Happy New Year

— RSJ

Happy 2024, dear readers! 

We hope 2023 was good for all of you. If it wasn’t, we are glad that it’s behind you. We didn’t have too bad a 2023 ourselves. This newsletter went along swimmingly (or so we think) and we had our book ‘Missing in Action: Why You Should Care About Public Policy’ published on 23 January 2023.

Why haven’t you bought it yet?

Anyway, it seems to be doing well based on the modest expectations we had of it. I’m yet to see the pirated versions of it peddled at traffic signals. Heh, that will be the day. But then I see it on shelves of all decent bookstores and that’s quite reassuring. That apart, Pranay had another book (one productive chap, I tell you), When The Chips Are Down on semiconductor geopolitics which is an area that’s going to get more interesting and contentious in this decade. All in all, we ended up writing 44 editions during the year totaling up to over a hundred thousand words. A good year, I guess.

On to 2024 then. Like in the past, we will indulge ourselves a bit in the first edition of the year. First, looking back at our predictions for 2023 and seeing how badly off we were and then next week, I will be doing a bit of crystal ball gazing for 2024.

Before I bore you with that, let me share with you this wonderful excerpt from a paper I read recently. Titled ‘Enlightenment Ideals and Belief in Progress in the Run-up to the Industrial Revolution: A Textual Analysis’, it covers an area of eternal fascination for me - Enlightenment and its impact on Western Europe. 

Interesting conclusions and a must-read:

“The role of cultural attitudes—specifically, of Enlightenment ideals that had a progress oriented view of scientific and industrial pursuits—in Britain’s economic takeoff and industrialization has been emphasized by leading economic historians. Foremost amongst them is Joel Mokyr (2016), who states that the progress-oriented view of science promoted by great Enlightenment thinkers, such as Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, among many others, was central to what would become the “Industrial Enlightenment,” and ultimately Britain’s Industrial Revolution. In this paper, we test these claims using quantitative data from 173,031 works printed in England in English between 1500 and 1900. 

A textual analysis resulted in three salient findings. First, there is little overlap in scientific and religious works in the period under study. This indicates that the “secularization” of science was entrenched from the beginning of the Enlightenment. Second, while scientific works did become more progress-oriented during the Enlightenment, this sentiment was mainly concentrated in the nexus of science and political economy. We interpret this to mean that it was the more pragmatic works of science—those that spoke to a broader political and economic audience, especially those literate artisans and craftsmen at the heart of Britain’s industrialization—that contained the cultural values cited as important for Britain’s economic rise. Third, while volumes at the science-political economy nexus were progress-oriented for the entire time period, this was especially true of volumes related to industrialization. Thus, we have unearthed some inaugural quantitative support for the idea that a cultural evolution in the attitudes towards the potential of science accounts in some part for the British Industrial Revolution and its economic takeoff.”

2023 Predictions Scorecard

I had 8 predictions across the global economy, Indian economy and Indian social and political order. So, this is how does the 2023 report card looks like.

Global Economy

This is what I had written:

#1 The trend of securing your supply chain for critical products will get stronger.

….but it is clear to most large economies that on issues that concern national security, it will be foolhardy to not plan for worst-case scenarios any longer. And national security could mean anything, really, but I can see on energy and key technology, nations will opt for more secure supply chains with watertight bilateral partnerships than be at the mercy of distributed, multilateral chains. I won’t go as far as calling it ‘de-globalisation’ yet, but this ‘gated globalisation’ is a trend that’s here to stay.

This is playing out but a bit slower than what I expected. Disentangling and building domestic capabilities isn’t easy. And it is costly. But through the year we had increasing curbs on what hi-tech (GPU chips, AI research) and defence companies domiciled in the West could export to China. At home, we continued the push on PLI on electronics and tech equipment with debates on how much value-added manufacturing is really coming through in these schemes. Also, interestingly, we are continuing down the path of decoupling from global ‘default platforms’ especially in financial services. The Rupay platform is continuing to get bigger with a specific push from the government to derisk payment infrastructure from global networks like Visa and Mastercard. Also, in a recent statement, the central bank has suggested building a homegrown Cloud Computing infrastructure that will be used on regulated entities in India so that they aren’t tied into global Cloud service providers. 

#2 The fears of elevated inflation and a recession in the US in 2023 are overblown. The recession is due, but it will come a bit later

My view is that as supply chain issues ease up with China opening up, energy demand going up and the US continuing to be at almost full employment, we might have a 2023 where for the most part, the US inflation will be higher than target, Fed will continue to remain hawkish, and the growth will hold up. This will mean the real risk of recession will be more toward the end of the year than now.

Turns out I was accurate. In fact, the US economy has held up even better than I expected. And the Fed almost softened their tone by their last meeting of the year.

#3 Big Tech will continue to be under the cosh

I half expect India to gradually move all payment and eCommerce arms of Big Tech into a structure that’s domestically controlled and owned in 2023. Third, FTC, with Hina Khan at the helm, will accelerate antitrust and competition law changes to reduce the dominance of Big Tech.

I think I got this right in a big way. Through the year, fintechs have offloaded ‘troublesome’ shareholders (read Chinese investors) and there is a real trend of what’s called ‘reverse flipping’ where unicorns that were domiciled outside of India for tax and regulatory reasons are coming back home. Reason? Well, if you ask them they will tell you because they believe in the India story. That’s very convenient. The real reason is domestic regulators are making it difficult for a non-domiciled company to get a full bite of the Indian apple. From data security and storage requirements to tax and fund transfer regulations, the entities that are essentially Indian but are registered outside India to avoid ‘regulatory inconvenience’ are now facing business inconvenience in following that model. Here’s more on this. 

Indian Economy

I think I wrote more about the Indian economy in 2023 than any previous year. Much of it was about my surprise, in a positive way, on how much better it was doing than my expectations. Now as I read what I had written at the start of 2023, I think I had somewhat forgotten during the year that I was quite optimistic about the economy at the start of the year. Here’s what I had written:

#1 Greater optimism

I am a bit more optimistic about the broader numbers than most, and I will explain why. I think GDP growth will come in around 6.5 per cent for FY24, and inflation will be around 5 per cent. We might see a couple of rate hikes in the next few months, taking the repo rate to 6.75 per cent, but that will be it. I see domestic consumption to remain strong and exports, in the light of the shift away from China, to be good for manufacturers, and how much ever I might struggle to get behind the PLI scheme, it will yield some short-term benefits. IT exports might be a dampener, but on balance, I see more upside to these predictions.

Couldn’t have gotten it more right. I think the growth for FY 24 might come in at 7 per cent. Repo ended up at 6.5 per cent and domestic consumption and manufacturing have stayed strong while IT exports have gone worse over the year. 

#2 Digitalisation: Wave 2

There will be a significant push on digitalisation in lending and eCommerce. The UPI infrastructure has revolutionised payments and, along with GST, has accelerated the formalisation of the economy..... Also, as I mentioned in an earlier point, doing this will also mean shifting the balance of power from Big Tech-owned entities to an open platform or domestically controlled entities. I sense a strong push in this direction in 2023.

This was a no-brainer, really. I expected a bit more traction on platforms like OCEN and ONDC which haven’t taken off yet. The digitisation of the financial services sector has made low-value credit much easier for people to access. And UPI and digital KYC have enabled that to an extent that unsecured individual lending saw its biggest year ever in 2023. In fact, by the end of the year, we saw the central bank inter