India's strategy of fuelling growth with market-based policies and eradicating poverty by “growing the pie rather than slicing it” holds lessons for other developing countries, two eminent Indian-American economists have said.
Jagdish Bhagwati senior fellow at Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and Arvind Panagariya, Columbia University professor, in a new book, have demonstrated how growth was the strategy successfully deployed to reduce poverty in India.
However, further reforms in labour and land markets are essential to translate growth into more employment, they argue in the new CFR book, “Why Growth Matters: How Economic Growth in India Reduced Poverty and the lessons for Other Developing Countries”.
Official poverty estimates provided by India's Planning Commission show the proportion of the population below the poverty line in India decreased 17 per cent in two decades, from 44.5 per cent in 1983 to 27.5 per cent in 2004-2005, they noted.