Banking

Competition is supposed to make banks more efficient and stimulate financial innovation by opening up of new markets. Given the dynamic changes within the Indian banking system in the last two decades, the effect of the developments in the market on the competitive behaviour of Indian commercial banks is assessed. The empirical analysis suggests monopolistic competition. This feature of the Indian banking market is consistent with other emerging-market economies and developing countries. We also find a decrease in competition across the two time-periods, before and after 2007. This may be attributed to the consolidation of the sector, with major banks acquiring smaller banks to gain economies of scale, market share and transaction volume.

To explore the empirical validity of the proposition that a rise in the interest rate would necessarily lead to a lower rate of inflation, empirical evidence from 158 countries, during 1981 to 2013, is used to critically evaluate this widely accepted idea. Based on the findings, it is argued that from a policy perspective, the so-called “inflation targeting” should be revisited.

A study of the financial processes underlying India’s high-growth trajectory of the 2000s and its relationship with “riskless capitalism,” a term first used by Raghuram Rajan in November 2014, finds that the Indian growth story cannot be over-simplistically explained as a result of “market-oriented” reforms. Public sector bank credit-financed investments, particularly in the infrastructure sector, played a significant role in sustaining growth, most crucially after the global economic crisis. Such a growth trajectory, however, proved to be unsustainable with the expansionary phase coming to an end in 2011–12 and bad loans piling up in the banking system.

The Narendra Modi government appears to have decided to privatise public sector banks (PSBs). Preparations are underway with arguments being marshalled that “there is no alternative” to privatisation.

Analytical issues have arisen in the conduct of flexible inflation targeting as the framework of monetary policy, adopted formally by India in 2016, despite the noticeable downward drift in the inflation rate and concerns of many economists about its relevance in the light of the global financial crisis. Issues such as the framework’s rationale, the medium-term inflation target, the meaning of real interest rate in the Indian context, the realism in respect of inflation expectations and of the inferred logic of the yield curve, and the implications for economic inequalities have been pointed out.