With a GDP that just reached $2.6 trillion, India is poised to become the world's third largest economy in less than a decade. In doing so, it will have moved one step closer to reclaiming its pre-industrial glory when it accounted for one-sixth of the global output and ranked second in economic size. This rapid movement in the absolute size of the economy will be insufficient, however, to bring prosperity to India's vast population. Today, 44% of the country's workforce remains in agriculture and another 42% in small enterprises with fewer than twenty workers. Labor productivity of both sets of workers remains low and they live overwhelmingly on subsistence-level incomes. In New India: Reclaiming the Lost Glory, Arvind Panagariya outlines a concise strategy to transform India from a primarily rural and agricultural economy to an urban and industrial economy with well-paid jobs for those with limited skills. Panagariya argues that the creation of good jobs requires the emergence of medium and large enterprises in industry and services, especially labor-intensive sectors such as apparel, footwear, and other light manufactures. He explains that India needs policies conducive to the growth of firms from small to medium, medium to large, and large to larger still. Such policies include greater outward orientation; more flexible land, labor, and capital markets; concerted effort to improve the quality of higher education; faster urbanization; and improved governance at all levels. Written by a preeminent authority on the Indian economy, New India: Reclaiming the Lost Glory provides a data-driven and persuasive roadmap for India to eliminate abject poverty, accelerate economic growth, and return to its historically prominent position in the global economy.

The India Policy Forum (IPF) is a new annual publication dedicated to research on the contemporary Indian economy. It provides a forum for addressing the scope, speed, and desirability of economic reforms within India and their fundamental impacts on the country's social and economic welfare. The IPF aims to nurture a global network of scholars interested in India's economic transformation. A joint publication of the National Council of Applied Economic Research in India and the Brookings Institution in the United States, the IPF provides a bridge between researchers in India and abroad. This inaugural issue contains highlights from a conference held in New Delhi in March 2004. Topics include: India's Trade Reform: Progress, Impact, and Future Strategy Should a U.S.-India Free Trade Agreement Be Part of India's Trade Strategy? Foreign Inflows and Macroeconomic Policy in India India's Experience with the Implementation of a Pegged Exchange Rate The Challenges for Capital Account Convertibility in India Banking Reform in India

While considerable progress has been made in analyzing the formulation of international economic policies, the existing literature remains deficient in several respects. First, the existing models take a relatively simplistic view of the political-economy environment. For example, in contrast to the observed reality, a large majority of the models view the government as a monolithic entity. Second, there is only limited recognition of the political-economy interactions between interest groups across national borders. Third, dynamic factors governing trade policy formulation have been essentially absent in the literature. Fourth, the empirical work in this area, both cross-industry within national boundaries and cross-national, is very much in infancy and in need of further development. Fifth, other aspects of international economic policy such as foreign aid and foreign direct investment have been scarcely addressed in the existing literature. In this volume, edited by Devashish Mitra and Arvind Panagariya, a group of distinguished scholars in international trade, especially from the younger generation, analyzes several of these important but neglected aspects of the political economy of international economic policy. The volume contains 12 essays topped by an introduction by the editors. The contributors to this volume are Alok Bohara, Carl Davidson, David Feldman, Kishore Gawande, Amy Glass, Omer Gokcekus, Keith Hall, William Kaempfer, Justin Knowles, Pravin Krishna, Phil Levy, Chris Magee, Steve Matusz, Wolfgang Mayer, John McLaren, Devashish Mitra, Alex Mourmouras, Doug Nelson, Arvind Panagariya, Martin Richardson, Martin Ross, Kamal Saggi and Ed Tower. The volume makes major advances in the area of political economy of trade, aid and investment policy, and therefore will be of considerable interest to academic researchers and students of international economics. Because of its obvious focus on the process of policy formulation, economists as think tanks, international institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and World Trade Organization, and trade-policy analysts in developed and developing countries will also read it.

