Arti Grover Goswami

Is India’s Manufacturing Sector Moving Away from Cities?

This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. It finds that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban locations. Although the secular trend for Indias manufacturing urbanization has slowed down, the localized importance of education and infrastructure has not. The results suggest that districts with better education and infrastructure have experienced a faster pace of urbanization, although higher urban-rural cost ratios cause movement out of urban areas. This process is associated with improvements in the spatial allocation of plants across urban and rural locations. Spatial location of plants has implications for policy on investments in education, infrastructure, and the livability of cities. The high share of urbanization occurring in the informal sector suggests that urbanization policies that contain inclusionary approaches may be more successful in promoting local development and managing its strains than those focused only on the formal sector. Cities are evolving in India from places of goods production to forges of human capital and coping mechanisms for survival.

Exporting Services : A Developing Country Perspective

The book builds on previous research, including that by the World Bank, on trade in services. Such research includes analyses of the effect of liberalizing services in developing countries and sectoral studies on financial, transportation, telecommunication, and professional services, as well as on international negotiations. The conceptual framework for this book is based on the existing literature on the service sector (Francois and Hoekman 2010; Hoekman and Mattoo 2008). Recognizing the heterogeneity in both, economic structure of developing countries and their service exports, this book takes an eclectic approach to identifying successful strategies. Chapter two surveys the literature on determinants of service exports and presents an illustrative empirical model that synthesizes the available models on trade in services. Because trade data on services are scarce and have a number of weaknesses, rigorous econometric analysis has serious limits. The subsequent chapters of the book examine the determinants of trade in services through case studies of the experiences of countries with varying degrees of success. The book analyzes service export performance for the following countries: Brazil, Chile, the Arab Republic of Egypt, India, Kenya, Malaysia, and the Philippines. The countries were selected on the basis of their performance in global trade (especially trade in services), their regional role, and the availability of data and because they have consciously pursued policies to promote service exports.

The misallocation of land and other factors of production in India

This paper quantifies the misallocation of manufacturing output and factors of production between establishments across Indian districts during 1989-2010. It first distills a number of stylized facts about misallocation in India, and demonstrates the validity of misallocation metrics by connecting them to regulatory changes in India that affected real property. With this background, the study next quantifies the implications and determinants of factor and output misallocation. Although more-productive establishments in India tend to produce more output, factors of production are grossly misallocated. A better allocation of output and factors of production is associated with greater output per worker. Misallocation of land plays a particularly important role in these challenges.

Vertical FDI versus outsourcing : the role of host country human capital

The existing literature on offshoring neglects the importance of host country conditions in affecting the boundaries of a firm. In this paper, the author focuses on the role of the host countrys human capital in affecting the organization of offshore production. Acknowledging that an input is produced offshore only after training the host labor, this training cost depends on the human capital gap between the home and the host country. The model finds that a sourcing firm prefers to offshore production internationally only if the human capital gap between the home and the host country is below a threshold. Secondly, as the human capital gap increases, the probability for international outsourcing vis-a-vis intra-firm trade increases. Finally, as opposed to conventional wisdom, the model shows the possibility of outsourcing inputs of a high-tech good when the human capital gap between the home and the host is high.The existing literature on offshoring neglects the importance of host country conditions in affecting the boundaries of a firm. In this paper, we focus on the role of the host countrys human capital in affecting the organization of offshore production. Acknowledging that an input is produced offshore only after training the host labor, we propose that this training cost depends on the human capital gap between the home and the host country. Our model finds that a sourcing firm prefers to offshore production internationally only if the human capital gap between the home and the host country is below a threshold. Secondly, as the human capital gap increases, the probability for international outsourcing vis-à-vis intra-firm trade increases. Finally, as opposed to conventional wisdom, our model shows the possibility of outsourcing inputs of a high-tech good when the human capital gap between the home and the host is high.

