East Asia Model vs South Asia Model, which one is better?

great_han

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I have read the Legatum Prosperity Report but their ranking takes individual freedom and other things into consideration. I think its somewhat deceptive to imply that India is doing better than China based on this report.

To be frank, Foreign investors couldnt care less about how much freedom China gives its people, or how many poor protesting farmers get killed in riots, or how many Falun Gong practitioners or Uyghur Muslims China throws into prison every year.

The only thing that foreign investors want is a stable political environment and a good secure manufacturing "supply chain" that will keep their factories running at full speed and turning out fat profits for them. This is why China has received so much more FDI investment than India

I think most Indians will admit that China has moved far more people out of abject poverty in the last 40 years than India. But the reason they were able to do this is because they adopted a ruthless Communist model where the "end always justifies the means".

Indians would never have accepted such a system, no matter what the rewards were going to be. So India will be slower in reaching a developed nation status but that was the only course that India could take.
India is not the only developing democracy. Think of all your Latin American brother except Cuba. Even most African nations. Will all of those be developed some day? Corruption is the problem that Chinese hate most, Still many young Chinese believe that democracy will cease corruption. While so many cases have proved it dont not.
 

badguy2000

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frankly speaking, India, Latin America and Africa are full of the examples of "failure of democracy"

many guys, including many Indians , are influnced by "west values" and insist that democracy be the right way to develop their countries ,just because west countries are the most successful states by now.

However, if China surpasses west states as for economy and miliatry,doubts of "west mod" will be rampant.

remember, west mod is attractive because of its economy succcess.
 

Known_Unknown

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The topic of this thread is hilarious. There is absolutely no comparison between East Asia and South Asia. And it is not because East Asians have a somehow "superior system" of governance or anything like that. In fact, there is no uniform system of governance throughout East Asia. Some countries are democracies, some are dictatorships, and some straddle the fence. It is because East Asia has experienced a different political and economic set of circumstances than South Asia.

Let's start with the case of Japan. It was ravaged after World War II, yet most of its industrial base was intact. The Japanese made their own planes, ships and weapons of war. They had progressed to the industrial age even before the war started. Although the US dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was never a land invasion or a sustained bombing campaign against the industries of Japan. Add to this the fact that after the war, Japan received billions in developmental aid from the US, the status of a de-facto US military ally, meaning that it did not have to worry much about any other country in East Asia attacking it, and unfettered market access for the export of its goods to the US market.

In short, the US basically bankrolled Japan's development. To compare Japan with Pakistan is absurd. India, and the region of India that broke off to form Pakistan, had not even experienced the dawn of the industrial age at partition. The British banned all industry in India, and reduced Indians to mere supplier of raw materials such as cotton, iron ore and jute which were bought at rock bottom prices, and shipped to Britain to make everything from clothes to salt, which was then sold back to the Indians at inflated prices. That is how Britain enriched herself and kept India poor. When India/Pakistan got their independence, industrially, they were still in the 1700s.

The first task before the leaders of these countries was to establish an industrial base in their country, and that is what Nehru achieved for India. Sadly, there was no one to do the same for Pakistan, and hence today, Pakistan's industrial base is almost non-existent. Pakistan has no equivalents of TATA, L&T, Infosys or Reliance. In two of the three wars between India and Pakistan, the US remained neutral and in the third, when it was broken into two, only managed a token show of sending an aircraft carrier to threaten India.

Also, unlike Japan, the Pakistan Army came to be extremely powerful, controlling not just national defence, but also running sugar, cement and textile industries, almost becoming an autonomous institution onto itself. It started constant wars with India to consolidate its hold on power, and gave religious piety and national security more prominence than economic development.

Japan and Pakistan are like chalk and cheese. Different histories, different levels of development at the end of WWII, different approaches to nation building and foreign relations ensured that Pakistan could never have turned out like Japan.
 

Known_Unknown

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Let's now look at the case of China vs that of India.