Growth miracles typically have been studied at the country level. The Making of Miracles in Indian States breaks from that tradition and studies three growth miracles in India at the level of the state: Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, and Gujarat. These are three of the largest and most diverse states in India. Andhra Pradesh is situated in the south of India, Bihar in the east, and Gujarat in the west. Bihar is the poorest among all states in India, Gujarat the third richest among the largest eighteen states, and Andhra Pradesh in the middle. Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat have long coastal lines while Bihar is landlocked. Yet, all of these states have grown at rates exceeding 8% for an entire decade in the 21st century. Despite many differences in the initial conditions, several common threads tie the high-growth experiences of the three states. First, accelerated growth has permitted acceleration in the growth of development expenditures in all three states, which has helped improve connectivity to markets. Alongside this growth, poverty has seen accelerated decline. Second, the composition of growth matters. Growth in high-value commodities such as fruits and vegetables, commercial crops, dairy, and animal husbandry in Andhra Pradesh and Gujarat has led to accelerated reduction in rural poverty. However, the failure of labor-intensive industry has stunted the migration of workers out of agriculture into industry. Third, the quality of leadership that brings improved governance with it is central to improved outcomes in the states. Visionary leaders--Chandrababu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, Nitish Kumar in Bihar, and Narendra Modi in Gujarat--played critical roles in the making of all three miracles. Fourth, the three studies also bring out the importance of pro-market reforms and the adoption of technology in development. Finally, the studies show that good economics is also good politics: voters reward the chief ministers who bring about significant improvement to the people's lives.

Reforms and Economic Transformation in India is the second volume in the series Studies in Indian Economic Policies. The first volume, India's Reforms: How They Produced Inclusive Growth (OUP, 2012), systematically demonstrated that reforms-led growth in India led to reduced poverty among all social groups. They also led to shifts in attitudes whereby citizens overwhelmingly acknowledge the benefits that accelerated growth has brought them and as voters, they now reward the governments that deliver superior economic outcomes and punish those that fail to do so.
This latest volume takes as its starting point the fact that while reforms have undoubtedly delivered in terms of poverty reduction and associated social objectives, the impact has not been as substantial as seen in other reform-oriented economies such as South Korea and Taiwan in the 1960s and 1970s, and more recently, in China. The overarching hypothesis of the volume is that the smaller reduction in poverty has been the result of slower transformation of the economy from a primarily agrarian to a modern, industrial one. Even as the GDP share of agriculture has seen rapid decline, its employment share has declined very gradually. More than half of the workforce in India still remains in agriculture. In addition, non-farm workers are overwhelmingly in the informal sector. Against this background, the nine original essays by eminent economists pursue three broad themes using firm level data in both industry and services.
The papers in part I ask why the transformation in India has been slow in terms of the movement of workers out of agriculture, into industry and services, and from informal to formal employment. They address what India needs to do to speed up this transformation. They specifically show that severe labor-market distortions and policy bias against large firms has been a key factor behind the slow transformation. The papers in part II analyze the transformation that reforms have brought about within and across enterprises. For example, they investigate the impact of privatization on enterprise profitability. Part III addresses the manner in which the reforms have helped promote social transformation. Here the papers analyze the impact the reforms have had on the fortunes of the socially disadvantaged groups in terms of wage and education outcomes and as entrepreneurs.

When India embraced systematic economic reforms in 1991 and began opening its economy to both domestic and foreign competition, critics argued that they had contributed little to the acceleration of economic growth. Their argument had rested on the claim that growth in the 1990s was no faster than in the 1980s. This claim was quickly refuted on the grounds that when properly evaluated, growth had indeed accelerated in the 1990s and, more importantly, while reforms had been made systematic in 1991, they had actually begun much earlier in the late 1970s. Subsequently, the reforms of the late 1990s and early 2000s have led to a jump in the growth rate from six percent in the 1990s to eight to nine percent beginning in 2003. The reforms have also led to a major structural change in the economy: the trade to GDP ratio tripled since 1991, there has been a gigantic expansion of foreign investment in India, and sectors such as telecommunications, airlines, and automobiles have expanded at rates much higher than those observed any time in the past. This dramatic turn-around has led the critics to shift ground. They now argue that opening the economy to trade has hurt the poor; that rapid growth is leaving the socially disadvantaged groups behind; and that the reforms have led to increased inequality. They also argue that people themselves do not feel that their fortunes are improving. The five original essays in this volume, topped by a substantial introductory essay summarizing their findings, take these challenges head on. They use large-scale sample surveys and other data to systematically address each of these arguments. They show that trade openness has indeed helped reduce poverty not just in general but also among the socially disadvantaged groups. The contributors to the volume find no evidence whatsoever in favor of a negative impact of trade openness on poverty on any groups. The essays also show that inequality shows no clear trend and is unrelated to trade openness. Peoples responses have also now turned grossly in favor of reforms. Thus, when asked how they feel about the change in their fortunes in the recent past, an overwhelmingly large proportion of individuals from every conceivable group report improvements. Moreover, systematic analysis of the 2009 parliamentary elections show that people now reward the Chief Ministers in states in which they deliver superior growth outcomes and punish those that do not. This book is the first volume in the series Studies in Indian Economic Policies edited by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya and published by OUP. It contains the first set of five original papers produced under the auspices of the Columbia Program on Indian Economic Policies housed in the School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP).

