I found this book via reading an economist article so decided to buy it to get a fresh perspective on the outlook for India and its ability to reform its growth model. The author is not optimistic. India's Long Road details the author's views on India's growth model as well as potential. He discusses his views via an economists lens and focuses on growth economics as well as on market failures. It seems from the writing that he has more of an expertise in international trade but I am speculating. If one wants to get a current view of India's prospects for growth with the Modi government in power then this has some material worth reading, I personally found it a poor combination of elementary economic lessons alongside policy criticisms that are relatively well known alongside some obscure technical advice on how India should approach international trade.
The book is split in 5 parts and the author starts with contextualizing India as well as detailing its historical growth and finally discussing what he believes as the high quality growth the country should be trying to achieve. In particular the author highlights he will be arguing that for India to achieve rapid, inclusive, stable and sustainable growth within a political framework of liberal democracy will be difficult. To me that already is almost stating the obvious. The author then starts getting into economic principles involved in growth. Basic growth and investment principles are highlighted and it seems this is a mixture of India specific information as well as lessons on how economic growth can be decomposed between investment, productivity growth and labour quantity changes. He discusses this historic growth and investment record as well as the State's involvement in the economy over time. The author notes that long spells of above trend growth are very rare on a cross sectional basis and to expect India to be a counterexample has history on the wrong side. The author discusses inefficiencies of the state and how it impedes growth through poor capital deployment as well as through crowding out investment. The author gets into the human capital side and discusses the challenges of inclusiveness, he proposes a living wage subsidy and how his calculations support its affordability. In addition the poor state of education and public hygiene are highlighted. The author highlights what he sees as practical solutions available to the government, which include more competition for teachers and doctors as well as inclusion of not fully qualified professionals. These ideas seem sensible but the contents of these criticisms of India are pretty well known so the need to have re-hashed with some policy advice the same arguments as Bagwhati made in 2014 on why growth matters is questionable. This concern is the same for the healthcare sector section. The author then gets into the political economy of the world. It is almost immediately irrelevant as the author spends time on the TPP which as we know is a dead trade deal. The author gives some quite detailed policy proposals for India on trade and has hesitancies to intellectual property rights as defined in more recent trade deals as they harm India's interests in pharmaceuticals. I thought these perspectives were quite well argued but in terms of content they seemed a change of pace from the previous sections.
All in all I found the book pretty mediocre. The economics lessons were not needed, the policy prescriptions were often old ideas repeated (though they still remain very valid, it just makes this book not valuable to the existing literature) and the political economy ideas seem to have been written before Trump won the presidency. There is real content in the book but I have preferred other books on where India's growth model is constrained and potential policies to improve the quality of India's growth.
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