RBI

India has been subject to capricious capital flows since its integration with the global capital markets in the early 1990s. In a bid to balance diverse objectives, India, like many other emerging markets, has resorted to active management of various types of capital flows. This paper finds that while the calibrated liberalisation approach resulted in altering the composition of capital flows towards more stable flows, and has helped India to negotiate the "Trilemma," the use of sporadic capital account management measures in the face of surge or stop of capital flows has not been very effective in achieving their objectives of reducing external vulnerability or mitigating macro-prudential risks.

The NAS estimates for private corporate investment based on RBI's studies of joint stock companies suffer from shrinking coverage, especially in the 1990s, leading to overestimates. Re-examining the official methodology, this study reports an alternative estimate. The results show that the level of re-estimated GFCF of the corporate sector had remained lower than that of NAS estimates. The trend between these two series has been diverging, more significantly since the mid-1990s. While the NAS series shows that the momentum of corporate investment has been sustained throughout the 1990s, the alternative estimates suggest that it had tapered off since the mid-1990s.

The growth of the financial market in 2002-03 was much more marked in the secondary market than in the primary segment. Turnover in all three components of the secondary market - equity, debt and forex - continued to grow apace.

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