Modi, Sisi & Jokowi: Three New Leaders Face the Challenge of Food & Fuel Subsidies

In few policy areas does good economics seem to conflict so dramatically with good politics as in the practice of subsidies to food and energy.  Economics textbooks explain that these subsidies are lose-lose policies. In the political world that can sound like an ivory tower abstraction.   But the issue of unaffordable subsidies happens to be front and center politically now, in a number of places around the world.   Three major new leaders in particular are facing this challenge:  Sisi in Egypt, Jokowi in Indonesia, and Modi in India.

The Egyptian leader is doing a much better job of facing up to the need to cut subsidies than one might have expected.  India’s new prime minister, by contrast, is doing worse than expected – even torpedoing a long-anticipated WTO agreement in the process.  In Indonesia it is too soon to tell.

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Egypt

Egypt’s new president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, did something In July that few leaders in North Africa or the Middle East had been able to accomplish before: he sharply cut longstanding fuel subsidies and allowed prices to rise (by 41% to 78% and more).   Surprisingly fewprotests materialized.

Egypt’s food subsidy program badly needs reform as well.  The country has been spendingover $5 billion a year on food subsidies.  The price of bread has been kept so low that, famously, it is often fed to animals. Past attempts to reduce such subsidies in North African countries have brought unrest and even government overthrow.  But it looks like the Sisi government is beginning reforms here as well.  Bread subsidies have already been cut by 13 per cent.

In a sense, he had little choice.  Egypt’s fiscal path under his predecessor’s policies was unsustainable.   Even with subsidy cuts, the current government only hopes to bring the budget deficit down to 10 per cent of GDP in the coming fiscal year, as opposed to 14% otherwise.   Still, who would have expected President Sisi, who took office in a fragile political environment, to start off with far more serious fiscal reforms than Indian Prime Minister Modi, who came to office amid hopes for sweeping economic reform and with a whopping democratic majority?

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Indonesia

Also in July, Joko Widodo (“Jokowi”) was elected President in Indonesia, another country with a long history of fuel subsidies that it can no longer afford [currently costing $21 billion, or 13%-20% of government spending].  Outgoing President Yudhoyono took the first courageous step of raising fuel prices a year ago.  [The fuel subsidies problem is even worse in oil-producing countries like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, where the right to dirt-cheap fuel is considered the national patrimony.  Indonesia itself is no longer an oil-exporter, in part because low domestic prices have encouraged rapid growth in fuel consumption.]  Jokowi does not take office until October, but his advisers favor cutting the remaining subsidies. He has forthrightly expressed an intention of doing so, gradually, over a 4-year period.

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Market Failure vs. Government Failure

Why do economists feel confident that they are right to oppose these commodity subsidies?  Agricultural and energy markets tend to be relatively close to the ideal of perfect competition, with large numbers of consumers on the demand side and producers on the supply side.  (Where competition in commodities is imperfect, government itself is usually the problem, not the cure.)    Thus the classic economics argument applies:  setting the price artificially low, with the motive of benefiting consumers, works to discourage production and creates a gap of excess demand that usually has to be met by rationing.    Setting the price artificially high, with the motive of benefiting producers, discourages consumption and creates a gap of excess supply that often ends up in wasteful government stockpiles.   And either way, the policy is an invitation to corruption.

Skeptics of the Invisible Hand point out that, left to themselves, private markets can fail in a number of ways.  Two of the most prominent justifications for government intervention in the marketplace are environmental externalities such as air pollution and inequality in income distribution.  What is so striking about subsidies for food and fossil fuels is that, notwithstanding that the policies are often promoted in the name of the environment or equity, in practice they usually do little to help achieve these goals and often have the opposite effect.   Less than 20% of Egyptian food subsidies go to poor people.  In India, less than 0.1 per cent of rural subsidies for LPG (Liquefied Petroleum Gas) go to the poorest quintile, while 52.6 per cent go to the richest.  Gasoline (petrol) subsidies in most countries go to the middle class; they are the ones who drive cars, while the poor walk or take public transportation.  The same is true of other forms of fossil fuel subsidies:  worldwide, far less than 20% of the benefits go to the poorest 20% of the population. 

 

Typically they are also ruinous for the budget, as in all three countries considered here.

