Arvind Panagariya

Jagdish Bhagwati

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.

How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the Lessons for Other Developing Countries

Why Growth Matters

Jagdish N. Bhagwati

Debunking Myths that Undermine Progress and Addressing New Challenges

India's Tryst with Destiny

Policy discourse in India tends to be dominated by assertions unsupported by facts, with the media indulging one and all without proper scrutiny. Often, the result is the creation and perpetuation of myths of all kinds. Thus, many believe today that poverty, illiteracy and ill-health afflict India because its leadership ignored them in favour of growth for its own sake; that the economic reforms that focused on growth have failed to help the poor, especially the socially disadvantaged; that any gains claimed in poverty alleviation derive from the use of progressively lower poverty lines; and that even if gains have been made, with one in two children suffering from malnutrition, reforms have done precious little to improve health outcomes. In this definitive book on economic reforms in India since Independence, Bhagwati and Panagariya decisively demolish these and other myths, which critics use as weapons to wound and maim the reforms. Using systematic data and analysis, they forcefully show that once the debris of critiques of India's reforms is cleared, it becomes evident that intensification of reforms - that allows sustained rapid growth - is the only way to lift millions out of poverty, illiteracy and ill-health. They argue that only growth can provide sufficient revenues for the provision of education and good health for the masses.

India's Tryst With Destiny

T. N. Srinivasan

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).

Lectures on International Trade, second edition

In this volume, veteran economist Arvind Panagariya compares two Prime Ministers' approach towards economic reforms-Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. He shows how the Vajpayee government was almost relentless in pursuit of reforms and enacted them in all areas, save a few. In his opinion, along with Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, Vajpayee 'must be credited with laying the foundation of the new India'. Vajpayee lost the parliamentary elections of May 2004, which led to the emergence of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) that ruled the country till May 2014. Although Dr Manmohan Singh, who had been the finance minister when India's economy was liberalized, served as the prime minister during both these terms, reforms came to a standstill. Social spending largely became a substitute for economic reforms. However, in its first term, the UPA did not do anything to either disrupt the prior reforms or introduce anti-growth policies. As a result, the economy grew at an 8 per cent-plus annual rate. Unfortunately, in its second term, the UPA turned outright anti-reform, taking numerous steps that eventually led to a drop in the growth rate during its last two years. Dr Panagariya analyses the reasons behind this. A book that highlights the importance of economic reforms to the public and to policymakers, An Economist's Quest for Reforms is essential reading to understand India's economic trajectory.

The Vajpayee and Singh Years

An Economist's Quest For Reforms

University Professor Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations Jagdish N Bhagwati

Pravin Krishna

Professor of Economics and Indian Political Economy Arvind Panagariya

The recent proliferation of free trade areas and customs unions in the world trading system has led to a revival of interest in the economic analysis of Preferential Trade Agreements (PTAs). The principal theoretical question of the 1950s and 1960s (Viner) was whether PTAs encourage or discourage the worldwide nondiscriminatory freeing of trade. The essays in this volume present the central contributions to the analytical approaches developed to examine these questions. -- Provided by publisher.

Alternative Approaches to Analyzing Preferential Trade Agreements

Trading Blocs

Openness has affected neither poverty nor inequality adversely. When surveyed, people in disproportionately large volumes from all groups say that their fortunes are improving. The essays in this volume show that trade oppenness has helped reduce poverty among most social groups.

How They Produced Inclusive Growth

India's Reforms

Jaime De Melo

Claudio Montenegro

Regional integration arrangements are more likely to be a stepping stone toward a freer world trading system if GATT rules are strengthened - and if developing countries enter into arrangements with developed rather than other developing countries.

Regional Integration Old and New

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.

Reclaiming the Lost Glory

New India

Kar-yiu Wong

Elias Dinopoulos

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 and the 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.

Trade, Globalization and Poverty

In 1946, Baloo Lal Panagariya, then twenty-five years old, arrived in Jaipur to join the editorial staff of the newspaper Lokvani, devoted to exposing the excesses of the British and princely rulers of Rajputana. Though unremarkable in itself, the story behind this event is one of the triumph of human spirit over adversity. Baloo Lal was born in a remote village in Rajasthan, in a family that could not scrape together two full meals a day. He lost his father at five and mother at fourteen. The village lacked even a primary school. Yet, thanks to the wisdom and sacrifice of his mother and his own perseverance, he completed his education, went on to serve with distinction as a civil servant in the newly formed state of Rajasthan and, after retirement, wrote the first definitive book on the history of the freedom movement in Rajasthan. In a very real sense, Baloo Lal's journey from the village of Suwana to the city of Jaipur was a long and arduous one, much more so than that of his own son, decades later from Jaipur to Washington, DC. His success led to more milestones in the next generation, with two of his children being honoured with Padma awards and another with a presidential award. My Father: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man adds a new dimension to the history of India. It is a reminder that post-independence India was built not just by a handful of leaders working at the top but numerous ordinary citizens who shaped its many contours from below.

The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man

My Father

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 Emerging Giant

India

India used to contribute approximately a quarter of the world's GDP until 1700 CE. As recently as 1820, this share was a hefty 16 per cent. But the Industrial Revolution shifted the centre of gravity of the global economy towards the West. The pernicious, indeed exploitative, policies of the British added to this shift by greatly impoverishing India. India's own policies during the first four decades following Independence denied it a rapid return to prosperity. But now that it has left those policies behind, opened up its economy and created a large GDP base, India can aspire to return to the prominent position it enjoyed in the global economy for so long. In The New India: A Reformer's Guide, one of the country's foremost economists, Arvind Panagariya, sets out a detailed pathway for India to regain its lost glory.

India Unlimited: Reclaiming the Lost Glory

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.An Economist Best Book of 2008.

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.Â Given the clear benefits trade openness has brought everywhere, this is a surprising development.Â The benefits of free trade are especially great for emerging market economies. FreeÂTrade and ProsperityÂoffers 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.

Arvind Panagariya

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