations must invest their savings somewhere. As a result international capital is on a constant hunt for new investment opportunities. In the course of this hunt international capital has been driven to rely increasingly on the growth of the financial-speculative activities, which have far outstripped the growth of the commodity-producing sector.³ The world’s financial markets of all types (stocks, debt, foreign exchange, commodities, and complex financial instruments called ‘derivatives’) have witnessed an extraordinary explosion of gambling. To take just one example, the actual ‘use’ of foreign currency is the import of goods or services; in the entire year 2006, world trade in goods and services was $14.5 trillion. But the buying and selling of foreign currency by international speculators in the same year averaged $2.7 trillion a day. In other words, trading in foreign currency was 68 times what would be required for international trade in goods and services. Similar explosions have taken place in all other financial sector activity, with new instruments being added at a hectic pace.

In order for this financial activity to keep growing, it needs to create ever-increasing scope for itself. One way of doing so is by opening up economies hitherto closed or restricted for foreign speculative capital, and by removing restrictions on entering various sectors within those economies. The financial sector worldwide sits like a giant parasitic creature atop the commodity-producing sector, demanding complete freedom to enter all arenas and bleed that sector.

Staving off worldwide slowdown
At the heart of this creature is the U.S. economy. In recent years the world economy has been staving off an underlying slowdown by relying more and more on U.S. consumer demand. U.S. consumers have so far managed to keep buying because of an easy supply of cheap bank credit. This in turn is made possible by the policies of the U.S. central bank (the Federal Reserve, the equivalent of India’s Reserve Bank), which has kept expanding credit by lowering interest rates and relaxing restrictions every time the economy seemed to be slowing. The Federal Reserve has winked at all sorts of risky practices by the financial sector in order to keep credit flowing. However, the purchasing power generated by this cheap and easy credit is not spent on U.S. goods alone. Rather, U.S. consumers keep buying, importing from the rest of the world vastly more than the U.S. exports to the rest of the world. The huge U.S. trade deficit thus ensures a market for the rest of the world.

How does the U.S. finance its giant trade deficit? In any other country, such a huge and ballooning deficit would have led to an immediate crisis. But the U.S. has so far been able to finance its deficit with capital inflows from the rest of the world, including from underdeveloped countries, and thus postpone the crisis. Why do these countries invest their capital in the U.S.? Because if they did not do so the dollar would fall against their currencies, their goods would become more expensive in dollar terms (i.e. to U.S. consumers), and their exports would fall, harming their own ‘growth’. Also because, as their own economies have been opened up to huge inflows of volatile foreign capital, they need to build up foreign exchange reserves to provide for the occasion when there may be a sudden outflow (as happened in Southeast Asia in 1997). Since the dollar is still the main currency used for international payments, countries keep a large proportion of foreign exchange reserves in dollars, in the form of U.S. government debt (known as U.S. Treasury securities).

Such is the bewildering merry-go-round of flows to which the world economy is bound. A portion of the giant sea of cash generated by the U.S. in the course of this operation comes back to the rest of the world in the form of speculative capital seeking attractive investment opportunities. This in turn sends third world share markets soaring. While third world rulers are happy with high share prices, this inflow of foreign cash in turn tends to either bloat the money supply in those economies, leading to inflation and instability, or push up the value of their currencies, threatening their exports. To ward off the latter, the central banks of these countries buy up the incoming dollars and invest them – largely in U.S. government debt, funding another round of U.S. consumption. The current perverse trend of net financial transfers from the developing economies to the developed countries, which began in 1997 at $1.3 billion, reached $760 billion in 2007.⁴ We turn once again to the Economist for a description:

Worldwide, an abundance of liquidity has lured investors into riskier assets in search of higher returns. Though there is no agreement on how to measure liquidity, using the global supply of dollars as a proxy, the Economist estimates that in the past four years it has risen by an annual average of 18 per cent, probably the fastest pace ever. Last year it washed through emerging economies in record amounts, pushing up their currencies. Between the start of 2006 and mid-December the Thai baht rose by 16 per cent against the dollar...

