Be you ever so high, the markets are always above you

by Ajay Shah.

Purposive state action is fraught with error. Human and social systems are poorly understood and contain nonlinearities, so there is a law of unintended consequences. Grand schemes go wrong. What works well is a humble approach, of crossing the river by feeling the stones, in an environment of expertise. There are two rings of containment of power, that help address a regime which diverges from this approach.

Two rings of check-and-balance

The first ring of containment of power is the checks and balances of the political system. Liberal democracies work by dispersing power, by using ambition to counteract ambition. This curtails mistakes.

In some situations, these things break down. Power becomes concentrated, which induces mistakes. The second ring of containment is the financial markets.

1. When Liz Truss was Prime Minister in the UK, the markets pushed back. The 30-year yield went from 3.6% to 5.1%. The GBP dropped 7.6%. The FTSE fell 7%. Ultimately, this led to her being ousted in 44 days.
   
   
2. When Tony Blair and the labour party won the elections on 2 May 1997, the financial markets expressed skepticism. When a new government is greeted with a higher interest rate, this immediately curtails spending power. This pushed the new government to go through with a group of responsible decisions. On 6 May 1997 (i.e. 4 days after winning), they announced independence for the Bank of England coupled with the creation of an independent Debt Management Office so as to unburden monetary policy from the debt management conflict of interest. On 2 July, in the budget speech, they were cautious in their spending commitments. All these actions were crafted because the second ring of containment impinged upon the political leadership.
   
   
3. Vijay Kelkar has long argued that the stock market crash of 17 May 2004 helped encourage Sonia Gandhi to choose the team of Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram and Montek Ahluwalia as the UPA economic policy leadership, which delivered the economic successes of 2004-2011.
   
   
4. James Carville worked for Bill Clinton. A rough analogy into Indian politics would be Amar Singh. He once said: "I used to think that if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the President or the Pope or as a 400 baseball hitter. But now I would like to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody." This awareness tempered and shaped the early actions of the Clinton presidency, which worked out as a successful period for the American economy. 
   
   
5. It is starting to work out similarly with the Trump Tariffs. The wheels of global general equilibrium started turning on 2 April, with forward looking forecasts embedded in financial market prices. Financial players everywhere asked: How well will the US economy work? Is the US the safe haven, with sound institutions, that we thought it was?
   
   The 10 year US Treasury went up from 3.9% to 4.5%. The 30 year bond briefly went up to 5%. The S&P 500 dropped 12.1%. Safe haven seekers turned to Germany, and yields on government bonds there fell. Larry Summers said on 9 April:  "We are being treated by global financial markets like a problematic emerging market".
   
   In my column in the Business Standard of 3 March, I had said that in the US, the first ring of containment has broken down --
   

   The US is in a constitutional crisis, with a failure of checks and balances, with the inability of the judiciary, the legislature, the electoral system, the agencies, the special counsel and the press to rein in a strongman.

   and that the second ring of containment would have to do its work --
   

   Market discipline will then impinge upon Trump and the MAGA world, and we hope, atleast partly kick them into shape. Be you ever so high, the markets are always above you.

Market discipline is not perfect. In the field of sovereign risk, we know well that the market tolerates a lot of fiscal misbehaviour for a long time, and then abruptly pulls access. Similarly, I have argued that the Indian equity market fares poorly on macro forecasting while it does well on micro-forecasting. The wrath of the market involves caprice. The key point here is that markets do speak truth to power, over and beyond the checks and balances of the political system.

A development perspective

The yearning for raw power is there in many people. On 9 April 2025, Donald Trump described his decision process: "Instinctively, more than anything else. I mean, you almost can’t take a pencil to paper. It’s really more of an instinct, I think, than anything else".  Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England said in 1930: "I don't have reasons, I have instincts". For a country to have a high level of per capita GDP, this primeval yearning for power needs to be contained.

The first ring of containment is the checks and balances in the political system (e.g. converting the Bank of England into an inflation targeting central bank with dispersed power in the Monetary Policy Committee). A good financial system constitutes the second ring of containment that checks such impulses, that induces better decisions by the political masters.

From an Indian perspective, checks and balances are the essence of the growth journey. The first ring of containment is relatively well accepted (Kelkar & Shah 2022). More attention is required upon the second: a financial markets system that would induce checks and balances, that would matter enough to reduce the incidence of mistakes in public policy.

Consider government borrowing. When government borrowing takes place as a set of acts between consenting adults, where voluntary lenders negotiate a price on the bond market, this creates the checks and balances in the episodes narrated above. In India, about 95% of government borrowing is mobilised coercively (Chitgupi et. al., 2024), which limits the role that the financial markets play in reshaping the incentives of the state. 

Consider the exchange rate. The checks and balances in the episodes narrated above involved a starring role for the exchange rate. When poor countries run a government controlled exchange rate, this channel of influence is limited [EiE Ep67 Floating exchange rate], which sustains poverty.

In India, a disproportionate burden of adjustment falls upon the equity market as other markets adjust less.

In today's mainstream thinking, financial development is seen as integral to the journey of economic development through its allocative function.  `Finance is the brain of the economy', `Wall Street tells Main Street what to do'. The financial system should occupy `the commanding heights of the economy' and make all the detailed allocative decisions about firms, technologies or industries which receive investment [EiE Ep21 The beauty of finance]. A good financial system performs the allocative function better than `industrial policy' can [EiE Ep89 Industrial policy]. 

But finance plays another important function as well: that of reshaping the checks and balances of the state, or being the second ring of containment for power. The second ring of containment matters most when the first ring of containment -- checks and balances of the political system -- falters. These two lines of reasoning encourage us to place financial sector development at the centre of the growth journey [EiE Ep57 How to do development].

There was a time in India when we were making progress in building a financial system. This has faltered (Shah 2023;  EiE Ep71 The Journey of Finance). We need to get back to the knowledge building and community building that began in the early 1990s in this field.

Who lends to the Indian state?

by Aneesha Chitgupi, Ajay Shah, Manish Kumar Singh, Susan Thomas and Harsh Vardhan.

Public finance researchers in India have paid great attention to debt and deficits. By now, the main messages of the field have started sinking into common knowledge: that it is good to run primary deficits in most years, so as to create space to surge the deficit once in a while when faced with a crisis. There is an adjacent field of public debt management that is equally important. Here, the strategic question is: How should the government borrow? From whom? Debt management strategy has not received the required level of interest.

Strategic thinking in debt management

A sound public debt management strategy must cater to three objectives:

• The mechanism for borrowing must not induce economic distortions upon the domestic economy.
• It must create strategic depth of being able to borrow on a very large scale when faced with great challenges, once every few decades.
• It must induce sustainable mechanisms for reasonably low cost borrowing, at reasonably predictable rates, for the long term.

There are four main pathways to choose from in debt issuance:

1. Monetisation of the deficit. Here, the central bank distorts the monetary base with `fiscal dominance’ where it buys the bonds issued by the government.
2. Coerced borrowing from financial firms. These are typically regulated firms, who are coerced using the tools of financial regulation.
3. Borrowing from voluntary participants (domestic or foreign). This is done through local currency bonds issued domestically, possibly nominal and possibly inflation indexed.
4. Borrowing abroad using foreign currency denominated bonds. As an example, this could involve Yen denominated bonds issued in London.

As with many other countries, we started out in India with the first method (monetisation of the deficit). This induces an economic distortion: the loss of monetary policy autonomy. A long journey of monetary policy reform took place, from the Ways and means agreement of 1993, to the Monetary policy framework agreement in 2015 that ushered in inflation targeting. This freed up monetary policy from the limitations imposed by debt management. In 2015, there was an attempt at institutional reform, in the form of the establishment of the Public Debt Management Agency (freeing up the Reserve Bank of India of the responsibility of issuing public debt), but this did not come to pass.

From 1993 onward, the main strategy for public debt management in India has involved method 2 in the list: a system of `financial repression’ where the government borrows from coerced financial firms. This is a tax upon financial intermediation. The interest rates discovered through government borrowing are important prices that impinge upon the economy. But these rates are distorted owing to the presence of coerced buyers of government debt. The lack of voluntary lenders creates the lack of strategic depth. The government is limited in how it can expand its borrowing when faced with special situations.

