Does public investment crowd-out private investment in India

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the crowding-in or crowding-out relationship between public and private investment in India. Design/methodology/approach - The autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds testing approach is used to estimate the long run relationship between public and private investment using annual data from 1971-1972 to 2009-2010. Findings - Based on the empirical findings, it is observed that aggregate public investment has a positive effect on private investment both in the long run and the short run. In contrast to the findings of previous studies, no significant impact of public infrastructure investment on private investments is found in the long run, while non-infrastructure investment has a positive impact on private investment in the short run. Among the various categories of infrastructure sector, a positive and significant impact in the case of electricity, gas and water supply is observed. Similarly, the result indicates that public investment in machinery and equipment and construction have substantially influenced the private sector machinery and equipment in the long run and the short run. In the case of the role of macroeconomic uncertainty, the results find a negative and significant impact on private investment and the impact is higher in the short run than in the long run. Originality/value - The present study extends the literature in three important ways: First, the study attempts to capture heterogeneity of public investment as well as disaggregate effects of two different categories of public infrastructure on private investment. The extent to which two different types of public assets impact the private investment in machinery and equipment investment is also examined. Second, ARDL model is used to examine the long-run relationship between public and private investment. Third, the study incorporates macroeconomic uncertainty into the empirical analysis to examine the role of macroeconomic volatility in determining private investment decision.