India's reforms: how they produced inclusive growth

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Introduction : Trade, poverty, inequality, and democracy / Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya --
Part 1: Reforms and democracy. Views from the Indian electorate : satisfactions and dissatisfactions with democracy, politics, and the economy / Alfred Stepan --
Economic reforms and election outcomes / Poonam Gupta and Arvind Panagariya --
Part 2: Trade, poverty, and inequality. Trade liberalization and poverty reduction : new evidence from Indian states / J. Cain, Rana Hasan, and Devashish Mitra --
Growth, openness, and the socially disadvantaged / Megha Mukim and Arvind Panagariya --
Trade and inequality in India / Pravin Krishna and Guru Sethupathy.

When India embraced systematic economic reforms in 1991 and began opening its economy to both domestic and foreign competition, critics argued that they had contributed little to the acceleration of economic growth. Their argument had rested on the claim that growth in the 1990s was no faster than in the 1980s. This claim was quickly refuted on the grounds that when properly evaluated, growth had indeed accelerated in the 1990s and more importantly, while reforms had been made systematic in 1991, they had actually begun much earlier in the late 1970s. Subsequently, the reforms of the late 1990s and early 2000s have led to a jump in the growth rate from six percent in the 1990s to eight to nine percent beginning in 2003. The reforms have also led to a major structural change in the economy: the trade to GDP ratio has tripled since 1991, there has been a gigantic expansion of foreign investment in India, and sectors such as telecommunications, airlines, and automobiles have expanded at rates much higher than at any time in the past.