From the late 1990s onwards, economists and thinkers have sought to enhance fiscal prudence in India through the mechanism of fiscal responsibility law. It is increasingly clear that this does not work. In recent work, Datta et. al. 2023 show that the Indian constitutional arrangements frustrate the possibility of Parliamentary law imposing fiscal discipline upon the union government. Once this idea is internalised, there is one main path towards fiscal responsibility: market discipline. This requires removing the system of financial repression.

Who lends to the Indian state?

In this context, the question Who lends to the Indian state? attains importance. A recent paper by Aneesha Chitgupi, Ajay Shah, Manish Singh, Susan Thomas and Harsh Vardhan examines this question. For a period of 10 years, we assemble information from multiple sources, which were all available in the public domain, to examine the nature of lenders to the Indian state. Some discoveries that we make are:

• The SLR went down in the last decade. This meant that the extent of bank funds mandated for the government decreased. However, the actual investments by banks in government debt securities was higher than what was mandated.
• Simultaneously, there was major growth in the role of insurance and pension funds lending to the government. While de jure financial repression of banks declined, there has been no such retreat with pensions and insurance.
• All the three groups of financial firms bought a lot more government bonds as compared with the de jure requirements. Excess ownership went from about 0 in 2011 to Rs.30 trillion in 2021.
• How did the government increase borrowing over the last decade, while simultaneously elongating the maturity profile? The answer lies in (a) Strong growth in insurance and pensions industries, and (b) Excess ownership of government bonds by coerced industries.
• The voluntary lenders are the private firms, MFs and FIIs, who are 4.8% of investors in the government debt market for 2021. India (along with China) remains an outlier in having very low borrowing from international debt markets.

Important questions for the future

This field is target rich with interesting questions, some of which are:

1. Why do financial firms lend so much to the government?
2. What will the structure of lenders to the government look like, 10 years out into the future?
3. If a big surge in borrowing is required, where will it come from?
4. How are households and firms changing their behaviour in response to the financial repression tax?
5. What is the path to fiscal responsibility?

Conclusion

The field of public finance in India has studied deficits and debt. There has been work on the institutional arrangements for debt management (i.e. the establishment of the Public Debt Management Agency). There has been relatively little work on the economic reasoning, the strategic thinking for debt management. In this paper, we offer novel insights and facts for this journey. More research is required, at the interfaces between public finance, finance and public administration, to grow knowledge on the important field of debt management strategy.

The electricity chokepoint in Tamil Nadu public finance

Charmi Mehta, Radhika Pandey, Renuka Sane and Ajay Shah

Each state in India can be visualised as an entity in itself. Vast magnitudes of finance will be needed to put the states on an energy transition pathway. While this pathway will be different for every state, the electricity sector is likely to be the recipient of much of these funds. The investibility of the electricity sector is thus an important field of study.

Many states in India face fiscal distress and many states in India have difficulties in the electricity system. In a new paper, 'The electricity chokepoint in Tamil Nadu public finance', we bring the two streams of knowledge together for the state of Tamil Nadu, and offer fresh insights for fiscal policy and for electricity policy.

The formal toolkit of a `debt sustainability analysis' (DSA) is brought to the standard Tamil Nadu fiscal data. This involves a first stage of comparing a group of fiscal indicators against normative benchmarks, and a second stage of forecasting the debt/GSDP ratio and the interest payments to revenue receipts ratio (IP/RR ratio) for five years; till FY 2028. These results, which we term the `baseline DSA' translate the mainstream intuition towards Tamil Nadu's fiscal difficulties into tangible numbers and forecasts.

A consolidated financial picture is drawn by integrating the two electricity sector utilities -- TANGEDCO and TANTRANSCO -- fused into the Government of Tamil Nadu debt stock. This yields a modified DSA that we term a `Corrected DSA'. This is done to acknowledge the implicit guarantee that state governments hold towards the debt of state-owned entities. This modified picture is thus a truer depiction of the fiscal problems of the state.

The fact that large debt servicing expenditures were successfully achieved for the last decade has helped create a confidence that the fiscal strategy of Tamil Nadu is deplorable but feasible. Of essence in the fiscal outlook of every highly indebted entity is the problem of sustainability. There are three concerns:

1. Sustained large scale borrowing, from the financial system, may potentially face difficulties through the risk appetite of lenders, changes in regulations, systemic crises in the financial system, etc.
2. The most important assumptions that shape the results of this paper are the nominal interest rate ($r$), estimated at 7%, and nominal GSDP growth rate ($g$), estimated at 9%. This has a $r-g$ of -2: it is a very positive environment from the viewpoint of fundamental fiscal dynamics. In the future, if $r-g$ becomes less benign, the debt dynamics could change significantly.
3. The conventional notion of fiscal stress is phrased in terms of bond default. In India, fiscal distress is known to manifest itself as unplanned budget cuts (that disrupt the working of the government), defaults on payments to private firms, and even the deferrals salaries or pensions. We look back upon three instances when state governments faced high fiscal stress in 2001, and find that the present projections for Tamil Nadu for FY 2028 are partially similar to these values.

The fiscal knowledge of this paper has implications for electricity policy. The electricity system requires two large blocks of investment. A big block of capital is required to rebuild the grid for the post-carbon world. And, a big block of capital is required for the investment in renewables and storage that are required to sustain economic growth in the post-carbon world. Of particular importance is the economic upside from exploiting that remarkable natural resource which is found off the coast of Tamil Nadu in the form of offshore wind generation. These investments will not arise in the environment of chronic fiscal stress in the electricity system.

The electricity knowledge of this paper has implications for fiscal policy. Through simulations where electricity subsidies remain constant or they are completely eliminated, we find that the electricity system is material in solving the fiscal problem. Thus, we extract the electricity subsidy problem from the sector, and place upfront its impact on the public finance parameters and the development trajectory of the state. A complete electricity sector reform versus business-as-usual translates into an FY 2028 outcome for the debt/GSDP ratio of 32.47% vs. 43.53%, and an IP/RR ratio outcome of 19.71% vs. 26.12%. These are large differences. They encourage us to prioritise electricity sector reform as a part of the medium-term fiscal strategy.

Charmi Mehta and Ajay Shah are researchers at XKDR Forum. Radhika Pandey is a researcher at NIPFP. Renuka Sane is a researcher at Trustbridge.

Sudden Rise of the Floaters

by Rajeswari Sengupta and Harsh Vardhan.

The first two months of 2021-22 have witnessed a remarkable new trend in the corporate bond market—a sudden rise in the issuance of floating rate bonds or “floaters” and the use of the 91-day treasury bill yield as the reference rate in these bonds, instead of the yields on dated government securities (G-Secs).

We conjecture that one possible reason behind this new development could be an increase in the perception of interest risk on the part of the bond market participants. This in turn may have been a result of the active yield curve management undertaken by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). If indeed dated government bonds such as the 10-year G-Secs have lost relevance as benchmark securities then this can lead to serious mispricing of risk in the economy, an unintended consequence of the RBI’s bond market intervention.

An interesting development in the bond market

Over the three-month period from April to June 2021, about 7 percent of the total corporate bond issuance of Rs 1.02 trillion consisted of floating rate bonds. While this percentage looks small, it is important to keep in mind that for the previous ten years or more, the share of floating rate bonds in the total issuance of corporate bonds has been less than 1 percent.

It is also important to note that the firms issuing these bonds and the investors investing in them are not a new class of issuers and investors. They are the same issuers and investors who were issuing and buying fixed-rate bonds until recently. In particular, 100 percent of the floating rate bond issuers now are non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) who were earlier issuing fixed rate bonds, and the investors are the same mutual funds and banks who were investing in fixed rate bonds earlier. This could imply that their behaviour has now changed due to external developments. It is as if the bond issuers and investors have suddenly developed a taste for floaters.

Corporate bonds are typically issued with a maturity of more than one year, along with a coupon, which is the rate of interest to be paid on the bond. Most bonds have a ‘fixed’ coupon—the rate of interest on the bond is decided at the time of issuance of the bond and remains fixed over the life of the bond.

This rate is a function of two factors – (i) the prevailing risk-free interest rate for the maturity matching that of the bond, and (ii) the credit risk spread that is added to compensate the investors for the default risk associated with the issuer.

