With less money being ploughed into productive capacity than during India’s last boom, consumer spending was thought likely to slump too, though with a long lag. Signs of this seemed apparent in the National Statistical Office’s (NSO’s) Consumer Expenditure Survey for 2017-18, details of which were leaked last November before it was binned by the government for alleged divergences from other data sets. The most significant of these was household expenditure having fallen in 2017-18 for the first time in over four decades. According to snapshots that appeared in the media of the 2017-18 study, average expenditure was driven down by weak rural demand. The pandemic’s impact on urban consumer confidence is captured by the Reserve Bank of India’s periodic survey of the same.

Source: Mint December 07, 2020 16:30 UTC