Reinventing India by Stuart Corbridge

Reinventing India by Stuart Corbridge

Author:Stuart Corbridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley


The pace of reform

By the mid-1990s India could reasonably be described as an emerging market, and the Economist newspaper was moved to acclaim the reforms as ‘nothing less than a repudiation of India’s distinctive approach to development – a repudiation, that is, of Nehru’s vision of socialist self-reliance’ (Survey of India, February 1997). If the neoliberal camp had any doubts about the reforms they related to the pace and depth of the changes that central government had induced. T. N. Srinivasan had early on complained that: ‘The credibility of the reform package and the probability of its successful implementation would be enhanced if it is implemented within a short time span’ (1991: 2145), and in this judgement he later received support from Jeffrey Sachs, the Harvard economist and guru of rapid economic reform (much to the annoyance of Padma Desai).15 For the most part, though, neoliberals have been content to accept ‘that the initial speed and scope of reforms in India were just about right’ (Bhagwati 1998: 37), and most have chosen to campaign for a second round of reforms that would foster growth and thereby deal with the substantial fiscal deficits that emerged in the second half of the 1990s. Deepak Lal, for example, has argued that the very scale of the central government deficit in the late 1990s – ‘about 6 per cent of GDP, one of the world’s largest’ according to the World Bank (1998: xiii) – must encourage the government to make reforms which recognize that ‘globalization is an irreversible process’ (Lal 1999: 46). Jagdish Bhagwati, meanwhile, has called upon the government to enact new policies in the

two areas where reforms are necessary and crucial if the outward orientation [of the economy] is to produce growth rates of 9–10 per cent rather than of 6 per cent and if we are truly to reproduce the East Asian miracle (rather than a pale and anaemic copy thereof) a quarter century behind schedule; [namely] (i) the public sector which cries out to be privatized now (but where the ability to deal with the entrenched unions is a major obstacle) and (ii) the ability of firms to extract greater efficiency from the labour force, including the application of changed laws that permit workers to be laid off as necessary, though with appropriate safeguards. (1998: 38)



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.