Comparison of the Effectiveness of India and Chinas Politics and Economics in the last decades - Research Paper Example

Comparison of India and China’s Politics and Economics- Which Has Greater Results in the Context of Social Well-Being, Prosperity Table of ContentsI. Introduction 4 II. Discussion 7 III. Conclusion 11 References 12 I. Introduction This paper compares the economic and political systems and structures of China and India from the perspective of which set of systems have yielded superior results over the past six decades, and from the perspective of the social well-being and the prosperity in economics. The paper also examines the underlying reasons for the better performance of either India or China. The 1950’s was a time for a fresh start for India, just having gained its independence from the British, and one can say that last six decades has been one long historical process of India trying to find its bearings economically, politically and socially, with mass unrest and the rise of powerful economic cities like Bombay. Meanwhile, even as Bombay flourished economically, growth in other parts of the country had been uneven within this period (Khilnani 1999, pp. 141-144). Reforms from the 1990’s and onwards led to the liberalization of vital parts of the economy and meant that foreign investors in key areas of the economy, such as information technology, could come in (Khilnani 1999, pp. 148-149). This has led to the rise of new powerhouses like Bangalore in the technology area, though again growth was uneven elsewhere (Guha 2007, pp. 686-687). That, and a substantial base of young people, has translated to promising prospects for sustained economic growth for the country moving forward. The observation is that even as the middle classes have swelled, the large parts of India remain agricultural, and that there are issues surrounding the rise of cities versus the continued reliance in agriculture of a large majority of the Indian population, and its large mass of poor people who remain vulnerable to things like problems with land and water, as well as education and the provision of basic social services (Guha 2007, pp. 691-696). This in turn has implications for the ability of India to do well financially and to lift its masses out of poverty, as well as care for its social well-being (Harriss 2011, pp. 130-132). Meanwhile, parallel with India securing its independence towards the end of the 1940’s, China had achieved remarkable levels of economic growth sixty years from the rise to power of the present Chinese socialist government. The argument is that between the two, it is China that has done better on measures relating to the securing of prosperity in an economic sense, and in the securing of the well-being of its society, and the evidence can be gathered too from the way the Chinese have demonstrated a remarkable ability to execute on its social and economic agenda with the concerted planning of the socialist government and leveraging the competencies and entrepreneurial capabilities of the Chinese masses (Hua 2012, pp. 182-189). II. Discussion There are ways to determine why China has pulled ahead of India in terms of economic prosperity and in terms of securing the well-being of people too, from a social perspective. The literature provides a study in contrast, for instance, in entrepreneurship and innovation at the grass roots level in China and in India, and we see that where India has ever been bogged down by such issues as bureaucracy, in China the grassroots level of entrepreneurship is high, and the culture supports an environment where entrepreneurship can thrive, with direction from the government. On the one hand we have India, with an unwieldy economy that was made so by intractable issues relating to governance and the way government handled business development and businesses in general, and the like. On the other hand, we have China, where the chapter on copycats in the book ‘China in Ten Words’ demonstrates the extent by which the Chinese have managed to exploit loopholes in copyright protection in the country to leverage deeply-ingrained social entrepreneurial impulses to ramp up the production of all kinds of copycat products (Hua 2012, pp. 190-193; Guha 2007, pp. 683-685). The thinking here, the underlying rationale, is that it is in the nature of the Chinese culture to innovate along the lines of producing copycat products to spur economic growth as a byproduct of that whole process (Hua 2012, pp. 196-197). In India, on the other hand, while liberalization practices have also allowed for the jump starting of the economy in the early 1990s, the growth has not been as high, and many millions more were still mired in poverty as to drag down the overall results for India. On the other hand, the shortcomings in terms of securing the well-being of the Indian society have been pinned down on government inability to make provisions for those, which in turn is also a function of the lower growth and the lower ability of the government to raise money to finance operations and to provide for social welfare services. Part of this dynamic, which has led to a vicious cycle of lack of social services resulting in more poverty and stalled growth, is the lack of progress in providing educational services to a greater part of the Indian population. This, according to the literature, is par of the reason why, in contrast to China, India’s growth and improvements in prosperity levels and the well-being of society has not been as pronounced (Guha 2007, pp. 694-697). The contrast therefore can be tied partly to the way China has succeeded in executing on its market reform programs, in the same way that India has been stalled by institutional inertia and some deeply-ingrained structures and ways of being in government and in society that makes progress in the economy and social well-being have not been as rapid and as sustained as in China (Khilnani 2009, pp. 144-146). Education for instance has been an area where China has excelled as far as providing literacy and education to its masses, something that primes China for even more sustained growth and improves its prospects of improving the well-being and material progress of greater and greater chunks of its population. This is implied in the way educational considerations factor into the dynamics of hiring and of human capital in modern Chinese workplaces, for instance (Hessler 2007). In India, on the other hand, while there has been a push to improve access to education and the provision of educational services to all, time is needed and constant execution to see results. This is because education is a long play, and will not result in overnight progress (Guha 2007, pp. 693-695). The basic idea is that there are profound differences in the way China and India pursued development and developed the economic and social systems that were conducive to growth. Part of the differences too can be attributed to the way the Chinese socialist programs for economic growth, which relied on centralized planning while freeing up market forces to allow for wide participation among the mass of Chinese people moving to the cities, has succeeded in ways that the Indian model failed to mimic. In China centralized planning had a way with tapping and exploiting embedded cultural practices such as copycatting, which is symptomatic of an ingrained Chinese entrepreneurial zeal. There is this unique arrangement in China where social conventions on entrepreneurship seem to jive with centralized planning and following the examples set by government (Hua 2012, pp. 196-199). In contrast, in India, there is a different dynamic that is characterized by some very large weaknesses in the ability of the government to provide for educational services and other basic social services that hamper growth and social well-being. One can argue that the lack of universal access to education has been a large negative for India, and is a stark contrast to the ability of China to provide education to a larger proportion of its vast population in comparison to India. To sum up, execution on long-run economic strategies, differences in ability to provide social services to large sections of the population, and differences in ability to educate their populations can account for the observed disparities in the economic and social well-being between China and India over the past six decades (Guha 2007, pp. 682-708; Hua 2012, pp. 181-202; Hessler 2007). III. Conclusion The previous discussion makes clear that between India and China, over the past six decades,and comparing how well they have secured the financial and social well-being and flourishing of the nation and its citizens, that it is China which has done a better job. This is so because of some fundamental differences in the defectiveness of their executions relative to their reform strategies, some differences in governmental structures and existing constraints, and differences in underlying cultural contexts and political contexts for pushing growth. Moreover, there have been profound differences in investments in fundamental social services like education, with China being better able to educate its masses than India over the past six decades, resulting in long-term disparities in the ability of the two nations to lift its masses out of poverty and improve their economic and social lot. Some ingrained social and cultural values too, in China, have resulted in positive gains in the long-term growth of the economy due to the successful unleashing and harnessing of the Chinese entrepreneurial spirit, as reflected in cultural phenomena such as copycatting (Guha 2007, pp. 682-708; Hua 2012, pp. 181-202; Hessler 2007). . References Guha, Ramachandra. 2007. India After Gandhi. McMillan. Harriss, John. 2011. “How far have India’s economic reforms been ‘guided by compassion and justice?”. Routledge. Hessler, Peter. 2007. “Boomtowns”. National Geographic. Hua, Yu. 2012. China in Ten Words. First Anchor Books. Khilnani, Sunil. 1999. The Idea of India. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Read More