Flow of funds and the impact of financial controls on bank portfolio behaviour: a study of India

This paper studies the flow of funds and portfolio behaviour of Indian banks from 1951 to 1994. In this period, financial controls such as variable reserve ratios were important constraints on bank behaviour, especially before liberalization took place in the early 1990s. We estimate a system of demand functions which uses as framework the Almost Ideal Demand System and which incorporates the reserve ratio regulations. Attention is paid to cointegration and to structural breaks. The estimated model provides coherent and plausible parameter estimates for prices and other variables. We find that a standard portfolio model can usefully be applied to the study of financial behaviour in a developing economy such as India, and some interesting policy implications can be drawn.