Thursday, June 09, 2011

India Growth Rate Set to Surpass Chinese Rate?

I'm reading "Maximum City" which served as the impetus for the movie Slumdog Millionaire and depicts Bombay/Mumbai in all its tattered and glitzy contradictions. India remains the most fascinating country I have visited, having been there a half-dozen times in my three-score-and-ten [minus two] thus far. Here is the report in Bloomberg last August which remains valid to this day, as far as I can discern:
India may overtake China as the world’s fastest growing major economy by 2015, as the South Asian nation doubles infrastructure investment and adds six-fold more workers than its northern neighbor, Morgan Stanley said.
India’s growth may accelerate to 9.5 percent between 2011 to 2015, Morgan Stanley economist Chetan Ahya said in an interview from Singapore today. India’s gross domestic product has expanded at an average 7.1 percent over the decade through the third quarter of 2009, compared with 9.1 percent in China, which surpassed Japan as the second-largest economy last quarter.

China's dependence on brown coal and India's continued reliance on an ageing rail infrastructure are among the many contingent variables in the complex picture of long-term growth. I can remember in the fifties/sixties of the last century reading an avalanche of optimistic predictions about the coming birth of an advanced economic engine in Latin America, which didn't foresee the stupidity of the indigenous population and its addiction to a victim-mentality and aversion to discipline.

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