Making India attractive to foreign capital: Beyond the RBI's June measures

Last month, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) announced a series of measures to support the rupee by encouraging foreign borrowing. So far, they seem to have worked. The rupee has stabilised. But the important question now is whether this stability will last.

 

The answer depends on whether the problem is temporary or permanent. If it is temporary, the RBI’s strategy makes sense. Borrowing can bridge the gap in dollar supply until conditions improve. But if the problem is permanent, borrowing only postpones the adjustment. Eventually, the same problem will return and the country will have to deal with it from a weaker position, since it will have accumulated debts in the meantime.

 

So, is the problem temporary? Only partly. The war in West Asia has pushed up oil prices, increasing India’s import bill and putting pressure on the balance of payments. But this factor is only a small part of the problem. Even if the tensions continue for a few more months and oil prices rise back towards $100 a barrel, India’s current account deficit should remain within its traditional “safe limit” of 2 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP).

 

The bigger problem lies  in the capital account. For much of the period since the 1991 reforms, India attracted substantial foreign capital. During the investment boom of the mid-2000s, inflows were more than sufficient to finance the current account deficit (CAD) and still allowed the RBI to accumulate foreign exchange reserves. That is why a CAD of around 2 per cent of GDP came to be seen as safe. Over the last couple of years, however, capital inflows have weakened steadily and, at current levels, they are no longer sufficient to finance even a modest CAD.

 

There is another reason why foreign capital matters. The government’s goal of making India a “Viksit Bharat” by 2047 will require the economy to grow at around 8 per cent a year, in real terms, for the next two decades. Achieving that will require much higher investment. Domestic savings alone are unlikely to be enough. Foreign capital will, therefore, have to fill part of the gap.

 

Consider the incremental capital output ratio (ICOR). It measures how many rupees of investment are needed to generate one additional rupee of GDP. India’s ICOR has historically ranged between 4.5 and 5. At that rate, sustaining a real GDP growth rate of 8 per cent requires investment of 36-40 per cent of GDP every year.

 

Today, India’s gross savings and investment are both around 30 per cent of GDP. Raising investment to the level needed for sustained high growth would, therefore, require an additional 6-10 per cent of GDP every year. At today’s GDP of around $4 trillion, even the lower end of that range amounts to roughly $240 billion a year in investment. Unless domestic savings increase substantially, India will need foreign capital to bridge this gap.

 

The obvious question, then, is how India can attract more foreign capital. The RBI’s June 5 package, especially the elimination of capital gains tax on foreign investors’ bond purchases, is a step in the right direction. But much more needs to be done. For example, nothing has been announced so far to encourage foreign direct investment (FDI). This matters because FDI is not only more stable than portfolio investment, but also brings technology and access to global production networks that India needs to build a competitive manufacturing sector.

 

To encourage FDI inflows, three policy actions are crucial. The first step is to liberalise India’s trade regime. Import tariffs need to come down. The Customs duty structure should be simplified. Quantity control orders (QCOs) that make it harder for manufacturers to source imported inputs also need to be phased out.

 

Second, policymakers need to rebuild the bilateral investment treaties (BITs) network that was dismantled entirely between 2016 and 2024. Setting up a factory requires a large, long-term investment. Foreign investors are more likely to make such commitments when they are confident that any disputes will be resolved through a credible and predictable legal process.

 

Third, policy certainty matters. Investors making long-term commitments need confidence that the rules will not change after their investments are made. The retrospective tax dispute involving Vodafone damaged that confidence. Although the government has since ruled out such taxation, more recent policy reversals have kept those concerns alive. The RBI’s decision in March requiring banks to unwind their offshore forward positions, at an estimated cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, is one example. Whether or not the policy was justified, unexpected changes of this kind increase the perceived risk of investing in India.

 

The RBI’s June measures have bought India some time. The challenge now is to use that time wisely. India needs a permanent strategy to attract foreign capital, especially FDI. That means making it easier to invest, protecting investors through predictable rules, and avoiding policy reversals after investments have been made.

 

Indian policymakers cannot guarantee that foreign capital will come. But they can ensure that there are no avoidable reasons for it to stay away.

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The writer is associate professor of economics, IGIDR, Mumbai. The views are personal