The Economist compara a Índia com a China

How the Asian superpowers compare on various measures of development

China versus Índia: o que explica as diferenças nas taxas de crescimento?

Yasheng Huang: Does democracy stifle economic growth? | Video on TED.com: 

Economist Yasheng Huang compares China to India, and asks how China's authoritarian rule contributed to its astonishing economic growth -- leading to a big question: Is democracy actually holding India back? Huang's answer may surprise you.

China vs India

Esta nota Update on China vs India – Chris Blattman dá conta de um conjunto de "links" relacionados com o futuro, e o futuro relativo, da China e da Índia, qual deles o mais interessante, e contendo muita informação sobre a evolução passada desses países e sobre o seu comportamento nesta crise.

A nota faz referência a um WP da NBER onde se compara a performance política-económica da América Latina e de África, após os seus processos de independência dos poderes coloniais - quer num caso, quer no outro, deparamo-nos com o fenómeno das "décadas perdidas"...

Inqualificável

"This promotional video that Israeli defense contractor Rafael made for a recent Indian aerospace trade fair is just weird beyond belief:

- tirado de Israeli defense contractor woos india with Bollywood FP Passport.

Índia: soluções para a sustentabilidade

Leiam isto, que tem piada: Op-Ed Columnist - Yes, They Could. So They Did. - NYTimes.com. THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN fala-nos do que se faz, na Índia, no campo de soluções para os problemas de sustentabilidade do mundo.

Sintomas do futuro que vem (em princípio) aí...

Os números falam por si:

"...The biggest and most technically clever firms are American and European, but their predominance in research, innovation and production is being challenged by Asian companies. A new report by the OECD puts hard figures on the extent of this steady shift. document.write(''); Every year around $1 trillion is spent on research and development (R&D) in computing, telecoms and electronics; America accounts for over one-third. But while corporate R&D in America and Europe grew by 1-2% between 2001 and 2006, in China it soared 23%. ..."

Para continuara a ler ir a Research and development in East Asia Rising in the East The Economist.

No entretanto, a situação em Portugal, melhorou substancialmente neste particular, segundo o que o Nicolau Santos, do Expresso, anuncia (ver aqui).

China e Índia: uma outra perspectiva

Pranab Bardhan, no Boston Review, discute o comportamento da China e Índia, - pelo que respeita ao crescimento económico, à diminuição da pobreza, ao contexto e tensões políticas (e.g., democracia versus Autoritarismo), à globalização -, em What Makes a Miracle - Some myths about the rise of China and India. A visão que transmite é diferente (qualifica-a em grande parte) da narrativa político-económica que certos meios políticos, académicos, - conservadores e ultra-liberais em termos económicos - fazem, do que tem vindo a suceder nesses países, nas últimas décadas, e da importância do que se passou antes. Imprescindível a leitura. Ver o blogue Dani Rodrik's weblog (que sugere esta ligação) para mais sobre este assunto.

Excerto: Sobre os méritos e deméritos relativos da democracia (parte da matéria).

"The relationship between democracy and development is much more complex than the conventional wisdom suggests. Even if we were not to value democracy for its own sake (or regard it as an integral part of development by definition), and looked at it in a purely instrumental way, democracy has at least four advantages from the point of view of development. Democracies are better able to avoid catastrophic mistakes, (such as China’s Great Leap Forward and the ensuing great famine that killed nearly thirty million people, or its Cultural Revolution, which may have resulted in the largest destruction of human capital in history) and have greater healing powers after difficult times. Democracies also experience more intense pressure to share the benefits of development, thus making it sustainable, and provide more scope for popular movements against industrial fallout such as environmental degradation. In addition, they are better able to mitigate social inequalities (especially acute in India) that act as barriers to social and economic mobility and to the full development of individual potential. Finally, democratic open societies provide a better environment for nurturing the development of information and related technologies, a matter of some importance in the current knowledge-driven global economy. Intensive cyber-censorship in China may seriously limit future innovations in this area.

All that said, India’s experience suggests that democracy can also hinder development in a number of ways. Competitive populism—short-run pandering and handouts to win elections—may hurt long-run investment, particularly in infrastructure, which is the key bottleneck for Indian development. Such political arrangements make it difficult, for example, to charge user fees for roads, electricity, and irrigation, discouraging investment in these areas, unlike in China where infrastructure companies charge full commercial rates. Competitive populism also makes it harder to cut losses resulting from experimentation in industrial policy in India, where retreating from a failed project—with inevitable job losses and bail-out pressures—has electoral consequences that discourage leaders from carrying out policy experimentation in the first place. Finally, democracy’s slow decision-making processes can be costly in a world of fast-changing markets and technology."

Excerto: Conclusão do artigo.

"Chinese and Indian economic performance has been far better in the last quarter-century than in the previous two hundred years—and this is one of the striking events in the recent history of the international economy. Other countries must adjust to this reality, and learn to treat the partial restoration of the earlier global importance of these two countries as an opportunity for trade, investment, and exchange of ideas, not as a threat. (We also need to work in tandem with them on the environment.) But we must remember that the story of their rise is more complicated and nuanced than standard accounts make out. That more complex story includes the positive legacy of China and India’s earlier statist periods, which offers general lessons for the process of development much too often ignored."

Índia, educação e casta

Não é, de modo algum, leitura agradável: Overcoming Caste - washingtonpost.com, mas é importante - diz respeito a uma parte significativa da população do mundo. Tem a ver com o sistema de educação na Índia, com discriminação, com casta, etc.. Disto retiram-se algumas constatações óbvias: - este mundo poderia ser melhor; na Índia, as famílias prezam a educação, mesmo quando não têm condições para a ter; o nosso sistema de educação, com os recursos que tem, poderia ter resultados melhores, e assim por diante.