Waning Business Confidence

A major constraint that has hobbled the efforts to accelerate growth has been the plateauing of savings and investments in the economy. Savings and investment rates had steadily gone up from around 10% of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the early 1950s to touch peak levels of close to 40% of the GDP at the time of the global financial crisis in 2007–08. However, it has plummeted and stagnated since then.

The most recent estimates show that the savings rate has slumped from the peak level of 37.8% of the GDP in 2007–08 to 30.2% in 2021–22, a decline of 7.6 percentage points. The fall in investment rates has been even sharper with the numbers going down from 39.8% of the GDP in 2010–11 to 31.4% in 2021–22, a decline of 8.4 percentage points over the period.