The deluge of spare cash has two main sources. First, average real interest rates in the developed world are still below their long-term average. Second, America’s huge current-account deficit and the consequent build-up of foreign exchange reserves by countries with external surpluses has also pumped vast quantities of dollars into the financial system. A large chunk of Asia’s reserves and oil exporters’ petrodollars have been used to buy American Treasury securities, thereby reducing bond yields [i.e., interest rates]. In turn, low bond-market returns have encouraged bigger inflows into higher yielding emerging-market bonds, equities, and properties, especially in Asia. Liquidity has been further boosted by the use of derivatives, and by carry trades (borrowing in currencies with low interest rates, such as yen, to buy higher-yielding currencies).... share prices in emerging economies have risen by 243 per cent on average from their trough in 2003.⁵

The Economist correctly locates the main reason for the tendency of the international financial sector to make riskier investment decisions, namely, the abundance of liquidity and the drive therefore to seek higher returns. It is this drive that explains the current ‘sub-prime crisis’, whereby, directly or indirectly, most of the international financial sector has invested in high-interest loans made by banks in the U.S. and U.K. to poor people (i.e., people who are ‘bad risks’) to buy houses.

Flood of inflows beyond the control of Indian authorities
As part of this pattern, India has seen a flood of capital inflows through various channels and under various labels – foreign institutional investment (FII) in the share market, foreign direct investment (FDI) (especially in the form of ‘private equity’, which behaves much like FII capital), and external commercial borrowings by Indian firms. There are also unexplained inflows in the balance of payments data (e.g. under the head ‘Other capital’) which indicate that individuals have been bringing in funds for speculation.

As dollars become more plentiful than before, the value of the rupee tends to rise. This can have several harmful effects. First, foreign goods become cheaper in rupee terms, and so domestic producers find it harder to compete with imports. Secondly, Indian exports become more expensive in dollar terms, and find it harder to compete on world markets. Both these trends depress domestic economic activity. Thirdly, if the rupee is set on a rising course, it becomes even more attractive for foreign speculators to bring dollars into India; because even if they were to make no profit on their investments in India they would be able to take out more dollars than they brought in. (For example, let us say a foreign speculator brought in $1,000 at the end of December 2006. He would have exchanged it for Rs 44,110. Even if he did not earn a paisa of interest on this sum for a year, he could have bought $1,119 with it at the end of December 2007.) This brings in yet more speculative capital, and worsens the problem.

In order to prevent this from happening, the country’s central bank, the RBI, buys up foreign exchange as it flows into the country, and this purchase becomes part of the country’s foreign exchange reserves, which are invested abroad in various types of interest-earning bonds such as U.S. government debt. The scale of this phenomenon can be seen in the size of the RBI’s foreign exchange assets at end-March of each year: 2003, $71.9 billion; 2004, $107.4 billion; 2005, $135.6 billion; 2006, $145.1 billion; 2007, $191.9 billion – an addition of $120 billion in four years. Between end-March 2007 and end-December 2007, the rate of inflow broke all records, as another $66 billion poured into the reserves in just 9 months.

Purely parasitic
Only a trivial fraction of these inflows went into investment in the Indian economy: In fact, the average for 2002-07 is zero.⁶ In the words of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (January 2008), “rising levels of investment have been financed from domestic sources – through a combination of higher retained corporate earnings and improved fiscal balances of government. There has been little absorption of net foreign savings... Thus, the capital inflows which were in excess of the current account deficit have in an accounting sense become part of the foreign exchange reserves of the central bank and [been] ‘re-exported’ overseas.” Nevertheless the Indian economy is compelled to accept these foreign inflows and drain out returns on them simply by virtue of having opened itself to capital inflows; their relation to the Indian economy is purely parasitic.
``
While these inflows do not fund investment, they do fuel elite consumption. When the RBI buys up dollars, it pays out rupees to the seller of the dollars; this money winds up in bank deposits. On the basis of these deposits, banks make loans; in particular, they have recycled the surging foreign inflows as loans to individuals for housing, automobiles, and consumer durables. Thus the foreign inflows have to a large extent financed the boom in spending by the middle and upper classes.

