Financialisation and Corporate Investments: The Indian Case Sunanda Sen and Zico Dasgupta

Financialisation creates space for transactions in the financial sector of economies, and, in doing so, helps to raise the share of financial assets in the portfolios held by market participants. Largely driven by deregulation, the process works to make financial assets relatively attractive as compared to other assets, by offering both better returns and potential capital gains. Against the backdrop of the prevailing analysis of corporate investments under financialisation in the advanced economies, this paper attempts to analyse the pattern of investment by corporates in an emerging economy like India during the 2000s. By analysing the sources and the use of funds of India’s corporate sector in further detail, this paper highlights a similar phenomenon of financialisation in the Indian economy which, ceteris paribus, adversely affected real investments during the 2000s along with a process of Ponzi financing during the post-crisis period.

India_Financialization   (Download the full text in PDF format)