India: The Emerging Giant | 
| Author: Arvind Panagariya
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Category: Book
List Price: $39.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  2 reviews
Sales Rank: 129672
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 544
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.4
ISBN: 0195315030
Dewey Decimal Number: 330.95405
EAN: 9780195315035
ASIN: 0195315030
Publication Date: March 3, 2008
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Product Description
India is not only the world's largest and fiercely independent democracy, but also an emerging economic giant. But to date there has been no comprehensive account of India's remarkable growth or the role policy has played in fueling this expansion. India: The Emerging Giant fills this gap, shedding light on one of the most successful experiments in economic development in modern history.
Why did the early promise of the Indian economy not materialize and what led to its eventual turnaround? What policy initiatives have been undertaken in the last twenty years and how do they relate to the upward shift in the growth rate? What must be done to push the growth rate to double-digit levels? To answer these crucial questions, Arvind Panagariya offers a brilliant analysis of India's economy over the last fifty years--from the promising start in the 1950s, to the near debacle of the 1970s (when India came to be regarded as a "basket case"), to the phenomenal about face of the last two decades. The author illuminates the ways that government policies have promoted economic growth (or, in the case of Indira Gandhi's policies, economic stagnation), and offers insightful discussions of such key topics as poverty and inequality, tax reform, telecommunications (perhaps the single most important success story), agriculture and transportation, and the government's role in health, education, and sanitation.
The dramatic change in the fortunes of 1.1 billion people has, not surprisingly, generated tremendous interest in the economy of India. Arvind Panagariya offers the first major account of how this has come about and what more India must do to sustain its rapid growth and alleviate poverty. It will be must reading for everyone interested in modern India, foreign affairs, or the world economy.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Review: India: The Emerging Giant July 11, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
 prospects of faster growth June 11, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
For anyone interested in economic development this book is a useful read. Detailing modern India, with all its tribulations and promises. In recent years, it appears that India has [finally] brought about a secular increase in its growth rate. No longer the parlous "Hindu rate of growth" of the 1980s and 90s, which caused it to lag far behind China.
The author explains the complexities of Indian society. How, with its chaotic democracy and the myriad pressure groups, development can often get stunted or delayed for years. The contrast to China is stark. The Chinese system has been able to deliver consistently faster growth for almost 30 years.
But the prospects for India seem brighter than its record. The book suggests that a rough consensus amongst its politicians might enable more reforms. For the sake of hundreds of millions of Indians who still live in stark poverty, and how deserve better from their betters, let us hope so.
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