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India

Can one single misguided policy do worse than simultaneously hurt economic efficiency, the environment, equity, corruption, the government budget, and the trade balance?  Yes it can.   It can derail the most important progress in multilateral trade negotiations of the last ten years!   This from a country, India, where a new president was widely considered likely to tackle much-needed market reforms.

Agricultural subsidies sometimes seek to keep prices low (to benefit consumers at the expense of producers), especially in poor countries, and sometimes seek to keep prices high (to benefit producers at the expense of consumers), especially in rich countries. India’s policies try to do both. As a result, India has accomplished the extraordinary feat of rationing grain to consumers at artificially low prices through a card system and yet at the same time suffering excess supply from farmers, because they are paid high prices.   (Agriculturalinputs are also subsidized — electricity, water and fertilizer — thereby delivering the requisite environmental damage.)  The government has had to buy up huge stockpiles of surplus rice and wheat that are rotting away [reportedlymore than 20 million tons of rice and 40 million tons of wheat reserves, at present].  The limited amount that is available for consumers is allocated in ways that are both corrupt and inconsistent with the stated goal of helping the poor.

The government would like to keep its subsidies and stockpiles. But it knows that this would violate international trade rules.  Modi has taken the unusual step of vetoing the Trade Facilitation Agreement that WTO member countries thought they had reached at a climactic summit in Bali in December.  This was to be the first substantive achievement in the long-suffering Doha Round launched in 2001.  It would have benefited all countries, including India.  But WTO agreements are supposed to require consensus.  Domestic political considerations evidently persuaded Modi to torpedo the agreement, which was to have been finalized by the end of July, if he couldn’t first extract a change in international rules to allow India permanently to keep its subsidies and its stockpiles.

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What is a leader to do?

Of course the US and other rich countries have their own distorting subsidies in agriculture and energy. The US still subsidizes oil production and Europe still subsidizes coal.  The luckiest crops include cotton, sugar, dairy products, and grain.  The subsidies often hurt environmental quality, domestic consumer pocketbooks, and producers in developing countries, as well as the budget and general economic efficiency.    But at least rich country governments don’t usually set a particular low price for an important commodity and lead consumers to think they will never have to pay more.

Once subsidies are in place, they are extraordinarily difficult to remove.  People become accustomed to the idea that the government is responsible for the price of food or energy.  If world commodity prices go up, as they often have over the last decade, citizens who are accustomed to the domestic price being set in the market are more likely to accept the reality that their officials can’t wave a magic wand to insulate them from the unpleasant shock.   But people who are accustomed to the price being set by the government do hold it responsible.  In some countries, the removal of subsidies has led to civil unrest and even the overthrow of the government.

That is a strong reason not to adopt such subsidies in the first place.  But it doesn’t necessarily mean that, once in place, keeping them is the better option for the savvy politician.  If the alternative to raising the price is shortages or rationing through long lines, that can bring angry protestors out into the streets as well.  Similarly, the procrastinating leader is unlikely to look like a political genius if ever-widening gaps force an even bigger rise in the retail price when the day of reckoning comes.  (The gaps that tend to raise the necessary adjustment over time include declining domestic supply as producers respond to low price incentives; widening trade deficits, as the commodity shortfall is imported; and growing budget deficits, as the government pays for the price difference.)

Some subsidies do find their way to the poor.  [Cooking oil is an example.]  Ideally, as a matter of compassion as well as politics, other more efficient means of supporting incomes at the bottom will be instituted at the same time that subsidies for food and energy are cut.  Developing countries have learned a lot about efficient transfer mechanisms, from policy innovations such as the Conditional Cash Transfers of Mexico’s  Progresa/Oportunidad or Brazil’s Bolsa Familia and from technological innovations such as India’s Unique Identification system.  But in countries where the adjustment does not come until a budget crisis forces it, there may be no money left for transfers to cushion the pain.

The savvy politician should probably announce the unpleasant adjustment as soon as he takes office.  That seems to be the approach of Jokowi and Sisi.  Ironic that the third politician, Modi, the one who comes in with the biggest electoral mandate and the most hypeabout market reforms, is the one who is already falling short.

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[A shorter version, “The Subsidy Trap,” appeared at Project Syndicate.  Comments can be posted there.].