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: Arvind Panagariya’s India: The Emerging Giant is the latest in the genre of books that have come out recently on the changes that are transforming India’s economy. Panagariya, a Jagdish Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy and Economics at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, is also a non-resident fellow at Brookings Institute. Well-known in India for his work on trade policy, he has been a frequent contributor to debates on the subject and has been a critic on the proliferation of regional and bilateral agreements and an ardent supporter of the multilateral trading regime, WTO.
His latest work is a seminal one and a must for all serious students of India’s economic history and the rapid changes that the country is going through. Structurally the book is divided into five major parts — Growth and Economic Reforms; Poverty, Inequality, and Economic Reforms; Macroeconomics; Transforming India; The Government. His analysis virtually covers all the major scholarly and policy debates and controversies that have arisen in recent years in various areas of policy. Of particular relevance is his insight into the linkage between growth, equity and poverty alleviation. As he himself states, the book is an attempt “to offer an analytical account and interpretation of the major economic development in post independence India” and “provides a detailed discussion of where the policies currently stand and a road map of the future reforms necessary to accelerate and sustain growth”.
There are two aspects that the book does not attempt to cover — state level policies and the fiscal relations between the central government and the states. Interestingly, he has structured his analysis of the political economy of India (Part I) into four segments: 1951-65 take off under a liberal regime, 1965-81 socialism strikes with a vengeance, 1981-88 liberalisation by stealth and 1988-2006 triumph of liberalisation. The chapter heads are provocative and provide for stimulating reading and the comparison between the growth stories of India and Korea enables us to get a perspective of what was right and what went wrong for India.
In Part II, where he studies the issues of poverty, inequality and economic reforms, he argues that “pre-occupation with growth and lack of concern for the poor was not at the centre of failure of India to achieve substantial reduction in poverty till 1980’s” and the “key failure was the pre-occupation with equity, which led...
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