Services trade protection and economic isolation

Poor connectivity is conventionally blamed on difficult geography and low income. But economic isolation could also result from policy choices in key ‘linking’ services such as air transportation and telecommunications. A new database on applied services trade policies reveals that many countries restrict trade in the very services that connect them with the rest of the world. We present evidence that restrictive policies lead to more concentrated market structures and limited access to services, even after taking into account the influence of geography and income. Moving from an intermediate level of restrictiveness to an open regime could lead to a 20 percentage point increase in cellular teledensity in the telecommunications sector and to a 25 per cent increase in flight connections per airline in the aviation sector, respectively.

Vertical Foreign Direct Investment versus Outsourcing: A Welfare Comparison from the Perspective of a Host Country

In the offshoring literature, there is a huge disconnect between the alternative modes of organizing offshore production and their relative welfare impact on a host country. We bridge this gap by comparing the welfare of a host country from vertical foreign direct investment (VFDI) vis-a-vis international outsourcing. Our model finds that the ability to maximize welfare in the alternative modes of organizing offshore production is contingent on the absorptive capacity of the host country. If a host countrys absorptive capacity is above a critical threshold, outsourcing is more welfare enhancing vis-a-vis VFDI; while even with an absorptive capacity lower than this critical threshold, outsourcing being welfare improving over VFDI cannot be ruled out.

The golden quadrilateral highway project and urban/rural manufacturing in India

This study investigates the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral highway project on the urban and rural growth of Indian manufacturing. The Golden Quadrilateral project upgraded the quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. The study uses a difference-in-difference estimation strategy to compare non-nodal districts based on their distance from the highway system. For the organized portion of the manufacturing sector, the Golden Quadrilateral project led to improvements in both urban and rural areas of non-nodal districts located 0-10 km from the Golden Quadrilateral. These higher entry rates and increases in plant productivity are not present in districts 10-50 km away. The entry effects are stronger in rural areas of districts, but the differences between urban and rural areas are modest relative to the overall effect. The productivity consequences are similar in both locations. The most important difference appears to be the greater activation of urban areas near the nodal cities and rural areas in remote locations along the Golden Quadrilateral network. For the unorganized sector, no material effects are found from the Golden Quadrilateral upgrades in either setting. These findings suggest that in the time frames that we can consider -- the first five to seven years during and after upgrades -- the economic effects of major highway projects contribute modestly to the migration of the organized sector out of Indian cities, but are unrelated to the increased urbanization of the unorganized sector.

Service outsourcing: The home, the host and the provider

Although offshoring service providers have grown meteorically in the last two decades, the phenomenon is still primarily analyzed through the lens of a home country and its firms. This paper presents a framework for explaining some of the stylized facts of the offshore service provider industry. The model characterizes the service choice of offshore service providers under alternative skill distribution and also explains why complex service providers employ more skilled workers, pay higher wages, and have a lower scale of provision. Finally, it sheds light on the relationship between partnering country sizes and wage inequality.

A detailed anatomy of factor misallocation in India

This paper complements the results of earlier work on factor misallocation. The paper first expands the methodology and provides two important decompositions for the main indices. The main result is that factor and output misallocation across districts is at least as important as misallocation within districts. Second, the paper provides an exploration of the service sector that complements earlier work on manufacturing. The analysis shows that labor plays a fundamental role for misallocation in services, whereas land is the determining factor in manufacturing. Third, the paper expands our earlier work on the effects of policies on misallocation by looking at a much broader range of policies, and find strong evidence of their effects on misallocation. Finally, the paper take steps towards the identification of the causal effect of misallocation on output per worker by developing a novel instrumental variable approach and a simulation approach that allows for checking the consistency of the empirical results.

Effects of land misallocation on capital allocations in India

Growing research and policy interest focuses on the misallocation of output and factors of production in developing economies. This paper considers the possible misallocation of financial loans. Using plant-level data on the organized and unorganized sectors, the paper describes the temporal, geographic, and industry distributions of financial loans. The focus of the analysis is the hypothesis that land misallocation might be an important determinant of financial misallocation (for example, because of the role of land as collateral against loans). Using district-industry variations, the analysis finds evidence to support this hypothesis, although it does not find a total reduction in the intensity of financial loans or those being given to new entrants. The analysis also considers differences by gender of business owners and workers in firms. Although potential early gaps for businesses with substantial female employment have disappeared in the organized sector, a sizeable and persistent gap remains in the unorganized sector.