Atanu Dey explains what Dutch Disease is (quoting from a website):
In 1959 a large reservoir of natural gas was discovered in the Netherlands, which by 1976 earned that country revenues of some $2 billion in addition to an estimated $3.5 billion of savings in imports. By the mid 1970s, gross corporate investment had fallen by 15% since the start of the decade, while employment in manufacturing had declined by 16%. The total level of unemployment had risen from a modest 1.1% to 5.1%, while the share of profits in national income which had averaged 16.8% in the 1960s had fallen to 3.5% in the first half of the 1970s. While the first oil crisis had a devastating effect on most of the western industrial base, why did The Netherlands, with its new-found fortune in natural gas, fare worse than most?
This process of de-industrialisation of the existing manufacturing base was attributed to the upward pressure that the energy discovery placed on the Guilder and the wage rate, and was dubbed the Dutch Disease. Since then, the term’s use has widened considerably to encompass any situation whereby a country’s apparent good economic fortune ultimately proves to have a net detrimental effect.
..and wonders if India could suffer from it: “India is a two-sector economy: the urban educated sector and the rural uneducated sector. The latter forms the base of the huge pyramid and toils away at a subsistence existence. The urban sector is seeing a boom what with BPO and ITES and all sorts of stuff. Policy makers, politicians, journalists, management gurus, TV reporters, and everyone and his brother are totally wrapped up in this incredible phenomenon. India, they all scream, has arrived. Having convinced themselves of that, they focus entirely on that part of the urban sector that is involved in the boom. This leads to a shocking neglect of the larger rural sector. Then when the boom runs out of steam, the country is worse off than what it would have been without the boom at all.”
I would tend to agree with Atanu. The boom that we are seeing is in pockets of India. That is a good start, but we cannot forget the 70% of India that is largely unimpacted. India needs balanced, all-round growth. Maybe in the coming year, India’s politicians will think about the rural populace since they will be voting.
