India Advanced In 30 Years As Much As Britain Did In 150: Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman
Paul Krugman, a Nobel Laureate on Saturday said that India has made great progress on the economic front, but the economic inequality in the country is still the same, adding that corruption in the country is still a major problem.
“There are issues with corruption. You cannot become Denmark with Chinese levels of corruption,” he said.
Paul said that the subcontinent has become a better place to do business than it was before, although the bureaucratic hurdles have not gone away completely but reduced enormously.
“One problem is a high degree of economic inequality,” Mr Krugman said at the News 18 Rising India Summit, adding that India has made “enormous strides” in economic progress but the wealth has “not been evenly distributed”.
Talking about the rising income of the middle-class globally, Paul Krugman said, “People, when (they) mostly talk about the story, understandably focus on China, but India is part of the story as well. India is still poor, but not in the same level at all. Indian GDP per capita is about 12 percent of the US level now, which sounds low but that is up from 4 percent not that long ago.”
Referring to the economic growth in India as “extraordinary”, he said that the country is now the world’s largest economy overtaking Japan and while being behind the US and China, it is far bigger than any of the European countries.
Talking about the factors that played a huge role in the economic growth of India, Mr Krugman said that there was a huge and dramatic change in India’s policy including the liberalizing policies taken part in the early 1990s.
“I am on the Centre-Left, but I do not think the government should have a heavy hand on the economy. India used to have License Raj, where bureaucratic obstacles were immense and that has not gone away completely but enormously reduced. India has become a much easier place to do business that it was. The PM said India moved from 148 to 100 in the rankings. That is not a badge of distinction, but it is better than it was,” he observed.
According to Mr Krugman, the transformation of policy came at a good time and the country opened up at the right time.