>My questions to you would be: 1) do you see this as a
>sustained trend
It has been ongoing for two decades. That doesn't mean that it won't
be reversed, but rapid growth in India is definitely not just a flash
in the pan.
>2) to what do you attribute this change? economic liberalisation?
Well, that is economists' conventional wisdom--that the "neoliberal"
economic reforms of the Narasimha Rao government in the early 1990s
were the decisive change. Dani Rodrik, however, argues that the
structural break comes more than half a decade earlier, and that the
more likely key was the Rajiv Gandhi government's decision to ease
restrictions on imports of capital goods, which he argues (and I
argue) are a key link in that they not only boost productivity
directly but also carry a great deal of technology across national
borders.
I would have to say that I really don't know what has transformed
India from an economy in which it takes more than 60 years for GDP
per capita to double to one in which it takes less than 20 years for
GDP per capita to double.
Brad DeLong
