In a recent special issue of TIME, I argued that India would eventually overtake China as the world’s premier emerging market. It’s a prediction that often produces snickers. How, skeptics ask, can India’s fractious democracy and inept governance overcome the clinical efficiency of China’s tight-fisted state? But I have always stood by that conviction.
My reasoning was that India’s superior and more commercially run private sector is stronger than China’s, and that ultimately, economic development is propelled forward by entrepreneurship and healthy, innovative private companies and banks, not by government planning and state-driven industrialization. India’s private enterprise, backed up by the freedoms of democracy, would come to trump China’s state-led, authoritarian growth model. Not only is history on my side — name one authoritarian regime that fostered vibrant, creative industries — but I also have my doubts about the perceived competency of the Chinese state. (That’s a subject for another post.) Yes, the Indian state may underperform the Chinese state, but, I felt, at the end of the day that wouldn’t hold back India’s economic miracle.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Is India’s Government Killing its Economic Miracle? | Business | TIME.com
