On 3/31/07, Anthony D'Costa <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The Indian growth model is NOT FDI-driven, far from it. A paltry $10
billion (with a good chunk of it in portfolio investment) is no real
driver. In fact the FDI in selected sectors (auto, IT) have been pretty
good in terms of India's technological spillovers and firm capabilities.
The Chinese story may be a little different. But I agree on the
employment front, it is very difficult to generate employment in
capital-intensive industrialization and especially with recent vintages of
capital being increasingly labor displacing.
The way I see it both China and India need to play the global market game
but divert the growth to the social domestic sector. India's growth rate
is much slower than China's precisely because of its devolved political
system. But in the end this may be to India's advantage because of
representative politics in which the poor have a large share.
It's said that voter turnouts in India's elections have not declined
as much as in many countries of the world where voting is not
compulsory. But to what extent does representative capitalist
democracy work for the poor, especially poor women and children?
Amartya Sen has said that famines of the sort that are associated with
the Great Leap Forward of China, colonial India, etc. wouldn't have
happened in a country that has representative democracy and democratic
media, but representative democracy and democratic media are perfectly
compatible with chronic malnutrition for which India (as well as much
of the rest of South Asia) is well known: "Estimates of general
undernourishment -- what is sometimes called 'protein-energy
malnutrition' -- are nearly twice as high in India as in sub-Saharan
Africa. It is astonishing that despite the intermittent occurrence of
famine in Africa, it too manages to ensure a much higher level of
regular nourishment than does India. About half of all Indian children
are, it appears, chronically undernourished, and more than half of all
adult women suffer from anaemia" (Amartya Sen, "Hunger in India,"
Address Made at a Public Hearing on Hunger and the Right to Food,
Delhi University, 10 January 2003
<http://www.righttofoodindia.org/data/amartya.pdf>).
--
Yoshie
