Washington, Dec 02: Indian economy is a "success story", four well-known US-based economists say, but differ on whether reforms were responsible for India's higher growth rates in recent years. Economists Bradford Delong and Dani Rodrik say, according to a survey published by the International Monetary Fund, that reforms cannot be credited with India's higher growth rates in recent years because the shift in the growth rate preceded the reforms of the 1990s.


Joseph Stiglitz, former vice president and chief economist of the world bank who was among the first to challenge the "Washington consensus," by which the World Bank, IMF and the us treasury would argue that liberalisation was the key to economic progress, went further.

He contended that India is one of the two most impressive economies today, the other being China, and that India also, like China, has bought the least into the "globalisation story that the IMF and others were selling."

Arvind Panagariya, resident scholar in the trade unit of the IMF research department and Professor of Economics, University of Maryland, said India is where it is and avoided pitfalls because it adopted gradual liberalisation.

Panagariya argued that India's growth in the 1980s was unsustainable and fragile. It was the more systematic reforms of the 1990s, he said, that produced decidedly more stable and sustainable growth from 1992 on.

Bureau Report