The Billionaire Raj, a new book on India’s economic transformation by James Crabtree — who was, until recently, the Mumbai bureau chief for the Financial Times — is a curate’s egg. First for the good part. One of the puzzles of the 1990s moves from planned economies to market-based economies in China, Russia and India […]
Back in 2013, I voiced concerns about the way in which China Development Bank (CDB) was running its infrastructure spending and foreign lending. Chen Yuan, then governor of the CBD, had turned the bankrupt bank into a vital instrument in the Chinese economy. By increasing its lending both within China and overseas, it became the world’s biggest development lender. […]
For the last two months I have been in Los Angeles basking in the unseasonable heat and looking incredulously at the presidential election race, which has also seen extraordinary heat and upended all the expectations of the pundits. Starting from about two per cent in June 2015, the two insurgents – the Republican Donald Trump and the Democrat Bernie Sanders – have seen […]
In my CapX article on India’s first budget, I had argued that, despite lacking a majority in the upper house (Rajya Sabha) , given his massive general election victory in 2014 Narendra Modi should have gone immediately for ‘big bang’ structural reforms which a traumatized opposition would have found difficult to oppose. Instead, he chose the dilatory […]
The new Indian government has now been in office for 10 months. It has presented an interim budget, which merely marked time and its first fully owned budget at the end of February. Despite the high hopes engendered by Mr. Modi’s rhetoric about turning back the statist policies of the previous Congress led governments which […]
Deepak Lal’s third article in his three part series on capitalism and inequality. My first and lasting impression of America, echoed by numerous observers from the hierarchical societies of Europe and Asia, was the absence of class, despite great inequalities of income and wealth. But today, many see a class society emerging in America. An important book […]
Deepak Lal’s second article in his three part series on capitalism and inequality. One of the abiding myths of ‘development economics’, and now with the stagnation of middle class incomes in the US also in developed economises, has been that economic growth accompanied by an increase in inequality will not ‘trickle down’ to the poor. My […]
Deepak Lal introduces the first of his three part series on capitalism and inequality. In September my wife and I toured Indo-China. After seeing the glories of the partially restored Hindu temples of Angkor Wat, we cruised down past the lush fields of the reversed Mekong river from Siem Reap to Saigon, making various stops- […]
In his Imagined Communities, the political scientist Benedict Anderson identifies four waves of nationalism. The first was the “creole” wars of liberation in North and South America, prompted by the policy of the European powers of barring the entry of the “creole” elite to higher official and political office. The accident of birth in the Americas seemed to […]
