New Delhi: Noted economist and member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (PMEAC) Rathin Roy on Wednesday dismissed the lowering of India’s growth projections by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, saying they often go ‘wrong’.
While the IMF has lowered India’s growth forecast for the current fiscal by 0.5 percentage points to 6.7%, the World Bank has pegged economic expansion at 7%, down from 7.2% projected earlier. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) too lowered India’s current fiscal growth to 7% from 7.4%, while RBI cut economic growth forecast to 6.7% from earlier projection of 7.3%.
“IMF’s growth projections are 80% wrong...World Bank’s growth projections are 65% wrong,” he said in a media interaction when asked to comment on lowering of growth projections by international multilateral lending agencies.
While the council has been dismissive of projections of multi-lateral lending agencies, the government does not miss an opportunity to tom-tom improvement in ease of doing business ranking by World Bank and other such improvement in indices.
Roy, who is also director of economic think tank National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), however, said the council will examine causes of slowdown. India’s economic growth slipped to a three-year low of 5.7% in the first quarter of the current fiscal.
Replying queries at the same media interaction, Niti Aayog member and chairman of the council Bibek Debroy said, “whether we like it or not we don’t have good data on employment”.
“In a country like India, you cannot get good data on employment and jobs from enterprise surveys. The labour bureau enterprise surveys covers less than 1.5% of total employment,” Debroy said. Noting that we can get data on unemployment and employment in India through household surveys, he said the last National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) household survey was out in 2011-12 and the next results of NSSO household surveys will not be available till 2018.