Gita Gopinath and Iqbal Dhaliwal — An Economic Roadmap for India

Typical Harvard-MIT nonsense. Increase private investment through "making it easier to do business" and imposing fiscal austerity to bring the government deficit in check. Increase GDP per capita by industrialization that increases the ratio of industry to services as a percentage of GDP.


India has two huge problems. One is endemic corruption, and the other is a frayed social fabric reducing its social capital, hence also its adaptive rate and return on coordination. These are not economic problems but cultural ones and it will not be possible to solve them using neoliberal assumptions about the market as pancea. All that will result from that is funneling money to the top with trickle down to favored constituencies. And all that most of the Indian people will get to do is watch. In other words, business as usual.


Moreover, it is difficult to talk about "India" in the first place. It is a very large and diverse country with a lot of potential that faces a huge organization and coordination problem if only owing to the diversity of languages representative of different regional and cultural traditions. The diversity is so great and the social dissonance over language differences rooted in different cultural differences is so pronounced that the country finds it necessary to use a foreign language and that of their former colonial masters to boot to surmount it. Add to this the religious disparity that often flares up into conflict, in which Modi himself as already been entangled, and the still influential remnant of the caste system that makes social change and social mobility all the more difficult even in the best of conditions. Overlaid on India is the residual of Moghul and British conquests. Etc. There's much more.

 The good news is that the Indian people are politically engaged and turned out to vote in record numbers. If change is to come, it will have to come from them rather than from India's political class. It has to begin with uniting to build an Indian future based on pluralism rather than the dominance of groups and interests.

Project Syndicate
An Economic Roadmap for India
Gita Gopinath, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, and Iqbal Dhaliwal, Deputy Director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) in the Department of Economics at MIT

For more neoliberal nonsense, see also Modi’s Mandate by Michael Mandelbaum. Professor of American Foreign Policy at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is the author, most recently, of The Road to Global Prosperity, whose recommendations include breaking the power of the trade unions that are standing in the way of firing.

On the more ominous side of international politics, India’s Shinzo Abe by Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research, is the author of Asian Juggernaut, Water: Asia’s New Battleground, and Water, Peace, and War: Confronting the Global Water Crisis. New strategic alliances are shaping up, and the focus is on Asia.