The flood of foreign capital increases the instability of the entire economy by fueling speculative booms in the share market, commodities market, real estate, and so on. The easy liquidity in the economy as a whole, and high returns in speculative sectors, lead domestic investors to join in the casino. The Bombay Stock Exchange Sensex (index of the top 30 stocks) rose from 5591 at March-end 2004 to 12455 on April 2, 200; as if this were not steep enough, it rose at its fastest pace thereafter to close above 20,000 for the first time on December 11, 2007. The Reliance Power issue of shares in January 2008 was the largest-ever initial public offering (IPO) in India. Yet it was fully subscribed within one minute of its opening, and was subscribed 72 times by the time of its closing; the portion reserved for ‘high net worth investors’ was subscribed 208 times. The issue received Rs 7.52 trillion of bids – astounding, considering that Reliance Power is a completely new company with no assets, and without record of having executed a single project. Turnover in the commodity futures markets rose by 1570 per cent between 2003-04 and 2005-06, rising from 4.7 per cent of GDP to 76.8 per cent; it soared further in 2006-07.

As the speculative boom proceeds, foreign investors may decide at some point that assets are now overpriced (for example, prices may be out of alignment with those of their similar investments elsewhere in the world). They would pull out till prices collapse to an attractive level. India’s share market has seen several steep falls in the last month. The Economist warned in July 2007 that India’s real estate was set for a fall:

The only country where a bubble leaps out from these charts [of rise in real estate prices] is India, where average prices have risen by 16 per cent a year over the past four years, well ahead of average income. It is the only country where house prices have surged by more than in America. In Bangalore and Mumbai prices doubled during 2005 and 2006. According to Global Property guide, a research firm, equivalent apartments in South Mumbai now cost three times more than in Shanghai, and not much less than in Tokyo – even though Indian incomes are much lower.⁸

In November 2007 the Economist ranked India as one of the riskiest ‘emerging economies’ in the world, saying “Those with current account deficits [like India] are vulnerable to a sudden outflow of capital if global investors become more risk averse.”⁹ In the calendar year 2007 the Indian rupee was among the three ‘emerging market currencies’ that appreciated the most, after the Brazilian real and the Thai baht. But India is very unusual in that the rupee has appreciated despite its current account being in deficit,¹⁰ i.e., despite it having to cover its current foreign exchange requirements with capital inflows. So the entire appreciation in the rupee was not the result of surpluses on trade in goods and services; rather, it was despite deficits and because of capital inflows.

Shifts in the global economy and their impact here
A second trend in the global economy has also had a major impact on the Indian economy: the successful drive, since the 1980s, by transnational corporations to increase the share of profit in their income (and to correspondingly reduce labour’s share). The rise of profit’s share, which began in the 1980s, has now reached historically very high levels;¹¹ the Economist candidly admits that “in the rich world labour’s share of GDP has fallen to historic lows, while profits are soaring”.¹² In the course of their quest to drive down the share of labour, armed with new technological developments, transnational corporations have sought out pools of skilled, white-collar labour in countries such as India as replacements for the more expensive white-collar labour of the imperialist countries. This has spawned a section of employees in India with incomes that are relatively high for India. This section is culturally under the same influences as the urban ruling class sections, and has a similar pattern of expenditure. While this section is sizeable in relation to the erstwhile ‘middle class’, and the demand generated by it is sizeable in relation to the existing constricted market, it is tiny in relation to total employment; and even long-term projections of its growth show it to be of no relevance for reducing overall unemployment.  

