Excerpt from Shining Asia: Asia After Europe (Mr. Sugata Bose) – Lifestyle News

In 1989, Amartya Sen provided a clear and comparative assessment of India's development experience during the first four decades since 1947. There has been no direct, large-scale public action by China to improve living conditions in India since 1947 and since 1949. This explains the 15-year difference in life expectancy between the two countries by the late 1980s. If India's mortality rate had been lower than China's, “there would have been 3.8 million fewer deaths in India around the mid-1980s.” As Sen said, “more people die every eight years”[d] Compared to China's death rate, India has more deaths than the total number of people who died in China's mega-famine. ”

By 2019, China had gone through four decades of economic reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in 1978-1979, while India Almost 30 years of liberalization that began in 1991 has been completed. PV Narasimha Rao, who served as Prime Minister from 1991 until 1996, directed Finance Minister Manmohan Singh to abolish permits, licenses, and what came to be called the subsidy raj. In mid-1991, India faced a balance of payments crisis and had to seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund to tide over the crisis. However, the Indian state made a virtue out of necessity by declaring a new industrial policy, removing many barriers to corporate entry, expansion, and diversification. The stifling practice of authorizing the use of industrial capacity has been effectively abolished. The bureaucratic logjam on the road to economic development was gradually resolved. These economic reforms addressed only the first part of his two-pronged problem facing India's economic development.Although reformers refrained from excessive state intervention in certain areas, they did not correct the state's neglect in social areas, especially the health sector. And education.

Since China's involvement in the world economy, a phenomenon widely described as the rise of Asia There are some notable differences between India's post-1979 reforms and post-1991 reforms. In 1979, China and India's economies were about the same size. After four decades of rapid growth, China's economy was nearly six times the size of India's in 2019. While India has steadily accelerated over the past four decades from its slow growth rate of 3-4% from 1947 to 1980, China has quickly become the world's manufacturing hub for exports to overseas markets. , grew even more rapidly.Focus on healthcare Furthermore, education during the Maoist era improved the quality of labor and became the basis for rapid economic development after 1979.

In his book “Adam Smith'' written in Beijing, Giovanni Allrighi writes that from a long-term perspective, “when the history of the second half of the 20th century is written,'' there is a possibility that “no theme will be more important than the economic theme.'' he claimed. East Asian Renaissance. ” This renaissance suggested that “Adam Smith's prophecy of eventual equality of power between conquering Western nations and conquered non-Western nations may finally come true.” With the rise of China's economy, Mr. Arrighi confidently predicted in his 2007 “realization of Mr. Smith's global market vision.” In the nearly two and a half centuries since the publication of The Wealth of Nations, a society based on greater equality among the world's civilizations has become more likely than ever before. ”

What the dramatic acceleration in economic growth in Asia, not just China, means for the global balance of power, and how it has affected pressing issues of domestic poverty and inequality. It's important to ask. Wealth inequality and income inequality between the rich and poor are rapidly increasing, even as millions of people are being lifted out of poverty. Furthermore, Asia's rise is not a linear story, but rather one punctuated by economic downturns, such as the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998, the global economic crisis of 2008, and the pandemic-induced recession since 2020. India was able to weather it better. From 1997 she survived the 1998 crisis better than several countries in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. However, the economic costs sometimes had unintended political benefits, acting as a catalyst for the collapse of Suharto-era authoritarianism and the transition to more substantive democracy in Indonesia. Despite the economic downturns of 1997, 2008, and 2020, relations between Asia and the West today are in the second century, with China becoming a creditor of the United States and Asia as a whole making strides in manufacturing and services. It's very different from before. Indeed, the global economic crisis can be seen to have had a more negative impact on the US and Europe than on China and Asia, and contributed to redressing the balance in favor of Asia in the 2010s.

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In 2019, when the novel SARS-CoV-2 virus was discovered in Wuhan at the end of the year, ushering in an era of unprecedented anxiety and uncertainty, the inexorable rise of Asia, led by China, became the dominant force in the world of economic and political power. It seemed as if a revolution was being brought about in the balance of things. . Any assessment of the impact of the global pandemic, officially declared by the World Health Organization in January 2020, on Asia's historical trajectory must be somewhat tentative. Strict lockdowns in the bustling capital of Hubei province, and later in 2022 in Shanghai and Beijing, have certainly dashed confident predictions that the future will be Asia's. Moreover, as the example of Sri Lanka's collapse in 2022 showed, Asian countries that borrowed money from China for infrastructure development on the eve of the pandemic faced an economic crisis.

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Although India participated as a major shareholder in the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, which was launched in January 2016, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, the world's largest free trade area consisting of China, Japan, South Korea and 10 ASEAN countries, Withdrew from the agreement. , Australia and New Zealand took effect in January 2022.

As Asia regained the global status it lost in the late 18th century in the early 21st century, India rose to prominence second only to China. Dynamic economic growth has brought new confidence. India was able to deal with the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 more efficiently than most countries in the world. However, India's performance in the areas of basic education and medical care for the poor still leaves much to be desired compared to other Asian countries, with the exception of Pakistan. As Amartya Sen has said, India was in danger of becoming half California and half sub-Saharan Africa. While the wealthy in the metropolitan centers indulge in conspicuous consumption, the tribal people of India's rural and forest heartlands continue to suffer from severe poverty. Furthermore, as China moves up the manufacturing chain, Vietnam, Cambodia,

bangladesh It serves as a manufacturing center with relatively low labor costs. India may have already missed that bus, becoming increasingly reliant on strength in the services sector as the agricultural sector continues to slump. If there is a dark side to the forces of modern globalization, there is also a dark side to the flow of labor migration that constitutes the interregional stage in Asia today. The pandemic contributed to a slowdown in economic growth across Asia. However, it is not this slowdown in growth that poses a bigger challenge for Asia's emerging economies, but distribution.

The trajectory of Asia's economies in the broader global context yields one powerful insight or conclusion. Asia has prospered not through economic atarky but by mobilizing political and cultural resources to set the terms of global engagement, and this was true throughout Asia except Japan during the colonial period. This was denied above. In this process of denial, colonized South and Southeast Asia suffered the most. By engaging with the global economy and restoring its own independence, many regions of Asia can not only capitalize on the global economic boom, but also leave themselves vulnerable to more precarious economic downturns, such as those that have since hit the world. We are able to reduce this. 2008-2009. As the United States and parts of Europe turned inward, Asia seized the opportunity to strengthen intra-Asian trade and investment while keeping lines of economic exchange open with the rest of the world. The global pandemic has created new uncertainties about the future of global interconnectivity. If Asia can address inequality issues while achieving rapid growth in a post-pandemic world, the Asian Century predicted by many could be a truly prosperous era in the continent's history. There is.

Excerpted with permission from HarperCollins.

Book: Asia after Europe: Imagining the continent during the long 20th century

author: appearance bose

the publisher: harper collins

288 pages, 699 rupees