China started off in 1949 with Mao proclaiming that Communism was the be all and end all to cure all of man's problems. The policies that were implemented on the basis of this thinking resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese people under the banner of the Great Leap Forward, imprisonment of hundreds of thousands under the Anti-Rightist Movement, and then the Cultural Revolution in which more than half a million people, especially minorities, were murdered in the name of progress, along with thousands of Tibetian Buddhist monasteries and priceless cultural treasures destroyed.

Inspite of all this upheaval though, the CCP dictatorship along with the PLA and other security held on to power with a vice like grip. They managed to suppress discontent, and force people to do their bidding in the name of progress.

The end result today is that after 40 million Chinese (that's more than the entire population of Canada, btw) had paid with their lives in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, the China of today provides a higher GDP per capita to its citizens than India does.

Could India have implemented similar policies? Not a chance. Unlike Mao's "Power flows from the barrel of a gun" theory, Indian independence was achieved through diametrically opposite, non-violent means.

A democratic India, therefore, pledged to provide for all its citizens equally. Even if that meant that the pie had to be shared between millions of hungry people, it also meant that the pie would be shared equally, and that no one would be sacrificed in the name of ideology. Unlike China, there was not a single famine in India post-Independence, although during colonial times, the British perpetrated several due to their greed and indifference towards the natives.

As a result, until the early 1980s, India led China on almost every measure of the HDI. After 1979, however, the Chinese economy took off due to the economic reforms by the CCP. In India, economic reforms were not initiated until 1991, as a result of which India lags by about 12 years behind China, in terms of absolute GDP and GDP growth.

It is also important to remember though, that although progress may have come a decade later in India, it did not come at the expense of 40 million lives, destruction of countless art and cultural treasures, and sowing of permanent enmities between different ethnic groups.

India's GDP in 2008 was the same as China's in 2003. So we might be 5 years late arriving on the scene. But was arriving early worth the lives of millions of our countrymen? I wouldn't think so.

The Chinese, however, may disagree.
 

stax

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You are the one that if going off topic, But in the East Asian model China is the poor man in the bunch if you look at GDP by per capita China would have the lowest, which shows that China is the only third world developing country in the East Asian model. While comparisions cannot be made from East Asia to South Asia because all the nations in South Asia are developing while the East Asian all nations are developed except for China which is still releatively a third world country comapared to others in the group.
I'm telling you that if our GDP per capita reaches half of US then total GDP is twice than US.
China will surpass US in the future. India also will surpass US.
 

hbogyt

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re:

The topic of this thread is hilarious. There is absolutely no comparison between East Asia and South Asia. And it is not because East Asians have a somehow "superior system" of governance or anything like that. In fact, there is no uniform system of governance throughout East Asia. Some countries are democracies, some are dictatorships, and some straddle the fence. It is because East Asia has experienced a different political and economic set of circumstances than South Asia.

Let's start with the case of Japan. It was ravaged after World War II, yet most of its industrial base was intact. The Japanese made their own planes, ships and weapons of war. They had progressed to the industrial age even before the war started. Although the US dropped nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was never a land invasion or a sustained bombing campaign against the industries of Japan. Add to this the fact that after the war, Japan received billions in developmental aid from the US, the status of a de-facto US military ally, meaning that it did not have to worry much about any other country in East Asia attacking it, and unfettered market access for the export of its goods to the US market.

In short, the US basically bankrolled Japan's development. To compare Japan with Pakistan is absurd. India, and the region of India that broke off to form Pakistan, had not even experienced the dawn of the industrial age at partition. The British banned all industry in India, and reduced Indians to mere supplier of raw materials such as cotton, iron ore and jute which were bought at rock bottom prices, and shipped to Britain to make everything from clothes to salt, which was then sold back to the Indians at inflated prices. That is how Britain enriched herself and kept India poor. When India/Pakistan got their independence, industrially, they were still in the 1700s.