Again as part of this drive to increase the share of profit worldwide, and making use of technological developments in production, transport and communications, transnational firms have increased their imports of goods from sites in low-wage countries. (Even so, the maximum ‘value-addition’, such as the retailing margin, accrues to firms in their own countries.) This shift has allowed goods made in India, whether by Indian or foreign firms, to enter world markets in certain sectors hitherto closed to them, such as the automobile parts sector. Moreover, several large Indian firms have improved their production standards and are emerging as competitive exporters.

It is important to note here that foreign trade has not boosted demand in the Indian economy: Net exports (exports minus imports) is a negative figure. In other words, the market India loses because of imports is larger than what it gains by way of exports. The Economic Survey 2007-08 notes: “The contribution of net exports of goods and services to overall demand also declined between the two plans to a negative 5 per cent. Thus the external trade has had a dampening effect on aggregate demand during the just completed Plan (2002-07).” The contribution remains negative in 2007-08.

It is worth pausing and noting a significant point here. Two of the most important claims made regarding the benefits of ‘globalisation’ are that foreign capital boosts investment and foreign trade opens expands markets and thus boosts demand. We have seen that in fact (i) foreign capital has not gone into investment, and (ii) under ‘globalisation’ India’s foreign trade has actually wound up depleting its markets and depressing demand.

However, it is not as if the inflows of foreign capital have had no effect at all. They have helped foreign capital capture more and more of the Indian economy, as we shall see below.

Indian multinationals: the global context
The rise of Indian firms capable of making sophisticated goods such as automobiles and pharmaceuticals for world markets is a new phenomenon, apparently marking a shift in the clout of the Indian capitalist class in the world economy. This impression is further strengthened by the fact that virtually all the top Indian firms have been busy buying firms abroad during this period. In 2006 Indian firms announced foreign takeovers worth $23 billion; by March 2007 they announced another $10.7 billion. It was estimated then that 60 per cent of India’s top 200 firms were planning to make foreign acquisitions. “This shows the new-found respect that India commands in the global arena”, claims Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the Aditya Birla group.¹⁴

However, this is misleading. For this development has been accompanied by another development, namely, the increasing shift of the developed economies to the financial sector. Around a third of the profits growth in the U.S. economy in the last decade has come from the financial sector, which along with the fall in labour’s share, does much to explain the high profit rates in the economy as a whole. The leading financial firm Goldman Sachs remarks that “margins in many non-financial industries remain at historically unremarkable levels.”¹⁵ The increasing financialisation of the world economy implies a shift in the centre of gravity away from the production of goods or non-financial services, a shift to financial sector activities. Where non-financial transnational corporations once played the dominant role in shaping the world economy, a greater role is played today by the financial and speculative firms; although giant firms often combine both functions, where the interests of the two conflict the financial sector prevails. (This is not to write a premature obituary of the non-financial transnational corporation, but merely to take note of a partial change.)

Increasingly it matters little to international financial capital whether a car is produced by a European firm or a Korean or an Indian one, as long as financial capital is able to invest in whichever would be more profitable and to reap the profits of such investment. Indeed if a European firm is likely to do better after being taken over by the Indian firm, international financial capital would support and finance the takeover (this may not hold for firms in strategic sectors such as oil, infrastructure, arms, etc).

Thus, even as new multinational corporations have emerged from the ‘emerging’ countries, encroaching on the markets of multinationals of the imperialist countries, financial capital of the imperialist countries has invaded the new emerging multinationals.

The strange phenomenon of Indian firms’ investment abroad should be seen against this larger background of the financialisation of capital worldwide. Rather than marking a basic change from the earlier subordination of the Indian economy by imperialist capital, it remains within the frame of a new, more complex, form of the same.

