Why in the News?

• A recent analysis examines the prolonged decline in corporate investment as a share of GDP in India and argues that weak demand expectations, profitability and differences in access to credit across firms are more important than simply reducing interest rates or corporate taxes.

What’s in Today’s Article?

• Corporate Investment (Background, Trend, Factors Determining Investment, Why Firm Size Matters, etc.)

Corporate Investment in India

• Corporate investment refers to expenditure by businesses on productive assets such as factories, machinery, equipment, technology and other forms of fixed capital.
• It is an important driver of economic growth because it expands productive capacity, creates employment and can improve productivity.
• A recently conducted study examines corporate investment through the lens of manufacturing firms and asks why private investment has remained subdued despite measures such as corporate tax cuts and a relatively low-interest-rate environment.

Trend in Corporate Investment

• According to the analysis, corporate investment as a share of GDP experienced a major increase in 2004, rising from 6.5% to 10.3% in a single year. It subsequently increased during India's high-growth period.
• Investment declined during the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) but later began recovering. This revival continued until demonetisation in 2016, after which corporate investment entered a prolonged decline.
• The study highlights that the decline after demonetisation is particularly significant because, unlike the Global Financial Crisis, which originated from an external global shock, demonetisation was a domestic policy shock.
• The analysis also notes that investment had already begun declining before the COVID-19 pandemic, suggesting that the pandemic alone cannot explain the prolonged weakness.

What Determines Corporate Investment?

• There are three major factors influencing a firm's decision to invest in a new factory or other productive assets.
• Expected Profitability
  • A firm will invest when it expects the additional productive capacity to generate sufficient profits.
  • Economies of scale mean that larger factories and equipment can often generate higher profit rates than smaller investments. However, every firm also faces a limit to how much it can sell.
  • Once productive capacity exceeds potential demand, additional investment may remain underutilised.
  • Therefore, investment depends not simply on whether a firm can build a factory, but on whether it expects sufficient future demand and profitability from that factory.
• Confidence in Future Returns
  • Investment involves a long time horizon. A factory may operate for decades, meaning firms must form expectations about future demand, profits and government policy.
  • The study uses Keynes's concept of "animal spirits" to describe this confidence.
  • When businesses are optimistic, expected profitability increases and firms are more willing to invest. When businesses become pessimistic, their expected profitability falls, reducing investment.
  • The authors argue that demonetisation affected investment not only by reducing immediate profitability but also by weakening confidence in future economic and policy conditions.
• Cost of Credit
  • Interest rates matter in two ways.
  • First, a firm compares the expected profitability of an investment with the return it could obtain by simply holding interest-bearing assets.
  • Investment therefore becomes attractive when expected profitability exceeds the relevant market interest rate.
  • Second, firms that need to borrow to finance investment face a direct cost of credit.
  • However, the importance of interest rates differs according to firm size.

Why Firm Size Matters?

• The analysis distinguishes between small, medium and large firms because their investment constraints are different.
• The authors compiled a balanced panel dataset of listed manufacturing firms between 2000 and 2024 using the Prowess database and categorised firms into three size groups.
• The analysis finds a clear asymmetry:

• Smaller firms: Lower profitability and higher interest costs.
• Larger firms: Higher profitability and lower interest costs.

• This difference has important implications for investment policy.
• Smaller Firms Are More Credit-Constrained
  • Smaller firms generally have less internal capital. Consequently, they need to depend more heavily on external borrowing to finance investment.
  • As borrowing increases, the cost of credit can rise because lenders perceive greater risk. This reflects what economist Michal Kalecki described through the principle of increasing risk.
  • Therefore, even when a small and large firm have access to similar technology, the smaller firm may face a significantly higher financing constraint.
• Large Firms Are More Demand-Constrained
  • Large firms typically possess greater internal capital and therefore face less severe financing constraints.
  • However, they may already have sufficient productive capacity relative to the market they can serve. Their investment is therefore constrained more by demand and expected sales than by the availability of credit.
  • This produces an important asymmetry:
    • Small firms are more likely to be constrained by finance, while large firms are more likely to be constrained by demand.

Why Lower Interest Rates May Not Be Enough?

• The study argues that this distinction helps explain why conventional cost-side measures have not produced a strong investment response.
• India reduced the corporate tax rate from 30% to 22% in 2018, while the Reserve Bank of India also maintained a relatively low-interest-rate environment for a period.
• Yet corporate investment did not experience a corresponding revival.
• The study argues that reducing interest rates may not substantially increase investment among smaller firms because their fundamental constraint may be access to credit and insufficient internal capital, rather than simply the headline interest rate.
• For large firms, lower interest rates may have an even smaller effect because these firms are primarily constrained by market demand rather than financing costs.
• Similarly, tax cuts may increase post-tax profitability but may not induce investment if firms do not expect sufficient demand for additional output.

What Could Revive Corporate Investment?

• The analysis argues that policies should focus on shifting the profitability curve outward rather than relying primarily on cost-side interventions.
• The proposed mechanism is stronger autonomous government expenditure.
• Government expenditure can create additional demand for goods and services. Higher demand can improve firms' expectations regarding future sales and profitability, encouraging both small and large firms to invest.
• Such expenditure can therefore influence investment through the demand channel, rather than merely reducing the cost of financing.

Conclusion

• The prolonged weakness of corporate investment in India cannot be explained by interest rates alone.
• The analysis highlights a fundamental difference between firms: smaller firms face greater financing constraints, while larger firms are more constrained by demand.
• This means that policies such as lower interest rates or corporate tax cuts may have limited effects when businesses lack confidence in future demand.
• The authors therefore argue that stronger demand creation through government expenditure could play a more important role in reviving private investment and generating employment.