The first task before the leaders of these countries was to establish an industrial base in their country, and that is what Nehru achieved for India. Sadly, there was no one to do the same for Pakistan, and hence today, Pakistan's industrial base is almost non-existent. Pakistan has no equivalents of TATA, L&T, Infosys or Reliance. In two of the three wars between India and Pakistan, the US remained neutral and in the third, when it was broken into two, only managed a token show of sending an aircraft carrier to threaten India.

Also, unlike Japan, the Pakistan Army came to be extremely powerful, controlling not just national defence, but also running sugar, cement and textile industries, almost becoming an autonomous institution onto itself. It started constant wars with India to consolidate its hold on power, and gave religious piety and national security more prominence than economic development.

Japan and Pakistan are like chalk and cheese. Different histories, different levels of development at the end of WWII, different approaches to nation building and foreign relations ensured that Pakistan could never have turned out like Japan.
Yes, there are.

No countries have taken the exact same path of development, but we can still find common traits from these East Asian economies during their take off. They were all dictatorships or pseudo-democracies and all export driven.
 

Energon

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IMO the premise of this thread is inherently faulty considering that there's really no such thing as a "South Asian model." In fact, the two most influential components- India and Pakistan have gone in diametrically opposite directions in terms of social and economic policy. While it is easy to discount the ills of Bangladesh, it should be kept in mind that this is probably one of the most unfortunate nations in the world given the barrage of problems it has faced since its inception (starting with the genocide of almost its entire intelligentsia). Sri Lanka may for the first time look toward some semblance of political and social stability and what "model" they adopt remains to be seen. Even for India in many ways, there's no conscripted model as such. The economic success has merely been the byproduct of the (reluctant) relaxation of its stifling governmental policies, thereby spawning the adage that India's growth is despite it's government, not because of it.

This is obviously not the case for the East Asian and South East Asian states. Now mind you that other than low cost production-export driven industrial sectors, and a "top down" socioeconomic scheme, there aren't too many similarities between these nations either. To group them all together as some sort of an East Asian bloc is pointless. In fact, some South East Asian states such as Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia developed along the pre-1965 US supported Pakistan model (considered the gold standard at the time). S. Korea and Japan were developed with American capital, and S Korea was able to achieve an industrial revolution through this capital (Japan was already an industrialized nation prior to WWII).

Now if one is to compare China with India (which seems to be the underlying implication here) then there is no question that China is currently in a completely different league when it comes to growth and modernization. The export based production of course has been an extremely successful model, but IMHO the most critical factor here is that China has managed to successfully kick off an industrial revolution. Despite possessing the requirements, but for a variety of reasons, India hasn't managed to do the same. One of the more important reason I think (and I'm borrowing from Narayana Murthy here) is that the government of India in the 60s under Indira Gandhi rejected the notion of cheap labor based production (as suggested by the UN and a barrage of Indian thinkers) and thereby aborted any chance of labor reform which is necessary for any democratic state to achieve an industrial revolution (unlike China) and it held on to its centralized industry model despite its apparent failure (Gurucharan Das).

Effectively, the biggest difference between the two at the moment is that China has been able to successfully exploit its strengths, and India hasn't. China's main source of power is the strong centralized control over all the material, financial and human resources of the state. India on the other hand has been unable to realize that unlike China, its real strength is not in its government or a powerful centralized apparatus, but rather in its versatile, hardy and ingenious population. For India, an American inspired ideal of reducing the government to a well tuned regulatory body and an "enabler" as opposed to a centralized authority is the only answer.
 

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^^^ So an industrial revolution never took place in India? According to you India is an agrarian economy?

What do you then call the extremely successful Indian corporate sector, which, btw, has more globally recognised and respected companies than China? TATA, Mahindra, L&T, Bajaj, Godrej, Wipro......I could go on and on.

And btw, labour reform is just a cute way of saying abolition of workers' rights.
 

Energon

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A few quick words about Democracy and China...

For those of you who keep fantasizing about China's democratization after fiscal advancement similar to that of S. Korea or Japan are deluding yourselves. It is unlikely that any genuine change will take place as long as China remains in its current form.

