“India Is A Case Of Successful Globalisation”

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: There is nothing more delicious for establishment baiters than an establishment icon going radical. There is nothing more horrifying for the establi-shment than one of its own turning renegade. Little wonder then that Nobel prize winning economist, one-time Chief Economist of the World Bank and former chairman of US President Bill Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisors, Joseph Stiglitz arou-ses the ire of free market economists and IMF mandarins and is a darling of the anti-globalisers. A mainstream post-Keynesian economist, he is worried about globalisation gone awry, especially under the tutelage of the IMF in crisis-ridden economies. On balance he prefers open eco-nomies, but open to trade rather than unbridled capital flows.

In India to deliver the Millenium Lecture at the University of Delhi and to address the World Social Forum in Mumbai, the author of two recent bestsellers, “Globalisation and Its Discontents” and “The Roaring Nineties”, Professor Stiglitz spoke to Sanjaya Baru of FE:

There is little of India in your books, barring the reference to Enron’s escapades! Is Ind-ia an unfamiliar territory?
I’ve been to India before, when I was at the World Bank and when I was in the Clinton Administration. But my interest in globalisation was triggered by my involvment with the East Asian crisis. The good news is that you did not have a crisis when I was at the World Bank! If you did, I would have got more involved with India!

India’s crisis was at the beginning of the 1990s and our policymakers have claimed that the way we responded to that crisis steered us away from the Asian fin-ancial crisis kind of problem.
Yes, it did. But I haven’t studied the Indian experience. I know, however, that India has done well in the 1990s. It has grown after your crisis. You can attribute this to a successful tackling of the crisis at the time. India is a case of successful globalisation in the `90s.