An outstanding work, written to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Jagdish Bhagwati; the foremost defender of free trade and its role in developing economies in the world today, this rigorously academic and critical volume represents an important contribution to the understanding of many aspects of globalization. The editors, affiliated with four of the leading economics departments in the USA bring together a stellar line of contributors from across the world to discuss the themes and arguments raised by Bhagwati's latest work.

A renowned professor of economics and regarded as one of the foremost international trade economist of modern times, Jagdish Bhagwati has written or edited over forty books including In Defence of Globalization and Free Trade Today as well as being the founding editor of Economics and Politics and The Journal of International Economics.

A tribute to the great intellectual accomplishments andthe inspiration that Jagdish Bhagwati provided to the field during his prolific and influential career, this book is a must read for all students and academics studying or working in international trade and development economics.

Most discussions of India's substantive economic growth since the 1990s tend to focus on national level statistics or on particular sectors such as the financial and call service sectors or on the pharmaceutical industry. But with a population of 1.2 billion, India demands to be treated like a collection of individual "countries, " rather than a unified nation. Ten of its states have populations equaling or exceeding that of the United Kingdom. If the state of Uttar Pradesh were a country, it would be the fourth largest, behind China, India, and the United States. These facts pointedly tell us that if we are to understand the ongoing experiment in economic reforms and poverty alleviation, we must study India at the level of the state. In this spirit, State Level Reforms and Growth and Development in Indian States provides the first-ever comprehensive analysis of growth at the highly diverse state level. The authors argue that when the national government loosened its stronghold on industry and services, state governments were able to shape the fortunes of their citizens through state-level policy reforms. Because of this, every Indian state experienced accelerated growth, unlike China during the first two decades of its development when the eastern half flourished as the western half lagged. Every Indian state has grown faster in the last decade than any other decade in the post-independence era. In fact, some of the poorest states, notably Bihar and Orissa, have been growing the fastest. Professors Panagariya and Chakraborty and Dr. Rao refute the common assumptions that growth has not occurred or that poverty has not been reduced in all Indian states. The recent reforms have also led to improved access in every state to basic amenities such as permanent houses, electricity, water, and sanitation. These accomplishments notwithstanding, regional inequality on a per capita basis has grown as well. Reforms in state-controlled sectors such as agriculture, industry, healthcare, and education have not advanced as far as some analysts previously predicted. The authors outline the reforms in these areas and draw on the experience of states that have successfully carried out some of them. The authors pay special attention to reforms in the areas of education and health while recognizing that the Indian constitution vests in the states much of this legislative and other authority and while considering the real absolute rise in income, literacy, and health status across all the states.

The slow progress of the GATT negotiations, developing countries' experience of trade liberalization in the 1980s and recent dramatic changes in Eastern Europe have all revived interest in regional integration. Papers in this volume, based on a CEPR joint conference with the World Bank, analyze why countries find regional integration more attractive now than in the past, the circumstances under which different kinds of integration are appropriate and the conditions necessary for their success. It also considers whether regionalism may serve as a stepping stone to multilateral free trade and the possible harmful long-term effects on small developing countries and free traders of the world's division into trading blocs.

Wallace E. Oates has made a pioneering contribution to environmental and public economics. This original selection of essays honors his seminal work in both these fields. The contributions to this volume apply Wallace E. Oates's key ideas and insights to a broad range of problems. The essays on environmental economics assess environmental policy in today's conservative era and analyse environmental taxes, environmental federalism and the choice of environmental policy instruments. The chapters on public economics investigate vouchers for private schools, capitalization, urban growth controls and the welfare economics of congestible amenities in general equilibrium models. The authors also examine intergovernmental grants in South Africa, public pensions in the European Union and fiscal federalism in early American history. Environmental and Public Economics is an informative and thought-provoking celebration of Wallace E. Oates's work which will be useful for students and scholars of environmental studies, public policy and public sector economics.