Take a few facts into consideration... although Japan and S Korea like China had the top down economic expansion model (through Chaebols, vertical Keiretsu etc.), it was dissociated from the governmental apparatus. This is not the case in China where the CCP possesses either directly or indirectly significant holdings in almost all aspects of the Chinese economy ensuring itself by far the largest portfolio in the nation and subsequently solidifying its position as the defacto power-holder. Point being that for the industrial, economic and probably the (impending) financial revolution, the Chinese society will forever be paying royalties to the CCP.

Even hypothetically if one day the CCP were to throw open the doors of politics only to have a new party twitter itself into power, what kind of an administration do you think any opposition party can have when significant portions of the country's holdings and its entire existing power structure belongs to the CCP? IMHO the CCP (and probably a large portion of the Chinese population) is ostensibly aware of this in addition to the fact that any fractures or destabilization within the CCP would be disastrous to the Chinese machine.

This is why the CCP is working very hard to eliminate political consciousness through rabid social engineering. The message is clear (and very much a one way street)... as long as the citizens of China abdicate their desire to be politically active the CCP will ensure economic benefits. IMO the active social engineering will go on until the coming generation internalizes the futility of political independence and submits to the reality that the future of China itself is directly hinged upon the authoritarian prowess of the CCP. The Orwellian conundrum here is truly astounding, and the effects of this will not be felt until a few decades from now (or unless China faces acute economic hardships).
 

mattster

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There is a palpable and understandable lack of an intuitive understanding of each other among Indians and Chinese, and it is clearly demonstrated in this thread.

Its a given no-brainer to any Indian that a country like China with central control of all economic policy is going to move ahead much faster in growth.

But what you Chinese dont understand is the reason that Indians and many other developing countries dont copy your model is because it is entirely alien to our value system, ethos, and culture.
It is not because we are necessarily enamoured with the Western system. The idea of democracy with all its attendant issues and messy problems may have originated with the ancient Greeks, but we Indians no longer think of it as a "western value" or practice.
It is as much our culture as a Western culture.

There are certain societies in this planet that will never support a single-party or single-person dictatorship no matter what the economic benefits.
I would put India, France, US, UK as the major countries where something like this could never happen.

In more simplistic terms, someone like a Hitler could only be created in countries like Japan or Germany, China, Arab states, Latin American States but never in the US, France, India, UK, Israel, etc - simply because the common people would have told him to "f*ck off".

The only example of a really good dictator that I can think of is the former PM Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore - Even a guy like LKY would never be possible in any of these countries. The reason LKY emerged and was succesfull in Singapore is because Singapore is 70% ethnic Chinese. Its also a very small island nation so its problems are also smaller.

I use these 2 guys: Hitler and Lee Kuan Yew as examples because of the "good and the bad". Dictatorships despite being able to make rapid progress in certain targeted areas, also tend to blow-up in equally spectacular fashion when things go wrong. The former Soviet Union, Eastern Block is a good example.

China thinks it can avoid the problem of the former Soviet Union by being a Capitalist economy with a single-party dictatorship in all other areas. Time will tell.

There are certain cultures where their brains are wired to accept dictatorships of one form or another in return for economic progress, social order, and global power/status, etc. Oriental and Arab cultures especially come to my mind in this respect.

India is one of those countries where our brains are just not wired that way.
So even if we have to take a slower more twisted, painful and more sustainable path to development, its OK, because this is the price that the people are willing to pay.

Even a state like Pakistan which has time and again experimented with military strongmen(who for all practical purposes are dictators) has always rebelled against it.

It is just not part of our South Asian psyche !! and that is why this whole thread makes no sense in comparing these 2 very different cultures.
 

Energon

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^^^ So an industrial revolution never took place in India? According to you India is an agrarian economy?

What do you then call the extremely successful Indian corporate sector, which, btw, has more globally recognised and respected companies than China? TATA, Mahindra, L&T, Bajaj, Godrej, Wipro......I could go on and on.