As Indian firms are allowed to stage takeovers (even hostile ones) of  foreign firms, it will be politically impossible for the Indian State to block foreign takeovers of major Indian firms. The rapidly rising FII stakes in Indian firms may facilitate such takeovers. (Indeed, in certain cases large over-capacity is developing worldwide. In such a situation,  ‘consolidation’ usually starts – i.e., giant firms start taking over other firms. Indian firms expect to become targets of large foreign firms on the prowl for takeovers. One strategy for Indian firms to avoid this fate is to become large and/or debt-laden, using the greater access to international capital markets. Thus, with the help of giant foreign borrowings, Tata Steel has taken over an Anglo-Dutch firm much larger, and possessing more sophisticated technology, than it. Whether or not the acquisition turns out to be profitable, the large debt will have to be serviced; and this fact may make Tata Steel, and the precious natural resources it controls, vulnerable to foreign takeover in the future.)

Political power of international financial capital
The political power of international financial capital in India has tremendously increased. At first it demanded the ‘independence’ of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) from domestic political authorities; but this was merely in order to free monetary policy from domestic political pressures so it could be fully subjugated to international financial capital. Insofar as the RBI showed any resistance to destabilising financial inflows, it was made to buckle. The power of the FIIs was strikingly demonstrated in a well-known episode. On the evening of January 12, 2005, Y.V. Reddy, the Governor of the RBI, while releasing a publication, remarked on the fact that much of the FII capital inflows could be from dubious sources: “There is a scope for enhancing quality of FII flows through a review of policies related to eligibility of registration of FIIs... price-based measures such as taxes could be examined though their effectiveness is arguable.” These extremely mild and tentative remarks, which if anything expressed the helplessness of the RBI in the face of foreign inflows, sparked fury from the FIIs. They contacted the Finance Minister, who promptly called the press to rule out any move to tax FII inflows; “I have spoken to the RBI governor now, and he means the exact opposite of what has been understood.” He said these ideas are thrown up from time to time, but they have been rejected. “I reject them now again”. Reddy himself was compelled to call a hurried press conference later the same evening to clarify that a tax on FII inflows was not under consideration, and the version of his speech on the RBI website added the phrase that measures such as taxes “may not be desirable”. This episode reveals the political weight of foreign financial capital in India today.

Whatever its qualms, the RBI has had to implement increasing capital account convertibility – in which the freeing of investment by Indian firms abroad is a very important step. The further the economy moves toward full capital account convertibility, the greater will be its vulnerability to speculative inflows and outflows.

In anticipation of this, the greater will be the rulers’ need to subordinate domestic economic activity to financial interests: Witness the inability of the RBI to check inflows even of the most suspect variety, despite the consequent rupee appreciation throwing millions of Indian workers out of work (the minister of state for commerce has put export sector job losses at two million), and despite the State having to incur huge subsidies on ‘sterilising’ foreign inflows (i.e., absorbing them to prevent them from increasing the domestic money supply). The Indian State has in fact given primacy to maintaining a favourable environment for FIIs. On the one hand, given the limited supply of free-float shares (i.e., shares held by those other than the promoters), large foreign inflows have made share prices soar; and so FIIs have put pressure on the Indian rulers to make available for purchase a steady flow of fresh shares through disinvestment. At the same time, the Indian rulers have also been finding ways to channel more domestic finance to the share market in order to allow foreign speculative capital a cushion to sell without making a loss. All such measures are being termed giving the market ‘depth’.

High cost of outflows
Finally, even with the limited capital account convertibility India already has implemented, there could be very large capital outflows. While, as we have seen, the large capital inflows that occurred earlier did not benefit India’s economy, large capital outflows would have devastating effects. This is a familiar pattern by now in the world economy. The classic instance is the 1980s debt crisis, which developed from a great global financial rotation that has certain similarities with the current one.

