Take a look at this “Phillips” curve for India (its not really a real Phillips curve – as it is the relationship between annual real GDP growth and inflation):

Do you notice something?

Yes you are right – the slope of the Phillips curve is wrong. Normally one would expect that there was a positive relationship between real GDP growth and inflation, but for India the opposite seems to be the case. Higher inflation is associated with lower GDP growth.

The reason for this obviously is that supply shocks is the dominant factor behind variations in Indian inflation. That should not be a surprise as nearly 50% of the consumption basket is food.

Rain as a supply shock

A closer scrutiny of the Indian inflation data will actually show that the swings in Indian inflation primarily is a rainy phenomenon. Hence, the Indian monsoon and the amount of rainfall greatly influences the food prices and as a result short-term swings in inflation is primarily due to supply shocks in the form of more or less rainfall.

Obviously if the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was following a strict ECB style inflation target then monetary policy would be strongly pro-cyclical in India as negative supply shocks would push up inflation and down real GDP growth and that would trigger a tightening of monetary policy. This would obviously be an insanely bad way of conducting monetary policy and the RBI luckily realises this.

The RBI therefore focuses on wholesale prices (WPI) rather than CPI in the conduct of monetary policy and that to some extent reduces the problem. The RBI further try to correct the inflation data for supply shocks to look at “core” measures of inflation where food and energy prices are excluded from the inflation data.

However, the problem with use “core” inflation that it is in no way given that changes in food prices is driven by supply factors – even though it often is. Hence, demand side inflation might very well push up domestic food prices as well. Hence, it is therefore very hard to adjust inflation data for supply shocks. That said it is pretty hard to say that the RBI has followed any consistent monetary policy target in recent years and inflation has clearly been drifting upwards – and food prices can likely not explain the uptrend in inflation.

On the other hand NGDP targeting provides the perfect adjustment for supply shocks and it would therefore be much better for the RBI to implement an NGDP target rather than a variation of inflation targeting. Unfortunately at the present the RBI don’t really officially target anything and monetary policy can hardly be said to be rule based. As I stressed in my earlier post on Indian monetary policy the RBI needs to move away from the present ad hoc’ism and introduce a rule based monetary policy.

PS Monetary policy is certainly not India’s only economic problem – and not even the most important economic problem. I my view India’s primary economic problem is excessive interventionism in the economy, which greatly reduces the growth potential of the economy.

PPS see also this fairly new IMF Working Paper on monetary policy rules. The conclusions are quite supportive of NGDP targeting.

PPPS The link between rain, inflation and monetary policy in India is being complicated further by the fiscal response in the form of food and agricultural subsidies in India, but that is a very long story to tell…