Senior fellow Arvind Subramanian's piece on growth in India was featured in the Business Standard .
From the Article
India’s policy turnaround enters its third decade this month, but the remarkable Indian growth turnaround is now in its fourth decade. The first two decades of higher growth – the 1980s and 1990s – have been well explored. Only now, with data becoming available, can we begin studying Indian growth patterns in the third decade, the 2000s.
My ongoing research with Utsav Kumar of the Asian Development Bank throws up four key findings about growth within India in the 2000s compared to the 1990s.
1. THE GOOD NEWS: Average growth has doubled. Chart 1 illustrates this fact. It plots the per capita growth rate for the 21 largest states for two time periods: between 1993 and 2001 (horizontal axis) and between 2001 and 2009 (vertical axis). The chart shows that with the exception of Himachal Pradesh and Rajasthan, all states are above the 45 degree line, indicating that growth in the 2000s was substantially greater than in the 1990s. Indeed, average per capita growth across the 21 states increased from 2.8 per cent in the 1990s to 5.8 per cent in the 2000s. The largest improvements were posted by Uttarakhand (7.1 percentage points), Maharashtra (5.8) and Chhattisgarh (5) with Gujarat and Bihar not far behind. The chart provides a clue both to the long-standing success of the Communist party in West Bengal and its overthrow in the recent elections: West Bengal was one of the strongest performers in the 1990s but was one of the few states that stagnated in the 2000s while others surged.