Economist Arvind Subramanian is the front-runner to become chief economic adviser to India’s finance ministry, a hotly anticipated appointment for the country’s new government given its pledges to tame inflation and kickstart the economy.
He isn’t likely to harbor any illusions about the profound obstacles that stand in the government’s way.
Mr. Subramanian—a fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and at the Center for Global Development, both of them in Washington—previously worked for the International Monetary Fund. He was assistant director of its research department and the fund’s resident representative in Cairo. He has also taught at Harvard University and Johns Hopkins. Early in his career, he worked at the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, during the Uruguay Round of trade talks in the late 1980s and early ’90s. (That particular experience could come in handy amid India’s current tussle with the GATT’s successor body, the World Trade Organization.)
His academic work has focused on trade and its effects on developing countries. His writings on India’s economic emergence since the 1980s have tried to deepen simplistic conventional narratives. In a 2005 paper written with economist Dani Rodrik, he argued that the real catalysts of the country’s recent decades of fast growth came a decade before 1991 reforms that liberalized investment and production.