Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic Rise of China and India - Paperback

by Pranab Bardhan (Author)

A comparative look at the astonishing economic rise of modern China and India

The recent economic rise of China and India has attracted a great deal of attention--and justifiably so. Together, the two countries account for one-fifth of the global economy and are projected to represent a full third of the world's income by 2025. Yet, many of the views regarding China and India's market reforms and high growth have been tendentious, exaggerated, or oversimplified. Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay scrutinizes the phenomenal rise of both nations, and demolishes the myths that have accumulated around the economic achievements of these two giants in the last quarter century. Exploring the challenges that both countries must overcome to become true leaders in the international economy, Pranab Bardhan looks beyond short-run macroeconomic issues to examine and compare China and India's major policy changes, political and economic structures, and current general performance.

Bardhan investigates the two countries' economic reforms, each nation's pattern and composition of growth, and the problems afflicting their agricultural, industrial, infrastructural, and financial sectors. He considers how these factors affect China and India's poverty, inequality, and environment, how political factors shape each country's pattern of burgeoning capitalism, and how significant poverty reduction in both countries is mainly due to domestic factors--not global integration, as most would believe. He shows how authoritarianism has distorted Chinese development while democratic governance in India has been marred by severe accountability failures.

Full of valuable insights, Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay provides a nuanced picture of China and India's complex political economy at a time of startling global reconfiguration and change.

Back Jacket

"Pranab Bardhan is one of our most sophisticated thinkers on economic development. His skills are on display in this enormously insightful book. I cannot think of a better comparative guide to the rise of China and India."--Dani Rodrik, Harvard University

"Bardhan's book is erudite, informative, and accessible, and his scrutiny of the conventional wisdom about the past quarter century of reform in China and India is always provocative. You do not have to agree with him to be stimulated and rewarded by his insightful scholarship. This book deserves a wide audience."--Tarun Khanna, author of Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures, and Yours

"This book is an important reference for anyone interested in growth and poverty alleviation in China and India. It makes eye-opening comparisons and offers acute insights across such wide-ranging topics as poverty and inequality, labor and anticompetitive regulations, industrial concentration in India compared to other countries, electricity in Indian agriculture, Chinese financing of roads, and Indian and Chinese business-state relations."--Philip Keefer, World Bank

Author Biography

Pranab Bardhan is professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Scarcity, Conflicts, and Cooperation.