India: The Emerging Giant

A true data driven depiction of history of Indian economy post independence. Throws light on the political economic principles aka 'socialism' that led to continued poverty for Crores of Indian people. Socialism = make self rich and keep everybody else poor

Thorough, well written re. content and detail. Statistics and data compared to S. Korea, China , Taiwan re. what changes have been made to improve India's economic condition.

If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion."- George Bernard Shaw .Arvind Panagariya is a distinguished trade economist, professor at the Columbia University, a protoge of Dr Jagdish Bhagwati, and a good communicator who through his newspaper columns has placed economic issues in their social and political contexts and made them explicable to the lay reader.This book draws on this experience. It is a comprehensive history of the Indian economy from the time of the First Five-Year Plan of 1951. It is not limited to examining selected aspects of the economy but considers the relationship between different aspects. Indian economists, like Indian policy-makers, have tended to look at specific issues and neglected the interactions between different sectors and issues. Panagariya constantly relates policies to political leaderships, economic concepts to practice, analyses a vast amount of data to support his conclusions, looks closely at the infrastructure, social sectors and not merely at poverty levels, industrial policies, agriculture, taxation, and public finance.Dr Panagariya's analyzes ongoing debates (example use of foreign exchange reserves to fund infrastructure investments) and suggests practical policy directions for every issue that he discusses. For example, he relates poor industrial progress to restrictive labour laws dissuading the organised sector from entering labour intensive industries. He discusses in detail the many infirmities in providing health, education, water and sanitation to the majority of people. He analyses required tax reforms, necessary subsidies to the poor and how they can be given efficiently, the mistake of ignoring the critical importance of international trade for a poor country, the infrastructure and how recent reforms have worked, while attributing poor implementation to hidebound procedures and the infirmities of the civil service set-up.Dr Panagariya shows convincingly that policy focus on equality often harms the fight against poverty. The present government has achieved less reform than the earlier NDA coalition, principally because of opposition from the Left. He also refutes the pleas for full convertibility of the rupee and supports the gradual relaxations that India has followed.The book divides the years since 1951 into four growth phases: 1951-65 at 4.1 per cent, 1965-81 at 3.2 per cent, 1981-88 at 4.8 per cent, and from 1988 to 2006 at 6.3 per cent. The restrictive period under Indira Gandhi's rule with her 10-point programme held the economy back and kept poverty levels high. They have dropped sharply since 1991. He demonstrates that growth in the Rajiv Gandhi years was at the cost of weakening the macroeconomic condition and that the years since 1988, especially 1992, show more sustainable growth. He considers a macroeconomic crisis (like in pre-1991) unlikely in the near future because of the gradual reduction of the fiscal deficit, more openness to trade, foreign exchange reserves, and removal of restrictions on industry.Dr Panagariaya seems to accept government claims on reducing fiscal deficits, though government figures do not provide for the large and growing Rupee bonds for supporting the oil and FCI subsidies, which are not counted in the fiscal deficit. He recognises the stimulating role of large public expenditures when there is growth and finds a close relationship between trade openness, growth and poverty alleviation.Dr Panagariya blames the complex labour laws for the dependence on agriculture and the huge informal sector for employment. Powerful labour inspectors, provision of facilities on premises, safety provisions, overtime, Provident Fund, health insurance, limited rights to reassign or fire workers, lack of speedy resolution of industrial disputes, and absence of option for firms to exit at reasonable cost (because of antique bankruptcy laws) have disproportionately strengthened the hand of the unions in the organised sector and made wages in the private formal sector 1.8 times those in the private informal sector. This has raised wage costs in unskilled labour intensive industry as against the capital intensive industries, and has held back India's growth of labour intensive industries unlike in China, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.This is among the best books and certainly the most comprehensive study of the Indian economy since Independence. It is easy to read despite the immense erudition that the author has brought to bear on the different issues. One thinks of such books as Jagdish Bhagwati and Padma Desai's 1970 book (Planning for Industrialization) which was an early critique of planning or Pranab Bardhan's 1984 book (The Political Economy of Development in India) which examined class dynamics in India as exemplars. Except for the fiscal deficit calculations, the influence of the Left in tempering economic with social reforms, and the neglect of the consumer goods industries and their influence on growth, there is nothing one can find to criticise in this book. It is a valuable addition to the libraries of people interested in understanding the past, present and future of the Indian economy.

Among all the books on India written by economists (recently there have been quite a few) this book has perhaps received the most favorable press. Reading this book one can easily discover the factors determining this disposition of the media. The book is a detailed work that does the delicate job of arriving at measured and researched judgments on India strikingly well. In effect the book dismisses the thick line distinction between optimists and pessimists on India's economic prospects. Arriving at measured judgments on India's prospects that are neither overtly pessimistic nor overtly optimistic required an in depth study of India's economic history in the post independence period. Seemingly straightforward this work had not been done. The reason is that to implement such a work required not one but several economists with their different specializations and also the expertise of social scientists from several other disciplines to handle the social and political complexity of India. Alternatively an individual author had to take upon himself/herself the extremely difficult task of wearing these different hats and more importantly in a way that the hats conformed to each other. This could be difficult but not impossible as the book demonstrates (by virtue of being written by a single author). In fact this is the essence of the book's thesis statement about India: difficult but not impossible.The book does a great job of compiling several important facts about India's economic performance. The most exciting aspects of the book come where it debunks several of the orthodoxies that fail to stand the test of hard numbers. An earlier book Freakanomics by Steven Levitt demonstrated the power of hard numbers. Those hard numbers led to determination of causality between events/issues that casual observation would never detect or guess, for example between abortion laws and reduction in crime. The hard numbers in this book do not discover new causality as much as they demolish some prevalent myths which are either not based on numbers or ex post can be thought of to be based on "soft" numbers. Thus, issues like when did poverty decline in India and what determined the changes in poverty levels have been challenged with some real hard numbers. Poverty, an issue of great economic and political importance in India has attracted several data engineers and data reverse engineers. The book presents numbers coupled with an easy and exciting tutorial on how to read the numbers correctly that is likely to cause some unemployment among these resources. At the same time, the critical analysis of numbers in the book is likely to generate new employment for social scientists.Generations of social scientists working on India for example have thought of Nehru (India's first prime minister) as the ultimate Fabian socialist who aspired for total government control and suppressed private enterprise. It is a different matter that no one sat down to check what the numbers could say on this. The book rigorously demonstrates that perceptions on this have been so far from truth. For those working on India's economic history, the book thus offers new employment indeed.This book is in fact a natural sequel to the epic "Economic History of India" by Dharma Kumar. If Economic History of India is the right book for the pre-independence India, this book is the right one for post independence India. The tenor of the book is definitely different written by stalwarts in different disciplines, the former by an economic historian and the latter by a trade economist. That these two books could combine in a seamless fashion exemplifies that rigorous research by masters always produces masterpieces independent of time.

This is an amazing book on Post-Independence Economic History of India .. It solely puts the blame of India's lackadaisical economic performance on Indira-era laws..In fact We are still trying to undo the damage wrought by them .Indian Economic Reform is essentially repealing of laws passed in 70s

The item was good. It was as good as new. I am fully satisfied with the product.

great. Exactly what I wanted, arrived on time and good condition. Very useful

"its good"