Overtaking China

Here is another bit from Anand’s comments.

The collective leadership that is fueling china’s growth today will have to go away in the future. Communism is not going to last long enough for china to become a developed nation. Once communism collapses and democracy begins to form in china, there will be a prolonged period of little or zero growth in the country’s economy.

That is when India will overtake china.

It is very likely wishful thinking combined with admirable patriotism that motivates Anand above. The engine of communism has been decoupled from the Chinese train long ago and it is the engine of capitalism that is driving that one. As Pranab Bardhan had observed, the Chinese were better socialists than Indians, and now the Chinese are proving to be better capitalists than Indians.

The Development Path of Economies

Anand’s comment in response to a past posting prompts this one. He wrote:

The fact that manufacturing accounts for such a small percentage of India’s GDP is not a minus but a plus. All the industrialized nations have seen manufacturing as a percentage of GDP shrink.

There is much misunderstanding about the process of development and it may be worthwhile to start thinking about development. (What follows is partly from another article I had written some time ago.)