Incredible India?
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This is a fundamental misdiagnosis. The vaunted successes in IT-based services and now in manufacturing niches are welcome. But they are a high-wage, capital- or skill-intensive drop in India’s low-wage, unskilled, labour-abundant ocean. India’s growth should be churning in these labour-abundant waters, but it isn’t.
Agriculture is stagnant, hobbled not just by very high external protection but also by crazy subsidies captured by comparatively rich farmers and middlemen, absence of property rights, terrible rural irrigation and infrastructure, and draconian domestic restrictions that fragment the internal market. Non-tradable services sectors – where potential employment generation is huge – are also crippled by domestic restrictions. Backbone services sectors (such as banking, insurance and retail) suffer from external protection as well. Last – and crucially – India’s glaring development gap is in manufacturing, for all sorts of Union and state-level policies – on labour markets, infrastructure, power generation, subsidies, the public sector, repressed agriculture and services sectors, uncertain property rights, and remaining zones of protection against imports and inward investment – conspire to prevent labour-intensive industrial production.
India needs its Industrial Revolution if it is to grow out of poverty. That means putting the impoverished in the countryside into (initially) low-wage work in mass manufacturing. That is what China and other parts of east Asia have done. These realities should be clearer now that the Indian economy has taken a sharp turn for the worse this year, in a climate of global economic crisis. This exposes the pathetic, do-nothing, zero-reform record of the Congress-led government since 2004. More generally, it lays bare India’s huge reform gaps and its brittle, decaying institutions.
Dr Razeen Sally is the author of Trade Policy, New Century: The WTO, FTAs and Asia Rising.
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Last year at a Thames festival, there was a band playing anti-capitalist songs, one of which was titled “Globalisation”. The lyrics were about a Western factory owner who, as the workers demand holidays, decides to shut down his factory and re-open it in Taiwan. Everyone was, of course, worse of: the Western workers were unemployed, and the Taiwanese were exploited.
Apparently, it hadn’t ocurred to the band to update their lyrics for a while. The days when Taiwan was a cheap-labour economy are long gone; this is now a middle-income country.
I wonder what role the influence of Western “intellectuals” plays in the adoption of ill-advised development policies in places like India.
Last year at a Thames festival, there was a band playing anti-capitalist songs, one of which was titled “Globalisation”. The lyrics were about a Western factory owner who, as the workers demand holidays, decides to shut down his factory and re-open it in Taiwan. Everyone was, of course, worse of: the Western workers were unemployed, and the Taiwanese were exploited.
Apparently, it hadn’t ocurred to the band to update their lyrics for a while. The days when Taiwan was a cheap-labour economy are long gone; this is now a middle-income country.
I wonder what role the influence of Western “intellectuals” plays in the adoption of ill-advised development policies in places like India.
Western “intellectuals” and their ideologies have indeed had a devastating impact on India’s development. The timing of India’s independence was particularly unfortunate in this regard. The influence of traditional socialism was close to its peak under Attlee in Britain in 1947 and this inevitably had a deleterious impact on the culture and structure of India’s institutions, which have been plagued by counterproductive bureaucracy ever since.
Western “intellectuals” and their ideologies have indeed had a devastating impact on India’s development. The timing of India’s independence was particularly unfortunate in this regard. The influence of traditional socialism was close to its peak under Attlee in Britain in 1947 and this inevitably had a deleterious impact on the culture and structure of India’s institutions, which have been plagued by counterproductive bureaucracy ever since.
thanks