And btw, labour reform is just a cute way of saying abolition of workers' rights.
Yes, India has not undergone an industrial revolution. In fact it has managed to miss the boat on multiple occasions since the turn of the 19th century.

I think you're confusing corporations and factories with industrialization. While the exact definition of the latter is a heavily debated topic, the basic difference has more to do with the society's 'state of mind' as opposed to just a physical attribute. Just because there's a physical presence of industrial hardware doesn't mean that a society is industrialized. The best example is that of the former Soviet Union, who despite having built up incredible prowess in science and select industrial sectors never achieved an industrial revolution.

India is no longer an agrarian nation in the classical sense, it is however the land of contradictions. Only around 20% of its GDP is now agro based as opposed to a little over 60% by the services sector. Yet over 60% of its population is dependent upon the agricultural sector, and it sports one of the largest farm outputs in the world.

The few select Indian multinationals you have listed have little or no bearing upon the industrialization of the Indian society at large, and their representation in the global economic sector is not nearly as competitive as their Western or Chinese counterparts.

India's recent success has been in the services sector (especially by the corporations you have listed) which in turn has propelled its government to consider leapfrogging an industrial revolution and aiming for an "information revolution" instead. Even if such an endeavor were to be possible, the handicap of not having industrialized will always be immense for a country like India. Only special cases like Hong Kong, Singapore or the Emirate of Dubai might be able to operate on such a philosophy.

I'm not sure I agree with your "definition" of labor reform; based on the documented experiences of all the industrialized democratic countries in the West and elsewhere it seems to be wrong.
 

Energon

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There is a palpable and understandable lack of an intuitive understanding of each other among Indians and Chinese, and it is clearly demonstrated in this thread.

Its a given no-brainer to any Indian that a country like China with central control of all economic policy is going to move ahead much faster in growth.

But what you Chinese dont understand is the reason that Indians and many other developing countries dont copy your model is because it is entirely alien to our value system, ethos, and culture.
It is not because we are necessarily enamoured with the Western system. The idea of democracy with all its attendant issues and messy problems may have originated with the ancient Greeks, but we Indians no longer think of it as a "western value" or practice.
It is as much our culture as a Western culture.
mattster You bring up some really important points, and here's my take on some of them.

RE China's unparalleled growth as a result of its authoritarianism:
While authoritarian rule propels instant growth, in most cases this growth is skewed and cosmetic and eventually results in a collapse. The best examples are that of Pakistani dictatorships (especially under Ayub) and the South East Asian states. To China's credit, the growth they have managed has been healthy, the poverty reduction has been astounding and as I've said before, they have managed to trigger an industrial revolution which other fast growing authoritarian states mentioned above and the likes of the oil rich gulf states haven't managed. Which is not to say that Chinese growth hasn't been skewed, it has, but the net result on the society at large is unmistakable. Now this is a truly unique and noteworthy achievement (will probably go down as one of the greatest societal achievements in this century).

RE India- democracy- ethos:
The concept of democracy in India is actually different from the West (which is the only one most people are aware of). Starting with the variable geneses of the ideas themselves... Western democracy is a refined ideology constructed over the period of many years as Europe moved away from monarchy and other forms of autocracy. On the other hand modern India is the only country in the world where democracy was essential to its very existence from day one. Nehru realized that without a democratic republic, India as a nation state would never survive (he was right). Also while Western democracy propagates the representative rights of individuals, the Indian variant in keeping with its social structure stresses first and foremost upon heterodoxy and political representation of all communities. The concepts of heterodoxy and pluralism are very deeply entrenched social features which go pretty far back in history. What India did borrow from the West was the governmental structure (up to a certain extent). That however is not synonymous with "democracy". Hence my comment on badguy's post, who clearly has no clue what he's talking about. If anyone is interested in this topic I suggest looking up Dr. Amartya Sen's essays from The Argumentative Indian.
 

mattster

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mattster You bring up some really important points, and here's my take on some of them.