After the 1973 rise in oil prices, the oil-producing countries of the third world, lacking broad-based economies and financial infrastructure of their own, deposited their new influx of dollars in the banks of Europe and the U.S.. These banks, now flush with funds, needed to find large borrowers. With the help of the third world ruling elites, they managed to get various third world countries, particularly in Latin America, to borrow large sums, at initial low rates of interest (with provisions for later hikes). They created the impression that these countries could go on borrowing forever, paying off loans with fresh loans. The foreign loans did not really serve development in these countries. But they financed large projects which created business for multinational corporations, and the elites of these countries skimmed off a good portion of these loans, depositing them back (illegally) in the same western banks. By 1982, the underdeveloped countries had piled up a mammoth debt of $827 billion.

At this point, the U.S., facing high inflation due to a fresh round of oil price hikes, hiked interest rates steeply. The hiked interest rates on U.S. government bonds attracted some capital away from third world countries. Now debtors such as Mexico found themselves unable to meet their foreign debt payments; whereupon all foreign banks stopped extending fresh loans to Latin American and African debtors. Thus began the great third world debt crisis of the 1980s. The International Monetary Fund agreed to provide foreign exchange loans to the debtors (in the bargain, of course, saving the developed-world banks that had lent to these countries), on the condition that they accept what it called ‘structural adjustment’ packages – slashed Government expenditure, massive privatisation, opening of the economy even further to imports, dismantling of efforts to get better terms for agricultural and mineral exports, opening of various sectors to foreign investment and takeover, and so on. These amounted to a great bonanza for the imperialist countries’ corporations. Latin America’s per capita GDP sank in the 1980s, and poverty grew steeply in what became known as its ‘lost decade’.

Mexico studiously implemented this programme. The Economist noted in March 1995: “Only a few months ago, Mexico was one of the third world’s stars”: zero fiscal deficit, removal of import barriers, massive privatisation and foreign investment, capital account convertibility to assure foreign capital complete ease of entry and exit. All this was accomplished in the face of mass distress; popular resentment found militant expression in the uprising in Chiapas in January 1994. To a chorus of praise from the IMF, World Bank, and so on, the Mexican government also piled up high-interest short-term debt subscribed to by U.S. investors. Mexico’s exemplary adherence to IMF policies did not save it, however, when the U.S. hiked interest rates from 3 per cent to 6 per cent over the course of 1994. Capital took the next plane out of Mexico in December 1994, sending the value of the Mexican currency plunging, and prices soaring. Mexico was thus thrust into crisis again, and into yet another ‘austerity’ programme – with further gains for foreign capital.    

The 1997 crisis in East and Southeast Asia offers fresh evidence of the devastation caused by such capital outflows, the ground for which was laid in these countries’ opening up to capital inflows in the earlier period. The countries affected by the 1997 crisis had to suffer soaring inflation as their currency values plummeted. The IMF provided foreign currency loans on severe conditions, which resulted in the stalling of domestic economic activity, takeovers of domestic firms by foreign investors at bargain prices, and an increase in poverty. Thus the harm done by large, sudden capital outflows is not limited to the losses to speculators on the stock exchange; rather it brutally affects the vast masses. As Brecht observed,

Those who had no share in the fortunes of the mighty
Often have a share in their misfortunes.

Impending slump in the world economy and India
There is now a further threat: the impending slump in the world economy, at the heart of which is the ailing U.S. economy itself. A significant aspect of the current U.S. recession is that it coincides with a striking downturn in the career of the U.S. as the principal imperialist power. This latter fact reduces the scope for the U.S. to fund its recovery with inflows of capital from the rest of the world. In the absence of a firm U.S. recovery, and amid the uncertainty accompanying any such major transition in the correlation of leading imperialist powers, the world economy faces the prospect of a protracted bout of stagnation. Global investors, having made major losses, may be particularly wary about investing in third world countries in such a climate; the more so in countries like India, where prices of shares and real estate are perceived to have risen too far. Given that the stimulus to India’s economic boom has come from inflows of external capital, such a change in the global economy would depress the domestic economy as well.

NEXT: IV. (3) Private Corporate Sector-Led Growth and Exclusion

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