The risk-free reference rate is ideally the interest rate on the government security of similar maturity. The credit spread is the function of the credit rating of the issuer. For example, if a AAA-rated issuer wants to issue a 5-year maturity corporate bond, then the risk-free reference rate will be the rate for a 5-year government security (let’s say 5.7 percent). If the credit spread of the AAA-rated issuer is an additional 100 basis points (1 percent), then the bond will be issued with a fixed coupon of roughly 6.7 percent. Note that this rate will apply to all the future interest payments by the issuer until the bond matures even if the underlying risk-free rate changes. This means that the investor in this bond is taking the interest rate risk. The secondary market price of these bonds reacts to changes in the underlying interest rates – the bond prices fall if the risk-free interest rate increases and bond prices go up if the risk-free rate decreases.

In the case of a floating rate bond, the main components of determining the coupon remain the same—a reference rate and a credit risk premium. The crucial difference is that the reference rate is no longer fixed but changes over time. Hence, these bonds are referred to as ‘floating’. The coupon on these bonds clearly specifies the reference-floating rate.

If the bond in the example cited above were a floating rate bond, then the coupon on it will not be a fixed rate of 6.7 percent. Instead, it will be the rate on 5-year government security at the time of interest payment plus 1 percent. In other words, for a floating bond, the applicable interest is computed at the time of payment of interest. If the 5-year government security rate moves up by 0.5 percent in a year then the interest rate payable will become 7.2 percent. The investor in such a bond is more protected from interest rate risk and the prices of these bonds in the secondary market fluctuate much less with movements in interest rates.

In the last two months, floating rate bonds worth Rs 70 billion have been issued in the corporate bond market, almost entirely by private companies. Overall, bonds worth Rs 793 billion have been issued by the private sector including NBFCs. The floating rate bond issues in these two months thus represent around 10 percent of private sector bond issuance.

An interesting feature of these floaters issued in the last two months is that all of them have used the yield on 91-day treasury bills (T Bills) as the reference rate. Notwithstanding the fact that these corporate bonds have maturities ranging from 2 to 4 years, yields on dated government securities (i.e., G-Secs with maturity of more than 1 year) have not been used as a reference.

What might explain this sudden preference on the part of the issuers and investors for these floating bonds?

What might be going on?

One possibility could be a heightened perception of interest rate risk. Bond investors might be harbouring the belief that the interest rates on dated G-Secs are unlikely to remain at their current levels. As discussed earlier, issuing floating rate bonds is one way to mitigate interest rate risk. This raises the next question – why would the perception of interest rate risk suddenly go up now?

We conjecture that this could be a result of the manner in which the RBI has been managing interest rates in the government bond market. The Covid-19 pandemic presented the Indian economy with an unprecedented challenge. A combination of falling tax revenues and rising expenditure on account of fiscal stimulus resulted in a massive increase in the fiscal deficit of the government, and a corresponding rise in government borrowing from the bond market. In 2020-21 the consolidated government borrowing was a whopping Rs 21.5 trillion and the planned borrowing for 2021-22 is roughly Rs 19.6 trillion. The overall government debt to GDP ratio is roughly 90 percent, the highest ever.

The RBI on its part has taken multiple steps to ensure that interest rates are kept low in the bond market so that the government’s cost of borrowing remains under control. It has allowed several primary auctions of G-Secs to devolve on primary dealers and has even canceled auctions when it did not receive bids at rates that were low enough. In addition to its standard open market operations (OMOs), it initiated the Operation Twist program whose objective was to bring down interest rates at the long end of the yield curve and push up rates at the short end. This meant that the RBI was buying long-dated G-Secs and selling shorter maturity bonds.

In March 2021 the RBI launched a program called the G-SAP wherein for the first time it pre-committed to buying a specific amount of G-Secs. These bond market interventions are mostly aimed at capping the interest rate on the benchmark 10-year G-Sec at 6 percent. As a consequence of these actions, the RBI has ended up owning a substantial amount of the 10 year benchmark government bonds (link).

It is possible that bond investors believe that the RBI will not be able to suppress the interest rates for too long, and the rates will rise sharply and suddenly. This could be either because of the large volume of G-Secs the government needs to issue to finance its deficit or because of growing inflationary concerns in the Indian economy (CPI inflation has exceeded the upper limit of 6 percent of the RBI’s targeted inflation band in both May and June 2021), or because of external factors such as rising inflation in the US.

This is akin to a spring that has been forcefully compressed but can bounce back anytime. If the rates suddenly go up, holding fixed coupon bonds will lead to losses, as explained earlier. This increased risk perception might be one possible explanation as to why the investors now prefer floating rate bonds.

Arguably, another unintended consequence of the steps taken by the RBI to lower the long-term G-Sec yields and suppress the organic evolution of the yield curve in response to market forces may have been that the bond market participants have lost confidence in the yield curve.

In the past whenever inflation went up, 10-year G-Sec yields would also go up, implying a positive correlation between the two variables. The underlying idea is that rising inflation is usually followed by a tightening of the monetary policy stance which in turn leads to higher long term bond yields.

For instance, figure 1 below plots the 10-year G-Sec yield alongside CPI (consumer price index) inflation from 2004-05 to 2013-14. This was a period of high and rising inflation. CPI inflation went up from 3.8 percent in 2004-05 to more than 10 percent in 2012-13. Concomitantly, the 10- year rate went up from 6.6 percent in 2004-05 to more than 8 percent by 2012-13.

Figure 1: CPI Inflation and 10year G-Sec yield, 2004-05 to 2013-14

But recently this correlation seems to have broken down. We can see this clearly in figure 2, which plots the two series using monthly data, focusing on the period from March 2020 to June 2021. CPI inflation began rising from May 2020 onward. It consistently breached the 6 percent upper limit of the RBI’s targeted inflation band during the period April-October 2020, increasing from 5.8 percent in March to 7.6 percent in October. More recently it went up from 4.2 percent in April 2021 to 6.3 percent in June 2021.

Figure 2: CPI Inflation and 10year G-Sec yield, March 2020 to June 2021

However, this time around, rather than increasing, the 10-year G-Sec yield actually fell from 7.5 percent in April 2020 to 5.8 percent in May, since then holding more or less steady around 6 percent. These developments suggest that G-Sec rate might be distorted by the RBI’s interventions, which in turn might explain why some investors are turning to the T Bill rate as a preferred reference rate.

Other explanations are, of course, possible. The rise of floaters could also be a result of companies expecting interest rates to come down, in which case they would not want to issue long-term debt at higher rates. This however seems unlikely. Given that inflation continues to be a concern, interest rates are more likely to go up rather than down, and sooner or later RBI would need to start normalising the surplus liquidity situation that the financial system is currently in.

Alternatively, floaters could be issued if the private sector is tapping a new class of investors, who are interested in buying bonds but do not want to run any interest rate risk. But the issuers of and the investors in the floaters are exactly the same entities that were participating in fixed-rate bond transactions earlier.

Finally, it is also possible that the funding requirements of the NBFCs (the sole issuers of floating rate bonds right now) have undergone some changes which might have increased their preference for these bonds.

Conclusion

We are observing an interesting new development in the corporate bond market. The rise of floating rate bond issuances by private NBFCs, and the use of the 91day T Bill rate as the reference rate seem to indicate a change in the preferences on the part of both issuers and investors.

We conjecture that one reason that might explain this development is the intervention in the bond market by the RBI to control G-Sec yields. Specifically, it is possible that the RBI’s persistent interventions have caused some market participants to lose trust in the yield curve. This possibility needs to be explored further in the future.

If there has indeed been an erosion of credibility in the yield curve, then this would be a serious problem. The yield curve is a fundamental construct in a market economy, as it defines the interest rate structure that is used to price debt. As a result, if the yield curve is distorted, then interest rate risk is being mispriced. The associated misallocation of resources could prove to be costly, damaging the economy just as it struggles to recover from the Covid crisis.

Harsh Vardhan is Executive in Residence at the Center for Financial Studies (CFS) at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research. Rajeswari Sengupta is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR). The authors thank Josh Felman and an anonymous referee for their useful suggestions.

How large is the payment delays problem in Indian public procurement?

by Pavithra Manivannan and Bhargavi Zaveri.

