Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Need accountable Economic System

We all agree that we need right kind of economic system. But what is right system is not known to a single. Therefore, given the options we chose one of them and hang on it till someone else overtake (almost automatically) but there is a lot of ‘if’ and ‘buts’ in between. It is also important to understand these systems functions. Best of my sense of understanding of economic system, is to make accountable for their actions. In other words, the system which makes every one accountable tends to promote freedom at nobody’s price.

In today’s Mint Mr.Niranjan writes about what kind of free market system do we need to create a New (Indian) Economics?

  • The long-term effects on social attitudes are most severe on those individuals who are between 18 and 24 years during economic downturns—an impressionable age when attitudes towards life and society are being formed.
  • These insights raise an interesting question: Will individuals growing up in a long boom be part of a generation that is more sympathetic towards free markets, have lower risk aversion and believe that wealth is a result of hard work rather than luck?
  • This is a question that can have a deep impact on Indian society and politics in the decades ahead. We can take 1985 as the breakthrough year for the Indian economy, when the first reforms were introduced and the middle class started participating in the stock market. A quick look at India’s population pyramid shows that around three out of every four Indians were born after 1967, and thus came of age in a country that had broken out of the circle of endemic shortages and anaemic growth.
  • These young Indians below 45 years of age are likely to be more open to free markets, new technologies and risk-taking. We see it anecdotally around us, but then India is a complex place and there are large swathes of the country where the benefits of reforms are not that evident, even though higher growth has lifted millions out of poverty.
  • India’s long economic boom has the potential to change popular attitudes towards free markets and capitalism, but a lot will depend on what variant of capitalism takes root here. There are too many worrisome signs right now that we are moving towards an economy dominated by giant oligopolies that are nurtured by government policies, even as the old habit of handing over the management of public companies to the children of large business families continues merely because they have hit the DNA jackpot.

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