RE China's unparalleled growth as a result of its authoritarianism:
I totally agree with you that China has done a phenomenal job of moving people out of abject poverty. The people that argue that there are still a ton of people left behind in China are missing one key point - How do you move a billion people out of poverty without leaving a significant portion behind. It does not matter what the system in place is, whether its Democracy or capitalist Socialism like China - some are going to benefit first, and others will be left behind.

In a nutshell - the Chinese development model is "top-down", and the Indian system is "bottom-up".
All democracies are essentially supposed to be "bottom-up" models, but the Indian system is not a truly bottom-up model, in the sense that rampant political beaurocracy, corruption and communal issues stifle the bottom-up model for growth in India.

Corruption in China is probably just as bad as India, but they dont have the beaurocracy to deal with.

To me the real question as far as China goes is this - their current political system of a capitalist economy and "CCP control of everything else under the sky" is a "limited shelf-life" model. Simply put, there is an expiry date on this model, and the Chinese people will decide that date.

At some point when most Chinese have attained middle-class with enough to eat and all the modern amenities of everyday life, then they will want the only thing left - which is to kick out the CCP, and define their own destiny. This will be a huge change and how China manages that will be the real question.


RE India- democracy- ethos:
The concept of democracy in India is actually different from the West
I not so sure that i agree with your premise here. The fundamental underpinning of any democracy is the "1-person, 1-vote" concept. This works great in a homogeneous society, but it falls far short in the more tribal, regional communal societies where minorities may be spread out and lose their clout, or rightful representation.

These countries with their non-homogeneous societies(mainly non-Western Commonwealth countries) have had to tinker with the British parlimentary system that they inherited to ensure that regional communities, groups are not sidelined in the process.

This has resulted in some unique power-sharing structures in various countries like Malaysia, India, etc. The fact that Western democracies have not had to do this is more a function of the fact that they were predominantly homogeneous societies unlike many Asian-African countries that are separated by race, religion, tribes, language, etc.
 

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Yes, India has not undergone an industrial revolution. In fact it has managed to miss the boat on multiple occasions since the turn of the 19th century.

I think you're confusing corporations and factories with industrialization. While the exact definition of the latter is a heavily debated topic, the basic difference has more to do with the society's 'state of mind' as opposed to just a physical attribute. Just because there's a physical presence of industrial hardware doesn't mean that a society is industrialized. The best example is that of the former Soviet Union, who despite having built up incredible prowess in science and select industrial sectors never achieved an industrial revolution.

India is no longer an agrarian nation in the classical sense, it is however the land of contradictions. Only around 20% of its GDP is now agro based as opposed to a little over 60% by the services sector. Yet over 60% of its population is dependent upon the agricultural sector, and it sports one of the largest farm outputs in the world.

The few select Indian multinationals you have listed have little or no bearing upon the industrialization of the Indian society at large, and their representation in the global economic sector is not nearly as competitive as their Western or Chinese counterparts.

India's recent success has been in the services sector (especially by the corporations you have listed) which in turn has propelled its government to consider leapfrogging an industrial revolution and aiming for an "information revolution" instead. Even if such an endeavor were to be possible, the handicap of not having industrialized will always be immense for a country like India. Only special cases like Hong Kong, Singapore or the Emirate of Dubai might be able to operate on such a philosophy.

I'm not sure I agree with your "definition" of labor reform; based on the documented experiences of all the industrialized democratic countries in the West and elsewhere it seems to be wrong.

While I agree with the premise of your post, and in particular, with India having 'missed the boat' in terms of a mass-scale, systematized 'industrial revolution', I must assert that the Indian model is in many ways unique, perhaps even pioneering in terms of a model for market-based, liberal democracy.

For an insight into what this model is, and in particular how this model escaped, or perceptibly 'delayed' the industrial revolution in comparison to "top-down" economies like China, see the following article by Gurcharan Das for example (a bit dated, but valid still.):

India — Skipping the Industrial Revolution?