Payment delays are endemic in government contracts in India. Businesses generally factor payment delays into the price of public sector contracts. Measuring the size and extent of overall payment delays from the government to vendors and contractors has, however, been a challenge. In this article, we use a novel data-set put together from public sources to ascertain the size of the payment delays problem in Indian public procurement.

When a private entity delays contractual payments, the delay is factored into the price of the next vendor contract or the debt contracted by the private entity. This feedback loop naturally instills payment discipline by aligning the payer's incentives with maintaining payment discipline. This is harder to achieve for government contracts, as information about payment delays in public procurement is often sparse, difficult to discern from budgetary statements or missing altogether. The problem is compounded as the state procures goods, services and works at various levels and through various entities owned by it. Payment delays affect the working capital cycle of vendors of all sizes. However, payment delays have a particularly deleterious impact on Micro Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), which often have limited access to formal financial systems to bridge their working capital requirements. Timely payments, therefore, are of crucial importance to MSMEs as they rely on their cash-flow cycle to fund their working capital requirements.

Payment delays in contracts with CPSEs

A significant proportion of overall central government procurement is undertaken by centrally owned public sector enterprises (CPSEs). Most CPSEs are incorporated as companies and many of them are listed. We use the information in the annual results of CPSEs as a proxy to ascertain the scale of payment delays in the public procurement undertaken by the central government. We study the balance sheet and annual reports of listed CPSEs for the last three financial years, 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20 ("study period").

We find that CPSEs had annual average outstanding trade payables of Rs.1.3 trillion as against an annual average procurement value of Rs.1.1 trillion, during our study period. This suggests that the annual average outstanding trade payables of CPSEs were about 18% higher than the annual average procurement undertaken by the CPSEs. We also find that when taken as a percentage of the value procured, CPSEs under some ministries, such as the Railway and Defence Ministries and Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, fare significantly worse than others. Further, we find that on an average, payments worth 8% of the total value procured from MSMEs are delayed for more than 45 days from their due date. Finally, we find that CPSEs demonstrate weak payment discipline towards all their vendors, and that the MSME vendors are not worse-off than the other vendors. This suggests that in the case of government contracts, the imbalance of the relative negotiating power of MSME vendors and non-MSME vendors has limited impact on the behaviour of the payer.

Our work demonstrates the potential to develop an ongoing system to measure payment discipline in public procurement, which could then act as a feedback loop for pricing vendor contracts when dealing with CPSEs and the government departments to which they are aligned.

Data and methodology

Our analysis is based on a hand collected data-set put together from the following two public sources of data:

1. the MSME Sambandh portal set up by the the Ministry of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise in 2017, to monitor the implementation of the Public Procurement Policy, 2012;
2. Annual reports and annual balance sheets published by CPSEs.

Our data-set consists of firm level information about CPSEs, such as the year of their incorporation, listing date, industry classification, variables indicative of their financial health and the procurement undertaken by them. We augment the data-set with information on payments delayed by CPSEs to MSME suppliers beyond 45 days from the date on which such payments became due (hereafter, "delayed payments"). The Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Act, 2006 (MSME Act)requires all companies that procure goods, services and works from micro, small and medium enterprises to disclose such payments in their annual report in the prescribed format.

Our data-set covers this information for 57 listed CPSEs. We collect the data for these CPSEs for three financial years beginning with the year in which the MSME Sambandh Portal was set up. This gives us data for the financial years, 2017-18, 2018-19 and 2019-20, which is our study period.

These 57 CPSEs are spread across 17 departments or ministries of the Central Government, with the largest number concentrated under the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas (19.3%), followed by the Ministry of Power (10.53%) and the Ministry of Steel (8.77%). The CPSEs in our data-set are spread across 34 industries, as per the National Industrial Classification (NIC) scheme prescribed by the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI). CPSEs in the business of 'electricity, gas, stem and hot water supply' account for the largest group (12.28%) followed by CPSEs engaged in the business of manufacturing coke, refined petroleum products and nuclear fuel (8.77%).

Each CPSE reports a target procurement value at the beginning of the financial year and the actual procurement value at the end of the financial year, on the MSME Sambandh portal. Table 1 shows the aggregate value of goods, services and works targeted and actually procured by the CPSEs in our data-set across different government departments.

Table 1: Procurement by CPSEs

	No. of CPSEs	Target (Rs. crore)	Actual (Rs. crore)
Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals	2	371.66	308.38
Department of Commerce	2	17.28	18.3
Department of Defense Production	3	1963.33	2880.47
Department of Fertilisers	4	2547.34	2641.74
Department of Heavy Industry	4	16392.1	15209.25
Department of Telecommunications	2	0	0
Ministry of Coal	2	5977.39	1774.82
Ministry of Defense	3	5838.79	7066.05
Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs	2	12.61	12.67
Ministry of Mines	2	2573	7132.09
Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas	11	52175.63	63849.08
Ministry of Power	6	6142.97	6608.55
Ministry of Railways	4	395.07	429.31
Ministry of Science and Technology	1	38	17.49
Ministry of Shipping	3	1725.67	1321.45
Ministry of Steel	5	4556.4	5356.22
Ministry of Tourism	1	125.07	34.85

The Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas is the largest procurer in our data-set, both in terms of the number of CPSEs and the value of goods, services and works procured by them. Table 1 also shows that a majority of the CPSEs have procured more than their annual targeted value. We observe this to be true across all the three financial years comprised in our study period.

Findings: CPSEs' outstanding dues

Trade payable are a rough proxy of the amounts due from a firm to vendors and service providers. We use the data on outstanding trade payable from the balance sheets of CPSEs as an estimate of payment delays in public procurement. Table 2 shows the three-year annual average outstanding trade payable due from the CPSEs in our data-set. The second column indicates the corresponding annual average value of procurement undertaken by these CPSEs, and the last column indicates the average outstanding trade payable as a percentage of the average annual procurement undertaken by the CPSEs.

Table 2: Average outstanding trade payable and procurement value

	Procurement value (Rs. crore)	Outstanding payable (Rs. crore)	Payable/ procurement (percent)
Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals	308.38	106.11	34.41
Department of Commerce	18.3	1119.66	6118.36
Department of Defense Production	2880.47	3449.92	119.77
Department of Fertilizers	2641.74	1971.93	74.65
Department of Heavy Industry	15209.25	10297.54	67.71
Department of Telecommunications	0.00	2313.67	0.00
Ministry of Coal	1774.82	1898.59	106.97
Ministry of Defense	7066.05	3031.90	42.91
Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs	12.67	2709.40	21384.37
Ministry of Mines	7132.09	1227.54	17.21
Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas	63849.08	82830.09	129.73
Ministry of Power	6608.55	7907.65	119.66
Ministry of Railways	429.31	1243.77	289.71
Ministry of Science and Technology	17.49	29.38	167.98
Ministry of Shipping	1321.45	1562.02	118.21
Ministry of Steel	5356.22	8739.99	163.17
Ministry of Tourism	34.85	58.94	169.12
Total	114660.72	130498.11	113.81

While the procurement value of a given financial year does not necessarily mean that the entire value of the contract becomes payable in the same financial year as the procurement contract may span across multiple years, the three year average numbers in Table 3, however, show a systemic break-down in the payment discipline of CPSEs. We speculate that these trade payable would have aggregated over time, and do not necessarily pertain entirely to the study period.

We then look at three departments/ ministries that account for the largest procurement by value in our data-set, to investigate the differences in the payment behaviour of CPSEs towards MSMEs and non-MSME vendors (Table 3). The CPSEs in these three departments also account for nearly 75% of the total outstanding trade payable of all the CPSEs in our data-set.

Table 3: Outstanding trade payable of CPSEs (as percent of value procured)

	2017-18		2018-19		2019-20		Total
	Non-MSME	MSME	Non-MSME	MSME	Non-MSME	MSME	Non-MSME	MSME
Department of Heavy Industry	84.02	7.87	80.87	15.82	110.63	11.81	88.89	12.22
Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas	182.65	7.60	187.97	3.56	143.05	4.13	171.49	4.32
Ministry of Power	116.44	14.90	161.54	15.35	292.02	21.73	175.63	17.46

In each of the three cases, the proportion of total outstanding trade payable to the value procured by the CPSEs during the study period is much higher for non-MSMEs than MSMEs. In the case of the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and the Ministry of Steel, the proportion of outstanding trade payable to non-MSME vendors exceeds 100% of the value procured, on an aggregate basis across the three years. Compared to non-MSME vendors, this proportion is significantly lower for MSME vendors (the highest being 21%).

