Policy Punchline

Arvind Panagariya is Jagdish N. Bhagwati Professor of Indian Political Economy at Columbia University and the former and first Vice Chairman of the National Institution for Transforming India (NITI Aayog). Previously, he was the Chief Economist of the Asian Development Bank. In this interview recorded in the spring of 2019, Prof. Panagariya discusses India’s economic reforms and future outlook. As he explains, India and China’s per-capita income really diverged starting in the 1980s as China embarked on more ambitious economic liberation plans ahead of India. The quasi-autarky regime in India scuttled foreign trade and was anti-growth by construction. Growth was important in India's economic policy agenda because one can do little without it. Redistribution wouldn’t have worked because if the state redistributed, everyone would’ve been below the poverty line. There was nothing to redistribute, and nothing to "trickle down" either. Growth was the priority. In 1991, the economic reforms that India needed f