Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
News

India Enters Recession as Virus Pummels No. 3 Asian Economy (bloomberg.com) 64

India entered an unprecedented recession with the economy contracting in the three months through September due to the lingering effects of lockdowns to contain the Covid-19 outbreak. From a report: Gross domestic product declined 7.5% last quarter from a year ago, the Statistics Ministry said Friday. That was milder than an 8.2% drop forecast by economists in a Bloomberg survey, and and a marked improvement from a record 24% contraction the previous quarter. Prime Minister Narendra Modi imposed one of the world's strictest lockdowns in March, sapping demand for non-essential goods and services. Despite the measures to stem the pandemic, the country is now home to the second-highest Covid-19 infections after the U.S. at 9.3 million cases. The second straight quarterly decline in GDP, pushes Asia's third-largest economy into its first technical recession in records going back to 1996. Financial and real estate services -- among the biggest component of India's dominant services sector -- shrank 8.1% last quarter from a year ago, while trade, hotels, transport and communication declined 15.6%. Manufacturing gained 0.6%, electricity and gas expanded 4.4% and agriculture grew 3.4%.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

India Enters Recession as Virus Pummels No. 3 Asian Economy

Comments Filter:
  • by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @11:23AM (#60770480)

    1. What can your economy produce, that other economies cannot or will not?
    2. Who are your competitors what do they do better than you at, and what do you do better than them at?
    3. Do customers care about your advantages?
    3. A. If Not can you find something new to give an advantage that the customer will care about.
    3. B. If So, be sure to market that Advantage so others know about it.
    4. Be sure to price the product in a way that you can sustain a workforce, keep the product producing, allow for realistic growth.
    5. Reevalute your position over and over again.
    6. Have a plan for emergencies (Plan for at least 3 months of downtime), where you can keep employees hired to prevent them from moving to a different place, because when you start up again you will want your skilled workforce.

    This plan may not make you #1 economy but it should keep your economy steady with a happy workforce. In which over time being steady will allow yourself to improve.

    • by ranton ( 36917 )

      Much of your plan is only relevant for a command economy, not market economies. You have basically laid out a plan based on business strategy 101 principles and have applied them to an economy instead of a business. So this can apply to a country like China, but the way western countries can support their market economies would be far different. India arguably has enough crony capitalism that is could act like China does if it wanted to though.

      Having a plan for emergencies though is certainly in the realm o

  • by hey! ( 33014 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @11:31AM (#60770490) Homepage Journal

    If India is reporting 1/3 the reported new cases the US is, it undoubtedly has more infections. The India has a population of 4 times that of the US but a per capita test rate 1/5 of the US.

    Given the roughly 140 million tests India has administered, how representative do you think that test population is of the whole population? India has a very large middle class -- larger than the middle class of the US, in fact. But it also has a vast underclass that is very difficult to track. Even if they wanted to make their test population representative of the whole, they probably couldn't.

    India's public health reporting is also highly suspect. Volunteers have been comparing death notices and obituaries to official counts, and even in those middle-class oriented open data sources they were finding a 70% higher death rate.

    • This. When it comes to a nation's virus stats, I tune out absolute numbers. I tune out case rates. Although no metric is perfect, a per capita increase in mortality is the best standard for comparing nations. India's fundamentals are apparently worse than the USA's. You've got a lot of people crowded in cities who routinely ride ridiculously crowded public transit. If they were really doing better than us, you'd want to look at genetics, mask compliance, or some magic hand sanitizer that they somehow h

      • The per-capita COVID-19 mortality in the US and the UK is factors of magnitude over several other countries -- not just India, but also Latvia, Estonia etc -- other countries with roughly comparable healthcare systems, age composition, and reporting mechanisms

        You can fiddle with adjusting statistics for underlying health conditions, but something else is causing such a large difference.

        What beats me is why the best minds in the world are not working day and night on eliciting the true reasons for difference

        • What beats me is why the best minds in the world are not working day and night on eliciting the true reasons for differences in national impact.

          Yes, me too. We may not know for years, if ever. There might also be different strains of the virus that interact with different genomes and health conditions, spreading at different rates. The slowdown in world travel may have protected India for now, but when things loosen up they could be in for a shock. If things loosen up though, it'll probably be because

      • India hat a lot of provinces that had an extremely strict lock down and contact tracing, long long before USA did anything. The second wave might hit them harder than the first one, though.

        https://www.sciencemag.org/new... [sciencemag.org] (Take with a grain of salt, no idea why they call her "Communist" )

        https://www.theguardian.com/wo... [theguardian.com]

        Ofc, that was in the beginning of the year.

        • by hey! ( 33014 )

          The problem is there are so many people there who both off the radar screen and completely unable to comply with an order to stay home for weeks on end. They live a hand to mouth existence.