Findings: Delayed payments by CPSEs to MSME suppliers

The final leg of our measurement involves estimating the 'delayed payments' by CPSEs to MSMEs, that is, payments delayed beyond 45 days from their due date. We aggregate the delayed payments outstanding as at year-end, by CPSEs to MSMEs, government department wise. Table 4 shows the delayed payments as a percentage of their annual procurement value from MSMEs.

Table 4: Delayed payments as percentage of procurement

	2017-18	2018-19	2019-20	Average
Department of Chemicals and Petrochemicals	6.22	11.73	11.84	10.46
Department of Commerce	0.86	47.38	1.08	17.47
Department of Defense Production	5.82	3.35	5.44	4.78
Department of Fertilizers	7.58	5.25	4.82	5.38
Department of Heavy Industry	7.91	15.92	12.11	12.37
Department of Telecommunications	0	0	0	0
Ministry of Coal	9.11	5.42	8.47	7.19
Ministry of Defense	3.55	3.20	3.98	3.56
Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs	6.72	4.86	5.49	5.70
Ministry of Mines	2.79	1.51	2.85	2.37
Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas	4.12	4.80	6.18	5.25
Ministry of Power	24.95	25.33	31.87	27.51
Ministry of Railways	11.03	20.58	11.02	13.62
Ministry of Science and Technology	0	0	0	0
Ministry of Shipping	14.36	3.47	2.94	5.62
Ministry of Steel	4.84	10.18	4.81	6.18
Ministry of Tourism	0	0	21.13	21.13
Total	7.36	8.06	8.70	8.16

We find that the delayed payments by CPSEs to MSMEs average at about 8% of the actual value of goods, services and works procured by them from MSMEs during the study period. This percentage has marginally increased from 2017-2018, and is higher than the average in 2019-20.

Conclusion

In this article, we take a sector-agnostic approach to measure the scale of the payment delays problem in public procurement in India. An analysis of the annual returns and balance sheets of CPSEs gives us new insights on the scale of the problem at three levels, namely, at the level of the CPSE, the industry and the government department to which the CPSE is aligned.

Our analysis provides evidence of the popular perception of CPSEs' weak payment discipline to vendors. Taken as a percentage of the average procurement undertaken by CPSEs, the payment delays by CPSEs to their vendors far exceeds their procurement values. Second, while CPSEs demonstrate weak payment discipline to both MSME and non-MSME vendors, the delay seems to be much larger towards large vendors than the small ones. Third, the delayed payments reporting requirements mandated under the MSME Act provides us an illustrative picture on the payment discipline of the CPSEs. For two out of three years of our study period, we notice that the total delayed payments to MSMEs is higher than the three-years average (Rs. 2323.42 crores).

Our approach of understanding payment delays in public procurement in India, through balance sheets of CPSEs demonstrates the possibility of setting up ongoing systems for the measurement of payment discipline of government departments through CPSEs aligned to them. Further, these delays may be indicative of either of liquidity mismatches or solvency issues, at the CPSE, or a mix of both. By approaching this problem from a balance sheet perspective, our study lays the foundation for conducting future work on the possible relationship between the financial health of the procurers and their payment discipline.

The authors are researchers at the CMI-Finance Research Group and thank Susan Thomas for valuable discussions.

The problems of public procurement and payment delays: A review of the recent literature

by Sourish Das and Rabia Khatun.

Introduction

'Public procurement'- the purchase of goods and services by the state from private enterprise -- tends to be a large part of economic activity in any country. The World Bank estimated that globally, public procurement in 2018 amounted to USD 11 trillion or 12 percent of global GDP(Bosio and Djankov, 2020). In India, these estimates are higher at 30 percent (Khan, 2017) and recent budget announcements suggest that these estimates are likely to increase.

Such magnitudes have a large multiplier effect on economic activity and economic growth. But the multiplier effect is dampened by the 'marginal cost of public funds' or MCPF which is the cost incurred by a rupee of public spending (Kelkar and Shah, 2019). In an ideal world, public procurement works well, and goods/services that are available in the private market for Rs.1 are purchased for Rs.1 by the government. In the real world, public procurement processes introduce an additional friction, an inefficiency, where the government pays Rs.A when purchasing something worth Rs.1. Every deficiency of public procurement procedures drives up the A.

There is a friction in taxation (the MCPF which Kelkar and Shah (2019) refer to as a cost of Rs.3 upon the economy when the government obtains Rs.1 as taxes). Similarly, there is a friction in contracting-out (the government pays A when obtaining services worth 1). These two come together in shaping the overall effectiveness of government action. A government that wishes to purchase (or contract-out)goods/services worth Rs.1 ends up with a true total cost for society of 3A. On the taxation side, this motivates research on understanding and reducing the MCPF. On the expenditure side, this motivates research on understanding and improving public procurement so as to obtain a reduced value for A.

The conventional processes of government do not produce information about these two elements of inefficiency. Researchers have to create mechanisms through which these estimates can be obtained. For example, there is a widely held perception that delays of payments are a persistent problem in public procurement. Such delays in payment translate into higher costs of doing business by the private enterprises that render services or deliver products to government or public sector enterprises, and raises the MCPF of public procurement. As has been happening elsewhere, the perception of the higher cost of doing business with the public sector is increasingly occupying the public discourse in India as a critical element of what is driving stress in the financial health of the corporate sector. At present, we have informal estimates about the difficulties faced in public procurement in India. As an example, Sahu (2020) recently estimated the size of the delayed payments from the Union government as totalling Rs.9.5 lakh crore, an estimate that was culled from public sources. The data presented included pending dues to road projects at NHAI, from power generating companies and power grid, in the sugar and fuel ecosystem, food distribution at FCI and to the micro, small and medium enterprises. But beyond such broad, aggregate estimates, there is little that is understood about the mechanics that drive this quantum of delay. What needs to be set right to solve the problem is not well understood.

In the present literature, two key features emerge. One is the issue of late payments by the state. This has become increasingly recognised as a major problem after the Financial crisis of 2008 and after the European debt crisis of 2009. Perhaps as a consequence, almost all of the studies are based on data from countries of the EU. A second central concern appears to be the effect of such late payment by governments on the financial health of firms, particularly Small and Medium Enterprises or SMEs. SMEs have been in the policy headlights over the last decade as a critical base of employment growth. Any factor influencing their financial health has also been highlighted as an important area of reform. SMEs are particularly affected by any adverse impact of payment delays.

In this article, we survey the literature on delays in payments by government and their consequences. We find it useful to classify this literature into two lines of thought about delayed payments in public procurement: (1) these hurt the profit of the private sector and increases the probability of bankruptcy, particularly for smaller businesses; and together (2) such delays have a significant negative impact on economic growth. Additionally, this literature shows pathways for setting up measurement systems that can then be used to regularly monitor the impact of public procurement processes on economic agents and the economy. Four papers appear to be the basis of understanding, which are Connell (2014), Checherita et al. (2016), Obeng (2016), and Conti et al. (2020).

Much of the work uses two components to measure late payments: payment delays and the duration of payment delays. Payment delay is calculated over agreed contractual period and it is the ratio of absolute delay (in days) to the agreed contractual period. Payment duration refers to agreed contractual period plus the absolute delay in days over agreed contractual period and is the sum of agreed contractual period plus payment delay. The data for payment delay and payment duration is obtained from Intrum Justitia, a private credit management firm which conducts an annual written survey among several thousand firms in 29 European countries. The survey results are published as the annual European Payment Index Report. Among other statistics, the survey reports the average annual payment duration and the average annual contractual payment period, both of which are further disaggregated into consumer, business-to-business, and public sector debtors terms.