In its history since Independence, India has seen widely different economic experiments: from Jawharlal Nehru's pragmatism to the rigid state socialism of Indira Gandhi to the brisk liberalization of the 1990s. So which strategy best addresses India's, and by extension the world's, greatest moral challenge: lifting a great number of extremely poor people out of poverty?
Bhagwati and Panagariya argue forcefully that only one strategy will help the poor to any significant effect: economic growth, led by markets overseen and encouraged by liberal state policies. Their radical message has huge consequences for economists, development NGOs and anti-poverty campaigners worldwide. There are vital lessons here not only for Southeast Asia, but for Africa, Eastern Europe, and anyone who cares that the effort to eradicate poverty is more than just good intentions. If you want it to work, you need growth. With all that implies.

This volume explores the claims of proponents of free-trade areas and analyzes two principal initiatives associated with recent US trade policy: NAFTA and APEC. The authors conclude that the US should reject preferential trading in favour of the more beneficial goal of non-preferential trading.

Arguments for protection and against free trade have seen a revival in developed countries such as the United States and Great Britain as well as developing countries such as India. Given the clear benefits trade openness has brought everywhere, this is a surprising development. The benefits of free trade are especially great for emerging market economies. FreeTrade and Prosperityoffers the first full-scale defense of pro-free-trade policies with developing countries at its center. Arvind Panagariya, a professor at Columbia University and former top economic advisor to the government of India, supplies a historically informed analysis of many longstanding but flawed arguments for protection. He starts with an insightful overview of the positive case for free trade, and then closely examines the various contentions of protectionists. One protectionist argument is that "infant" industries need time to grow and become competitive, and thus should be sheltered. Other arguments are that emerging markets are especially prone to coordination failures, they are in need of diversification of their production structures, and they suffer from market imperfections. The panoply of protectionist arguments, including those for import substitution industrialization, fails when subject to close logical and empirical scrutiny. Free trade and outward-oriented policies are preconditions to both sustained rapid growth and poverty alleviation in developing countries. Panagariya provides compelling evidence demonstrating the failures of protectionism and the promise of free trade using detailed case studies of successful countries such as Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea, China and India. Low or declining barriers to free trade and high or rising shares of trade in total income have been key elements in the sustained rapid growth and poverty alleviation in these countries and many others. Free trade is like oxygen: the benefits are ubiquitous and not noticed until they are no longer there. This important book is an essential reminder of the costs of protectionism.

India is not only the world's largest and fiercely independent democracy, but also an emerging economic giant. But to date there has been no comprehensive account of India's remarkable growth or the role policy has played in fueling this expansion. India: The Emerging Giant fills this gap, shedding light on one of the most successful experiments in economic development in modern history.
Why did the early promise of the Indian economy not materialize and what led to its eventual turnaround? What policy initiatives have been undertaken in the last twenty years and how do they relate to the upward shift in the growth rate? What must be done to push the growth rate to double-digit levels? To answer these crucial questions, Arvind Panagariya offers a brilliant analysis of India's economy over the last fifty years--from the promising start in the 1950s, to the near debacle of the 1970s (when India came to be regarded as a "basket case"), to the phenomenal about face of the last two decades. The author illuminates the ways that government policies have promoted economic growth (or, in the case of Indira Gandhi's policies, economic stagnation), and offers insightful discussions of such key topics as poverty and inequality, tax reform, telecommunications (perhaps the single most important success story), agriculture and transportation, and the government's role in health, education, and sanitation.
The dramatic change in the fortunes of 1.1 billion people has, not surprisingly, generated tremendous interest in the economy of India. Arvind Panagariya offers the first major account of how this has come about and what more India must do to sustain its rapid growth and alleviate poverty. It will be must reading for everyone interested in modern India, foreign affairs, or the world economy.

The greatest strength of this thoroughly revised and expanded edition of Lectures on International Trade is its rigorous algebraic and geometric treatment of the various models and results of trade theory. The authors, who now include Arvind Panagariya, offer both policy insights and empirical applications. They have added nine entirely new chapters as well as new sections to several existing chapters (e.g., a greatly expanded treatment of the growing theory of preferential trade agreements).