By Gurcharan Das | Sunday, November 18, 2001

Many Indians are frightened by the idea of bypassing the industrial revolution. They ask, "But won't we still need clothes to wear and cement and steel to build our homes?" This is a misguided worry. Gurcharan Das, former head of Proctor & Gamble India, explains why, in this excerpt from his book "India Unbound."

The most direct answer to such fears is that the value added in the new Information, Communication and Entertainment (ICE) economy is far higher than in the old economy.

Seizing the comparative advantage

Put another way, a little bit of Indian software will be able to buy a great deal of a generic commodity like steel.

In the globalized open economy governed by the World Trade Organization, we will make only what we are good at. That means goods and services where we have a comparative and competitive advantage — and we will import the rest.

Fortunately, we Indians are competitive in many areas. We will, for example, make aluminum, cement and pharmaceuticals — but we will import steel and fertilizers. We are also low-cost producers of at least 12 agricultural commodities.

Adapting to the new economy

Once we reform our agriculture and the world opens its agricultural markets, we should be able to rapidly gain significant world market share in this field.

It is also worth remembering that the new economy is largely a service economy — and creates many more jobs. Meanwhile, the old economy is increasingly cutting jobs, downsizing, mechanizing — and becoming even more capital-intensive.

Skip IT

India, with its vast intellectual capital — two million low-cost English-speaking college graduates each year — is in an excellent position to provide "knowledge workers" to the global economy and to benefit from the knowledge revolution.

With competitive advantages in agriculture and the new knowledge economy, it may in the end be all right for India to skip much of the industrial revolution.

And yet, keen observers of modern India have this grave worry: If our bureaucrats and politicians killed our industrial revolution, won't they do the same with the knowledge revolution?

Why progress will prevail

I believe they will not prevail this time around, for several reasons. One, because our current economic reforms are curtailing their ability to inflict damage.

Two, because high-technology business is virtual — and it is difficult to control what you cannot see. Three, because the Internet creates transparency and brings transactions into the public domain.

Digital divide

It undercuts the bureaucrat's power, which is based on the bartering of knowledge.

Many are rightly skeptical about the new economy's ability to spread to the masses. They can only see the "digital divide." It is true that people will benefit only if they have education.

It is also true that four out of ten children in India are illiterate. It is worse for girls and in the northern states, where teachers are often absent and schools lack even the basic facilities. Children are not motivated to learn and drop out.

A thirst for education

But there is a hopeful sign. There is a new-found thirst and enormous pressure from below for education. In the past six years, India's literacy rate has risen from 52% to 62%.

This is a huge improvement. And if this trend continues, universal literacy is not far behind — despite the politicians. The happiest news comes from India's most underdeveloped states, where growth has accelerated the most.

More accountability

Among girls, literacy has grown faster than among boys.

These figures come from a smaller sample and will hopefully be confirmed in 2001. In some states, responsibility for education is beginning to shift to elected village councils.

This has brought more accountability. Two provinces — Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh — are leading the charge. And their citizens have returned the favor by reelecting their political leaders.

So perhaps there is hope. In the end, if there is one thing that could secure our future, it is vigorous attention to building human capabilities.

IT tools for all

For 50 years, India has been a political democracy, which has given voice to the lower castes through the ballot box and shown the world how political democracy can translate into social democracy.

It has now become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world. And it wants to disseminate information technology tools to the common people.

India's model for the world

The government's goal of "IT for All by 2008" reflects an understanding that the spread of information technology is an opportunity.

It is an opportunity for all to overcome historical disabilities and compress the time needed to reach comprehensive development goals.

There is a broader significance in all of this.

If India succeeds in its path of liberal market-based democracy — as it has every right to expect — it will shed new light on the future of liberalism in the world.