The impact of delayed payments in public procurement on the health of firms

Connell (2014) attempts to estimate the economic effects of late payments that firms face in some European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain) regarding delays in payments in Business to Business (B2B) and Government to Business (G2B) transactions with two questions:

1. How can the cost to firms associated with government late payments be approximated? This cost is estimated as the short-term financial cost of firms associated with late payments. In order to calculate this, they use the volume of claims against the public administration, the average annual interest rate for loans to non-financial corporations and the average government payment delays expressed as a fraction of a year.
2. Do liquidity constraints associated with payment delays put the firms out of business? A panel regression is run between payment delays and the firm's exit rate. This was done for B2B and G2B transactions separately. The exit rate is defined as the ratio of death firms to the total number of active firms. The regression controls for size of the firms involved, country fixed effects to control for national time-invariant characteristics, and business cycles variables to control for changes in financial conditions.

The paper finds that payment delay is statistically significant and negative across all the countries studied, with higher payment delays being seen with higher exit rates. The estimated financial cost as a percentage of GDP in 2012 ranges from 0.19 percent in Greece to 0.005 percent in Finland. A one point reduction in the payment delay ratio would reduce exit rates by about 2.8 or 3.4 percentage points in a B2B transactions. As expected, these effects are exacerbated with business cycle effects. The results also show that bigger firms, with a larger number of employees, are more likely to survive the deleterious effects of payment delays. In G2B transactions, a one point reduction in the delay ratio leads to a decrease in exit rates of about 1.7 to 2 percentage points. The effect is lower than payment delays in B2B transactions which is suggested as being due to the different representations of SMEs in these different types of transactions. The overall findings of this study suggest that payment delays in commercial transactions by the public administration and private entities have detrimental effects on the health of a firm, and exacerbate the burden of already financially constrained firms which ultimately push them out of business.

Delayed payments in public procurement and its impact on the economy

Checherita et al. (2016) analyze the impact of government payment delays on private firms and on economic growth. They argue that increased delays in public payments can affect private sector liquidity and profits and hence ultimately economic growth. This study defined payment delays by including various measures of the accounts payable data from government accounts (as defined in ESA 1995 code AF.7) along with the other measures of payment duration defined earlier. In addition to the short-term impact of payment delays from government on real GDP growth, the study also analyses profit growth measured by economy wide gross operating surplus, and bankruptcy measured by the probability of default (using Moody's measure of distance to default) over the period spanning 1993 to 2012.

Using a panel regression analysis, they find a negative relation between delayed payments and growth. The results show that a one standard deviation change in delayed payments reduces the growth rate by 0.8-1.5 percent, and a one percent increase in arrears reduces growth by 0.6-0.9 percent. The paper finds a statistically significant impact of delayed payments on the growth rate of operating surplus of firms. A one standard deviation increase in delayed payments reduces profit growth by 1.5-3.4 percent. Finally, their results suggest that delayed payments reduce the distance to default. In similar work, Fiordelisi et, al. (2012) show that economic growth in Italy would have been an additional 0.38 per cent if the government paid its trade loans within 30 days.

Obeng (2016) investigates the impact of payment delays caused by a liquidity crisis in the European Union, using changes in the pattern of late payments among EU companies between 2005 and 2014. The paper finds the following features about payments delays during the financial crisis: payment delays increased across the board; delays had a higher negative impact on SMEs, low profitability firms, and low liquidity firms; significant variation in how delays increased depending upon the sector that the firm operated in. The paper analyses the variability of firm late payments under different macroeconomic conditions using data for 54,277 EU firms over the period 2005 to 2014 from the AMADEUS database, a commercial European firm database. A fixed effects regression model to estimate the impact of selected macroeconomic shocks on payment delays finds that the financial crisis has a significant negative impact on payment delays of accounts receivable, even after controlling for firm characteristics such as profitability, liquidity, size, sector, country, credit collections, and credit period.

This literature establish that impact of delayed payments by the government on firms and economy is negative and significant. The next strand of the literature asks what can be done to reduce the economic cost of delayed payments, and to improve the MCPF of public procurement.

Conti et al. (2020) analyze the regulatory framework of the EU (called the Directive on Late Payments or DLP) concerning delayed payments by government. This paper focuses on G2B commercial relationships, starting by investigating the impact of the DLP on firm survival, employment and investment. They use sector level data for a sample of 23 EU countries (and Norway) from 2008-2015, using 38 two-digit sectors from the Structural Business Statistics(SBS) database (an Eurostat firm database which provides information on European firms). The authors construct the exit rate of firms for a given sector in a country as the ratio between the number of enterprises that cease activity and the stock of active enterprises in a given year and for a given country-sector unit. A difference-in-differences analysis finds that after the introduction of the Directive, the exit rate of firms decreased in sectors that sell a larger fraction of their output to the government. They also find that there is an increase in employment in those sectors more connected with the government, and conclude that more discipline in government payment terms can have considerable positive effects on economic activity.

Implications

The results of the above studies present the first empirical estimates of the quantum of the negative impact on the economy when the government delays payments for procurement transactions.Some indicative estimates of the economic impact include:

1. One standard deviation worsening in delayed payments reduce firm profit growth by 1.5-3.4 percent.
2. One point reduction in delayed payments reduce firm exit rates by 1.7-2.0 percent.
3. One standard deviation worsening in delay of payments reduce economic growth rate by 0.8-1.5 percent.
4. Paying trade loans in 30 days imply an additional 0.33 percent economic growth.

Even with the caveat that these are values estimated for countries and firms operating in the countries in the EU, where contract performance and enforcement tend to be some of the best in the world, these are useful benchmarks to frame the impact of problems of public procurement for us in India. Such an exercise is particularly pertinent for the current times, where the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a severe reduction in GDP growth and there is a large scale loss of jobs. One estimate puts the reduction in the Indian economy at 23.9 per cent in the April to June quarter of 2020 (Choudhury, 2020).

India has followed the global response to such a systemic shock, with the state becoming the saviour of last resort and rolling out economic interventions in the form of income support schemes and various public expenditure programs. However, the present situation of the Indian fiscal conditions place constraints on the credibility and sustainability of new spending. What the above literature suggests, in addition to these recent interventions, is that India would do well to find ways and means to clear her dues to direct and indirect suppliers, particularly given that a large fraction of Indian enterprises are micro, small and medium enterprises. Sahu (2020) reports that INR 5 lakh crore out of the reported INR 9.5 lakh crore of dues from the government was due to MSMEs. If reducing the delays in payments can reduce the distress related bankruptcy of such firms by even one percent, it can have a material impact on the health of these firms and continued availability of avenues for employment. More importantly, such an action will improve the confidence of small traders and vendors across the country in participating in G2B transactions. If payments can be made on time, it will reduce the MCPF and strengthen the channels through which the state can deliver a positive impact on economic growth at the time when it is most required, and to those who need the support the most.

One path suggested in international literature is to put in place a regulatory framework on public procurement. However, there is no clear evidence that indicates that this can be successful in reversing payment delays. For example, Banerjee et al. (2020) show that e-governance reforms of the MNREGA system does deliver a positive impact on reduced leakage in social benefit programs but fails to reduce payment delays. Further, Roy and Uday (2020) analyse the link between the presence of a legal framework and the corruption and they find no correlation between the two.

Conclusions

What the existing studies show is the importance of establishing systems through which the impact of the public procurement processes can be understood. Unlike in the various EU countries where these studies have been carried out, there are no systematic empirical studies that have been done in India to quantify the economic cost of delayed payments on firms and the economy. A first step towards solving the problem of delayed payments and the overall processes of public procurement would be to facilitate opportunities to gather information of the impact of these process on the operational health of firms. Such information needs to developed for India and made largely available to the research community to get a sound empirical understanding of the process of public procurement and how to improve the cost of doing business with the Indian State.

References

Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Clement Imbert, Santhosh Mathew and Rohini Pande (2020), 'E-governance, accountability and leakage in public programs: Experimental evidence from financial management reform in India', American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 12(4).

Cristina Checherita-Westphal, Alexander Klemm, and Paul Viefers (2016), 'Governments payment discipline: The macroeconomic impact of public payment delays and arrears'. Journal of Macroeconomics, 47: 147-165.

Erica Bosio and Simeon Djankov (2020), 'How large is public procurement?', World Bank Blogs, 5 February.

Franco Fiordelisi, Davide Mare, Nemanja Radic, Ornella Ricci, Philip Molyneux, and Thomas Weyman Jones (2012). 'Government late payment: the effect on the Italian economy', Doctoral Dissertation, School of Economics and Business, Loughborough University, UK.