          So I suspect the numbers we have seen may represent the impact of the pandemic and the measure taken on a more easily monitored segment of the population. What we've seen since mid September is a dramatic drop in reported cases but with very little slackening in the death rate. The median time from case report to death

          • In India the numbers appear to be hardly coupled at all, which means we're missing something.
            That can be the difference in time when it is reported versus time it is published on sites like this: https://www.worldometers.info/... [worldometers.info]

            During the first wave many countries had alternating days with 0 death and 500 - 800. Which obviously make no sense. At the moment I do not find a good example country, but in April Itally e.g. reported nearly no one dead or even zero one day, and next day 800 or more.

            Yes, the time

        • India hat a lot of provinces that had an extremely strict lock down and contact tracing, long long before USA did anything.

          Really? Starting when? My quick googling shows initial tabs at 'people's shutdowns' around March 21st. How long after that did America start doing 'anything'?

          I remember my kid coming home for spring break and never going back to school - that was in TX, around the end of March.

          Citations please, and a definition of 'long, long before' would be nice.

        • She is a member of the "Communist party of India (Marxist)". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

          And across the world, I see mostly "left" politicians taking Covid much more seriously than "right" - even though left and right are not highly descriptive as categories of politicians.

          Though "lot of provinces" is an overstatement. Kerala was somewhat unique. In late February, India was hosting Mr Trump boasting about "yuuge" crowds spreading whatever CoronaVirus was present at the moment.

    • India and the US are not comparable for many many more reasons than just these. But the number of tests is a confounding variable. Here, I am also answering some of your other posts in this thread :

      1. Different genetics. Also see related point 3.

      2. You do mention public health reporting. I'll add that there is a long term (body of) studies showing that half the deaths are unreported in India : https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov] are unreported. This number could easily have risen dramatically in periods of cr

  • Despite the measures to stem the pandemic, the country is now home to the second-highest Covid-19 infections after the U.S. at 9.3 million cases.

    That's not a failure. India has 1.35 billion people. That's a 0.69% infection rate, which beats European/North American/South American counties by a wide margin.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Failure is relative.

      Hello from Melbourne. We had 700 cases a day. We now have zero cases a day.

      That number is set to spike back up as soon as we let dual citizens from countries such as India back through our disastrous hotel quarantine.

      Sort your shit out, World. We'd love to welcome international travelers back to our shores.

      • by Curtman ( 556920 ) *
        We had a wonderful summer too with 0 cases for several weeks in my part of Canada. Now flu season is back and we've got 400/day.
      • Yes, Melbourne (actually Victoria, I have no Melbourne specific numbers) had half the rate of cases of India. That's very good. (Although Victoria has 1/20th the population density, which in a pandemic matters a lot.) However, you repeated the absolute cases, not the infection rate. Like, a cruise ship has less than 700 cases a day - it's still worse to be than Melbourne during the worst of it.

        I'll also point out that NZ and Australia have summer weather right now, which would be limiting the spread.

    • You assume they actually know how many people are infected. They've only done 72% as many tests at US (136MM for India vs 187MM for the US), while having 4 times as many people.

  • by Dan East ( 318230 ) on Friday November 27, 2020 @12:26PM (#60770614) Journal

    A problem with a number of countries with low income is the workforce does not have the hardware, nor the internet access, at home to support working remotely. In countries like the US it's a foregone conclusion that the infrastructure exists for high speed internet at most residences allowing a much easier transition.

    Further, the workstations the employees use are shared by staff across multiple shifts, and are desktop systems that aren't very portable. So there aren't enough computing devices to begin to supply the number of workers with the hardware to work at home.

    These kinds of factors drastically decrease the productivity and increase the basic cost of doing business if the workers cannot work in their dense office spaces / cubical farms. It's an equalizer which takes away some of the financial advantages that allow these kinds of developing countries to undercut globally with much cheaper services.

    • by PPH ( 736903 )

      India and similar economies have a much smaller white collar, intellectual production class than the West does. Most of their population are farmers, small manufacturers and shopkeepers. Jobs that require workers to show up and interface with each other and the public. You could drown the county in high speed broadband and state of the art computing power. But if most people have to make daily treks through open air markets to feed themselves, and they work there as well, lockdowns pretty much kill the econ

    • A problem with a number of countries with low income is the workforce does not have the hardware, nor the internet access, at home to support working remotely.

      This is the world's customer support call centre you're talking about.

    • You can rest assured that in Asia the internet connection of the average Joe is better than for most wealthy Americans. I suggest to visit it once, when/if the borders are open again.

    • by jma05 ( 897351 )

      > A problem with a number of countries with low income is the workforce does not have the hardware, nor the internet access

      Everyone with a computer job in India can afford an adequate computer and Internet access is dirt cheap with an actual free market, unlike US. The plans start at around $3/month with way more data allowances than US plans. The "hardware" that can launch a web browser, a remote desktop client and Zoom is rather cheap these days, even by Indian standards.

      The difference is that most peo

  • The economy was already slowing down from Modi's incompetency, such as take currency out of the economy dropping liquidity and demand, and major changes in taxes which messed up the supply side. This what happens when you have religious nutjobs lead a country. The only reason why India's economy in the beginning of Modi's presidency looked like it was doing better was because they changed how GDP was calculated in the country, which gave it a few percentage points more. They changed it such that occupati

Avoid strange women and temporary variables.

Working...