Is India’s Growth rate sustainable?

With Indian economy growing leaps and bounds, the question is is it sustainable? IMF and Brookings Institution organised a forum over this topic on March 8, 2007.

It was moderated by Lael Brainard (Vice President and Director of the Global Economy Development Program at Brookings) and economists present were:

• Charles Kramer is Chief of the IMF’s division that covers India,
• Shantayanan Devarajan is Chief Economist, World Bank’s Human Development Network and
• Nirvikar Singh is Professor of Economics, University of California, Santa Cruz

The transcript of the forum is here.

 The discussion is a pretty useful one and they discuss this report prepared by IMF Staff, alongwith the inputs of the economists.

Most of the points have been known for quite sometime. Like for instance  the issues (power, water, labour reforms, etc.) and the possible solutions (importance of institutions etc) .

However, it is nicely done and we have a nice summary of thing so far. The IMF report should be interesting. Let me read it and get back.

Assorted Links

1. Ajay Shah hopes RBI does something about its messy monetary policy. Rajeev Malik has some prescriptions for RBI.

2. MR has a posting on one of the next generation economists – E. Glen Weyl

3. WSJ Blog points out that US GDP has been revised downwards for the previous 3 years. The latest GDP numbers show Savings rate in US have increased.

4. Rodrik points out to an article which explains growth and development by monkeys, trees and jungle. Funny and quite a thought.

5. Arvind Panagriya has a nice article in ET. He says unlike the general view, agriculture is not as important to India’s growth as it is made out to be. Well, the problem is not growth in agriculture, but to move people out of agriculture into services and industry. He has given a good solution to this problem which I have discussed here. He does mention the solution in the article albeit briefly.