Gaurav Choudhury (2020), 'India's GDP contracts 23.9 per cent in Q1FY21 as lockdowns, restrictions bludgeon economy', 1 September.

Isaac Kwame Essien Obeng (2017), 'Delaying payments after the financial crisis: evidence from EU companies', Acta Universitatis Agriculturae et Silviculturae Mendelianae Brunensis, 65(2): 447-463.

Maurizio Conti, Leandro Elia, Antonella Rita Ferrara and Massimiliano Ferraresi (2020), 'Government late payments and firms survival: evidence from the EU', Technical report, Societia Italiana di economica pubblica, Working paper No. 753.

M. H. Khan (2017), 'Public procurement issues with government of India', Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA).

Prashant Sahu (2020), 'Forget stimulus, clear your dues: Rs 7 lakh crore unpaid dues to industry by central govt depts and PSUs', in Financial Express, 8 September.

Shubho Roy and Diya Uday (2020), 'Does India need a procurement law?', The LEAP Journal blog, 19 August.

Vijay Kelkar and Ajay Shah (2019), 'In service of the Republic: the art and science of public policy', Penguin Allen Lane.

William Connell (2014), 'Economic impact of late payments', Technical report, Directorate General Economic and Financial Affairs (DG ECFIN), European Commission.

Rabia Khatun is an independent researcher and Sourish Das is associate professor at the Chennai Mathematics Institute. The authors would like to thank Susan Thomas for comments and suggestions on the article.

There be dragons: Off-balance-sheet liabilities of the Indian State

by Ila Patnaik and Ajay Shah.

Conventional fiscal stability analysis looks at the stock of debt and wonders whether a country can pay off this debt, under reasonable scenarios for future interest rates and fiscal surpluses. In many countries, though, the fiscal sustainability story has turned on promises made by a government which were not explicitly counted in the debt. There are obvious liabilities that are kept off the books - such as debt in public sector companies or state electricity boards. In this article we look deeper, at less obvious ways in which off-balance-sheet liabilities have arisen, and the checks and balances that can contain them.

Off balance sheet liabilities of the government

Off balance sheet items come in two kinds.

1. A promise that looks like the cashflows on a bond. Example: A pension promise to a person is no different from a series of coupons that are paid out every year. Promising a pension is exactly like issuing that comparable bond.
2. A promise that looks like an option payoff. Example: If a government is in hock to pay the lenders of a firm when it goes bankrupt, it is much like being the seller of an option. When governments write guarantees, this changes the risk profile of the exchequer and generates possibilities of large payouts when those options mature in the money.
   It should be noted that organisations backed by statute are not automatically backed by a government guarantee. As an example, in the UTI crisis of 2001, the government had no legal obligation to make good the losses of investors, but a political decision was made to use fiscal resources to pay half the loss. There is a mixture of financial risk ("Will X get into trouble?") and political risk ("Will the government backstop X?").

A correct reckoning of the liabilities of a government should add in these off-balance-sheet liabilities of both kinds. The FRBM Act brought control on one kind of off-balance-sheet liability of the Indian State: explicit guarantees given by the government. But there is more to the problem of off-balance-sheet liabilities than explicit guarantees.

Differences in cost versus differences in transparency

In the field of pensions, an interesting distinction is made between an unfunded defined benefit program vs. a funded defined benefit program that has assets invested in government bonds. In the conventional wisdom, a funded DB program is always superior to a pay-as-you-go unfunded program.

However, these two approaches are exactly the same in terms of the cashflows: both involve a highly predictable set of claims on the exchequer at future dates. To promise a pension is to implicitly issue a bond. This equivalence, between the cashflows of a bond and the cashflows of a pension, has an interesting implication. Consider a funded DB public pension program that invests in government bonds. The two streams of cashflows cancel out.

This approach to funding (holding government bonds) does not make things cheaper: it is only superior in that it is transparent and connects into the fiscal planning process. Cost savings only come about when a funded DB program invests in higher return assets, such as equities, through which the claims upon the exchequer at future dates are reduced on expectation.

What are the important off-balance-sheet liabilities of the Indian State?

Some important components of the off-balance-sheet liabilities are:

• Promises made for defined benefit pensions of civil servants, in particular the new `one rank one pension' (i.e. wage indexed) pensions for uniformed folk, and the underfunded `Employee Pension Scheme' (EPS) that is run by the EPFO. For the civil servants recruited after 1/1/2004, there is no such problem, as these new recruits are in the New Pension System.
• Promises made in a variety of health-related entitlement programs (Patnaik et. al., 2018).
• The temptation to make good the promises made by public sector financial firms, that experience distress in the future, even when there is no explicit guarantee. Of these, LIC has a balance sheet of Rs.28 trillion.
• The temptation to make good the promises made by private financial firms that experience distress in the future, even when there is no explicit guarantee. As an example, will the failure of IL&FS -- a private financial firm -- induce a direct or indirect fiscal impact upon the exchequer? So far, the government has not put money on the table, but could this change?
• The use of fiscal resources in responding to a full blown financial crisis, that may occur at a future date.
• The Parliament has enacted many laws, which could potentially evolve into large inflexible expenditures. These include `Right to education', `Right to food' and NREGS. On a similar note, the promises which are being made under `minimum support price' (MSP) could turn into large expenditures if the future brings together a certain combination of political pressures, jurisprudence and development of State capacity. Until repeal, these laws are a genotype that could, under the right combination of events at future dates, get expressed in a way that involves major fiscal risk.

These liabilities add up to large sums of money, of the same order of magnitude as the overt stock of public debt. Hence, off-balance-sheet liabilities should become more prominent in the Indian fiscal discourse.

How do the incentives of politicians and officials change?

At present, there is no check-and-balance influencing these opaque promises and risks. Each party in power looks to enter into greater off-balance-sheet obligations so as to get re-elected. How might this change?

The key thing that shapes these incentives is financial repression. At present, government debt is mostly sent into involuntary lenders. When the fiscal system graduates from financial repression to voluntary lenders, off-balance sheet liabilities would matter. There are numerous gains from removing financial repression: voluntary borrowing is more efficient than forced borrowing, the magnitude of resources available in a crisis would become greater, etc. But this requires a government that faces a skeptical bond buyer who demands a risk premium based on the extent to which the Indian State may engineer inflation or default.

In India today, there are many loose ends, which periodically induce fiscal surprises. This creates an adverse risk profile of Indian government bonds, and would drive up the required interest rate for borrowing when faced with voluntary buyers of bonds. In such a world of market discipline, when a government dips into LIC's resources, this would induce a higher cost of borrowing.

In India today, most of the attention in fiscal reforms lies upon tax policy reforms, such as the GST and the Direct Tax Code, and there is some interest in FRBM. There is much more to a mature fiscal system, including the issues of tax administration, debt management, the bond-currency-derivatives nexus, off-balance-sheet liabilities, accrual-based accounting, and the budget process. We need to broaden our research and policy work to address this full range of problems.

Tracking and understanding off-balance-sheet liabilities, communicating them to lenders, and communicating these concerns back into the budget process, is part of the work program of the future Public Debt Management Agency (PDMA) (Pandey and Patnaik, 2017). A Fiscal Council will help. Accrual based accounting will help.

Once we start paying attention to off-balance-sheet obligations, this creates fresh impetus for economic reform in many areas. As an example, if a monsoon failure induces a farm loan waiver paid for by the government, this is like a monsoon derivative that has (maybe) been written by the government. When reforms of personal insolvency and reforms of agriculture remove this possibility, the risk profile of the Indian exchequer will improve, and the cost of borrowing will go down.

Off-balance-sheet liabilities and financial reform

There is a close connection between public finance and finance, centering around the government bond market and the PDMA. For public finance, PDMA and the government bond market are the source of debt. For finance, the PDMA is the biggest investment banker of the country and the government bond market is the tool for low risk transfers of resources across time. What is less widely noticed is the intimate connection, between public finance and finance, through the question of off-balance-sheet liabilities.

