in imagining that India

Martin Wolf writes in FT:

"Fortunately, a country as big as India could sustain fast growth even if the external environment remained less friendly than before. But that would make lifting internal obstacles to growth even more urgent.

India and China are both ancient civilisations. But China’s ancient state has a powerful legitimacy. India’s state is young. Politics are a permanent negotiation. Democracy is not, as some argue, an obstacle to India’s progress, but a necessary condition for its existence as a state. For all the frustrations and failures, the political system is workable.

As a chapter in the Economic Survey on the “Micro-foundations of Growth” argues, even “India’s unpardonably large bureaucratic costs are like a valuable resource buried under the ground”. So much could be achieved if the state got out of the way. I have little difficulty in imagining that India can sustain growth of close to 10 per cent a year for a long time. Under conservative assumptions, the Indian economy would be bigger than the UK’s, in market prices, in a decade and bigger than Japan’s in two. I argue in a chapter on “India in the World” that India is following China as a “premature superpower”, by which I mean a country with low living standards, but a huge economy."