Adapted from "India Unbound" by Gurcharan Das. Copyright © 2001 by Gurcharan Das. Used by permission of the author.
India ? Skipping the Industrial Revolution? by Gurcharan Das - The Globalist


I must also assert, that while you are right in positing that the Sowjet Union, as an ideological-political state, did not undergo an industrial revolution, most economic historians view the Russian SFSR, prior to its unification with the Transcaucasian SFSR, the Ukrainian SSR and the Byelorussian SSR to form the 'Union of Soviet Socialist Republics', to have undergone a 'limited industrial revolution': to the extent of a rapid ramping-up of grain output because of greater integration with the world economy, an expansive increase in per capita income, a modest increase in industrial output by the infusion of western science and tech, and a high fertility demographic regime in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, this was mitigated by the attendant capriciousness of law and order and the authoritarianism of the state. Even during the Soviet era, despite significant industrialization and a state-sponsored catalyst to innovation in the form of the many agricultural and industrial research labs that proliferated, most gains were laid redundant by Soviet closetedness. Russian cotton spinners, for instance, might have been able to compete against the English as the Indians did without tariff protection, but heavy industrial output and even the weaving of cotton required tariffs.

However, a reassessment of the Sowjet economic performance based on: recalculations of national income between 1928 and 1940, including, and most importantly, the growth in consumption; the use of simulation models to explore counter-factual development trajectories in other world states; and the reposition of the debate on Soviet performance in a world-historical context have found that the results led to a more favorable assessment of the Sowjet experience than was previously acknowledged. For instance, per capita GDP growth-rates of OECD countries between 1928- 70- before the Soviet Union's decline, plotted with a regression line indicating the pace of convergence of low-average income OECD countries with high-average income OECD countries, showed that the Soviet Union achieved a growth-rate higher than the regression coefficient of that data (meaning higher than the catch-up rates of poorer OECD countries), and infact witnessed a cumulative growth that was higher in this period than the OECD average. In particular, the first Five Year plan (1928-32) saw Soviet GDP increase rapidly, even while private consumption declined slightly and the standard of living increased during the period.

But what Russia failed to achieve, even more than a real wage calibration along western european lines, even more than a rural-urban nexus, even more than private consumption, and the real reason, I believe for its demise was a significant institutional revolution, that unlike japan, which was at the same income-level at that period, effectuated a synergistic institutional and bureaucratic transformation to effect its rise from a third-world income level in 1913 to a west-European income level in 1989. When the bases for its late Imperial growth collapsed during the interwar years, and later when the bases for its socialist growth at the dissolution of the Sowjet Union, so did Russia's industrial revolution.
 

Armand2REP

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I've got another one for you, how about compare

China = communist 1.4 billion people to:

Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong = democratic 200 million

Communist GDP = $4.5tr Democractic GDP = $7tr

Democracy wins... :dfi-1:
 

redragon

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I've got another one for you, how about compare

China = communist 1.4 billion people to:

Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong = democratic 200 million

Communist GDP = $4.5tr Democractic GDP = $7tr

Democracy wins... :dfi-1:
lmao, great, Chinese really should do more and better, let's be more focus, my fellows, work harder and take more world #1 home
 

hbogyt

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I've got another one for you, how about compare

China = communist 1.4 billion people to:

Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hong Kong = democratic 200 million

Communist GDP = $4.5tr Democractic GDP = $7tr

Democracy wins... :dfi-1:
Japan, Taiwan and Korea were all dictatorships before the Asian financial crisis when their economies thrived. Then the bail out came with strings attached, hence their current democracies. Thoese didn't need the bail out (can't recall exactly who) changed due to foreign and domestic pressure.
 

Armand2REP

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Japan, Taiwan and Korea were all dictatorships before the Asian financial crisis when their economies thrived. Then the bail out came with strings attached, hence their current democracies.
And just how do you classify functioning parliamentary democracies as dictatorships? :sarcastic:
 

hbogyt

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It is not a claim by me, it's one by many economists. If you want explanation, read a book called "Tigers Tamed". It's been 3 years since I read that book, so I can't just pull an explanation off the top of my head. In response to your claim that they were parliamentary democracies, Pakistan is a democracy too, on paper.

Edit: Just because they are rich now and are democracies doesn't mean one could equate the two as you are doing.
 

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