How will off-balance-sheet liabilities change when micro-prudential regulation improves and the resolution corporation is setup? Financial firms will face distress less often, we will discern that distress early, and we will have an institutional mechanism to put the distressed firm down. Conversely, under present conditions, we get surprised by the difficulties in an IL&FS or in a UTI. These crises lead to a political question being thrust upon the leadership: Will you make liability-holders happy by using taxpayer money? We should, of course, have a mature political system which is able to turn down such requests most of the time, but we should have a mature financial regulatory system so that these situations do not arise in the first place.

Governments worldwide have faced claims on fiscal resources when dealing with full blown financial crises. The probability of occurrence of such crises, and the severity of such crises, is shaped by the institutional capacity in systemic risk regulation. The FSLRC apparatus for systemic risk regulation -- the Financial Stability and Development Council (FSDC) and its information system, the Financial Data Management Centre (FDMC) -- will reduce fiscal risk and thus the cost of government borrowing. As an example of the work program which should take place through FSDC/FDMC: At present, we have the possibility of runs on mutual funds (Sane et. al., 2018), which can lead to a full blown financial crisis, which requires policy thinking and reforms on a financial system scale.

Our objective in financial economic policy should be: to be as sparing as possible in ever asking for resources from public finance policy. For a sound fiscal system, we require financial sector reform. This will have a beneficial impact upon contingent off-balance-sheet liabilities and thus the cost of borrowing.

The need for a research community and a research literature

A remarkable feature of the existing Indian policy process is that no fiscal estimation was done in the policy process that led up to the announcements  about one rank one pension, or the various health insurance programs.

Even if policy makers had tried to reach into the research community to obtain such estimates, the state of data and knowledge is weak, and it is difficult for policy makers to obtain policy support from researchers. Some early work on the civil servant's defined benefit pension (Bhardwaj and Dave, 2005), one rank one pension (Sane and Shah, 2015) and banking (Shah and Thomas, 2000) is available. Much more needs to be done in this important field.

In an ideal world, record level data would be available from the government which would permit estimation of the value of the implicit debt or the implicit derivatives that the government has issued. The state of information systems and transparency of government is often a bottleneck, and creative research strategies have to be employed. As an example, Bhardwaj and Dave, 2005, utilise data from a national scale household survey to identify present and future beneficiaries of the traditional DB civil servants pension, and extrapolate the sample estimates to an estimate of the implicit pension debt associated with the traditional civil servant's DB pension. Similarly, Shah and Thomas, 2000, exploit information in stock prices to estimate the equity capital gap in banks, which helps overcome the opacity of banks and banking regulation.

A research community is required, which will build a research literature in estimating these expenditures based on exploiting diverse datasets. There will, of course, be multiple different estimates, as different researchers search for useful approximations through different assumptions and modelling strategies. A coherent picture will emerge from these debates. The PDMA, and buyers of government bonds, will be important users of this research community.

Off balance sheet liabilities and GDP growth volatility: A conjecture

There is a big gap between short spurts of GDP growth and sustained GDP growth. A mature market economy is a turtle, it plods along for a century, obtaining a low rate of growth on average, and harnessing the power of compounding. Poor countries fail to get sustained growth. The striking fact in cross-country comparisons is how volatile the GDP growth of poor countries is.

What might be going on? An analogy from a different field is useful. A well known problem in financial portfolio management is the returns that can be obtained, in the short term, by selling out-of-the-money options. For some time, the option seller seems to make a lot of money. But in time, some of those options get exercised and the portfolio gets into a lot of trouble. In similar fashion, for some time, a government that takes on option-like off-balance-sheet liabilities can gain votes and possibly accelerate economic activity, at the cost of sustainability.

Perhaps one element of the high GDP growth volatility of poor countries runs as follows. Mature fiscal systems create checks-and-balances which reduce the extent to which debt or off-balance-sheet liabilities can surge. Perhaps less developed countries have weak institutions, and then the political leadership sees a different optimisation. Short bursts of GDP growth can then be achieved in many bad ways, such as a surge in debt, piling up off-balance-sheet liabilities, etc. But this is not sustained growth: We get a spurt of high growth, and then things go wrong. This yields one more element of the translation of bad institutions into high GDP growth volatility.

References

Bhardwaj, Gautam and Surendra A. Dave, 2005. Towards estimating India's implicit pension debt, Working paper.

Pandey, Radhika and Ila Patnaik, 2017. Legislative strategy for setting up an independent debt management agency. NUJS Law Review, 10(3).

Patnaik, Ila, Shubho Roy and Ajay Shah, 2018. The rise of government-funded health insurance in India. NIPFP Working paper.

Sane, Renuka and Ajay Shah, 2015. What is the cost of one-rank-one-pension? The Leap Blog.

Sane, Renuka, Ajay Shah, Bhargavi Zaveri, 2018. Runs on mutual funds, The Leap Blog.

Shah, Ajay and Susan Thomas, 2000. Systemic fragility in Indian banking: Harnessing information from the equity market. IGIDR Working Paper.



The authors are researchers at the NIPFP in New Delhi. We are grateful to Shubho Roy, M. Govinda Rao and Arbind Modi for useful discussions.

Legislative strategy for setting up an independent debt management agency

by Radhika Pandey and Ila Patnaik.

Every government requires an institutional arrangement for its borrowing and debt management. The borrowing of the government, i.e. the sale of bonds, is enabled by a capable bond market. To the extent that the bond market is liquid and has wide ranging participation, it becomes easier for the government to obtain low cost financing. Just as resource-raising of a private firm has an `investment banker' for advice and then execution, resource-raising for governments has a `public debt manager' for advice and issuance.

In India, RBI has traditionally been the public debt manager for the Government. RBI owns or controls bond market infrastructure (exchange, clearing house and depository), and also regulates the bond market.

Historically, RBI managed government debt on paper based ledgers. However, following a scam in the government securities market in 1992 and recommendations by an RBI Committee on Repurchase Agreements, RBI set up an electronic ledger for holding government securities. This ledger, the Securities General Ledger, was legally mandated to be the only depository for government securities through the Government Securities Act. The Act gave RBI exclusive powers to oversee, govern and regulate participation in the depository.

The RBI also set up a trading platform for government securities that was based on an order matching system known as NDS-OM and helped banks set up CCIL, a bank owned clearing and settlement system on which G-Secs could be settled.

In its role as overseer of the G-Sec market, RBI also acquired powers to regulate the G-Sec spot market through a carve-out created through a government notification under Securities Contracts Regulation Act. In 2006 it was given additional powers to regulate derivatives on government securities, through an amendment to the RBI Act by adding a chapter (Chapter III-D) giving it these powers. The amendment mandated that all derivatives transactions on G-secs will be legal only if they are undertaken by RBI regulated entities. The amendment gave powers to RBI to issue directions to agencies dealing in Government securities. These steps ensured that RBI had full supervisory powers over any entity that participated in either G-sec markets or in their derivatives.

In this period, RBI did not have a clear objective, as was emphasised by the preamble of the RBI Act which described the agency as a `temporary provision'. This arrangement came under question from two points of view. On one hand, securities markets underwent legal and institutional reform that improved their market infrastructure and regulatory capacity. In parallel, the objective of inflation targeting was gaining currency as the predominant objective of RBI. This repeatedly led to the proposal that the debt management work, which conflicts with monetary policy, be placed in an independent Public Debt Management Agency, and the bond market be merged into securities markets. In a recent paper we describe the legislative aspects of implementation of the PDMA. We work out the intricacies of a PDMA Act which establishes the PDMA as an agency, and merges the bond market with securities markets.

Existing thinking on the subject, such as the Financial Sector Legislative Reforms Commission, assumes a clean slate in which the PDMA is created as an agency and a unified financial market system is enacted at one go. We work out the complexities of amending existing laws, without the assumption of a clean slate. We also work out the issues of sequencing through which the existing institutional arrangements are transitioned into the new arrangements. In light of some recent developments towards setting up of a PDMA, this paper is useful as laying the groundwork for implementing the PDMA reform.

The establishment of PDMA would yield numerous gains for the Indian macroeconomic and financial system. It would free RBI of the conflict of interest of performing debt management work for the central and state governments. It would yield low cost financing for government debt. It would result in development of the bond market by harnessing the capabilities of the securities market infrastructure. Finally it would yield improvements in the government borrowing program by selling bonds to voluntary buyers in a deep and liquid government bond market.