In the past 6 business days, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has launched 3 new programs, a study on the corporate bond market in India, published a major working paper on fiscal policy capable of handling variations in business cycles and all of its regular duties of auctioning bills.

The programs launched are integral to understanding how the massive Indian economy works. More importantly the RBI, is inventing new ways to track and get a grasp on the economy.

The first program is the Export Data Processing and Monitoring System or EDPMS. This is a major achievement to expedite, increase accuracy, remove lag times, speed transmission to all parties and significantly reduce paper usage in the process. The effective greening of this system shows that streamlining any process has side benefits. More details in a separately published article.

The second program is designed to monitor inflation and create reasonable expectations of inflation through a survey. The program is called “Inflation Expectations Survey of Households”. The Reserve Bank of India says, “the Survey seeks qualitative responses from households on price changes” and that the RBI will be used “as one of the important inputs to the monetary policy formulation”.

The third program launched was a Consumer Confidence Survey. This survey will look at all aspects of household spending and gauge consumer’s confidence with their ability to make household purchases both now and in the future. “The survey seeks responses on questions pertaining to economic conditions, household circumstances, income & spending, perceptions on prices, employment prospects, outlays for major purchases such as gold, car, house, durable goods etc.”, the RBI reported. This survey is now underway.

The Study on Corporate Bonds is an interesting report that compares India’s corporate debt market to other emerging economies and correlates similar debt structures in both countries to help India analyze its bond market. India has instituted reforms to its corporate bond markets and will now track over the past 10 years its evolution versus Japan, Korea, Singapore, Malaysia and Brazil. The study was conducted by Professor Sunder Raghavan, Prof. of Finance, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University; and Director Shri Ashok Sahoo, Financial Stability Unit; Shri Angshuman Hait Assistant Adviser, Department of Statistics and Information Management; and Dr. Saurabh Ghosh, Assistant Adviser, Department of Economic and Policy Research, of the Reserve Bank. An extended article will be published here.

A great deal of time will be spent studying the working paper issued last week regarding the stability of India by using econometrics from institutions such as IMF, OECD and the European Commission and comparing them to India’s statistics and data. This paper in many ways is the equivalent in weight to Ken Rogoff’s and Carmela Reinhart’s, “This time is different”, except this is clearer and 500 pages fewer. The conclusions of this study will be here. – By Julien David

IMF, OECD, Reserve Bank of India