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Trade and Industry I: India

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The Economy of South Asia

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Abstract

The expansion in the capacity of the states to spend on development was directed to industrialization in India. This is well known, much less well known is the fact that in the process of pursuing heavy industrialization, India repressed an established system of long-distance trade. The rest of South Asia had a rather more benign attitude to trade, though shared India’s enthusiasm for industrialism. The push for industrialization, the costs of that strategy, and its unravelling from the 1980s are explored in this chapter.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    V.K.R.V. Rao, ‘National Income of India,’ The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 233, 1944, 99–105.

  2. 2.

    R. Nagaraj, ‘Size and Structure of India’s Private Corporate Sector: Implications for the New GDP Series,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 50(45), 2015, 41–47.

  3. 3.

    I.S. Gulati, ‘Competitiveness of India’s Tea Exports,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 3(7), 1968, 325–332.

  4. 4.

    Synthetic substitute prices were approximately two-thirds that of comparable jute goods in the international market in the late 1960s. The ratio did not change very much, in fact marginally converged in the 1980s. The Government of India protected domestic consumption of jute. On relative price trends, Goutam K. Sarkar, ‘The Fading Fabric-II: Jute Manufacturing Sector,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 21(50), 1986, 2188–2197.

  5. 5.

    Indian School of Social Sciences, ‘Economic Crisis in India and the Fifth Five Year Plan’, Social Scientist, 3(5), 1974, 61–88.

  6. 6.

    For example, David Hardiman, Feeding the Baniya: Peasants and Usurers in Western India, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996; and essays in Sugata Bose, ed., Credit, Markets, and the Agrarian Economy in Colonial India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994.

  7. 7.

    Cited in Sumanta Banerjee, ‘India and South Asia: Growing Economic Stake,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 6(24), 1971, 1168–1169.

  8. 8.

    By then, South Asian countries were competing against each other. Protectionist moves by Sri Lanka in the 1960s, for example, were read as a reaction to threats from the Indian textile industry.

  9. 9.

    Barbara Harriss-White, ‘The Role of Agro-Commercial Capital in ‘Rural Development’ in South India,’ Social Scientist, 7(7), 1979, 42–56.

  10. 10.

    John Williamson, ‘Pakistan and the World Economy,’ Pakistan Development Review, 37(4), 1999, 181–201.

  11. 11.

    D. Mazumdar, D., ‘The Issue of Small versus Large in the Indian Textile Industry’, World Bank Staff Working Paper No. 645, Washington, DC, 1984; I.M.D., Little, D. Mazumdar, J. M. Page Jr., Small Manufacturing Enterprises, a Comparative Analysis of India and Other Economies, New York: Oxford University, 1987.

  12. 12.

    See N. Lamoreaux, D.M.G. Raff and P. Temin, ‘Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Towards a New Synthesis of American Business History’, American Historical Review, 108(2), 2003, 404–33, for an application and a survey. For other major contributions in application of theory to explain economic history, see O.E. Williamson, Economic Institutions of Capitalism, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995; and several essays in C. Sabel and J. Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

  13. 13.

    See essays in Deepak Nayyar, ed., Industrial Growth and Stagnation: The Debate in India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994, on the extent of the industrial decline, and interpretations thereof.

  14. 14.

    Pranab Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984; I.J. Ahluwalia, Industrial Growth in India: Stagnation since the Mid-Sixties, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985; J.N. Bhagwati and T.N. Srinivasan, Foreign Trade Regime and Economic Development: India, New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

  15. 15.

    See, for example, K.K. Subrahmanian, ‘Role of Foreign Aid and Investment’, Social Scientist, 1(6), 1973, 3–29.

  16. 16.

    U. Lele and I. Nabi, ‘The Role of Aid and Capital Flows in Economic Development’, American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 73(3), 1991, 947–950.

  17. 17.

    Hubert van Wersch, The Bombay Textile Strike 1982–83, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992.

  18. 18.

    S. Guhathakurta, ‘Economic Independence through Protection? Emerging Contradictions in India’s Small-scale Policies Sector’, World Development, 21(12), 1993, 2039–2054.

  19. 19.

    S.P. Kashyap, ‘Growth of Small-sized Enterprises in India: Its Nature and Content, World Development, 16(6), 1988, 667–681.

  20. 20.

    J. C. Sandesara, ‘Small-Scale Industrialisation: The Indian Experience’, Economic and Political Weekly, 23(13), 1988, 640–654; M.H. Bala Subrahmanya, ‘Reservation Policy for Small-Scale Industry: Has It Delivered the Goods?’, Economic and Political Weekly, 30(21), 1995, M51–M54.

  21. 21.

    For a selection of writings interpreting the 1980s ‘jobless growth’ in organized manufacturing, I.J. Ahluwalia, Productivity and Growth in Indian Manufacturing, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991; Ajit Ghose, ‘Economic Restructuring, Employment and Safety Nets’, ILO-ARTEP, Social Dimensions of Structural Adjustment in India, ILO, Delhi, 1995; R. Nagraj, ‘Employment and Growth in Manufacturing Industries: Trends, Hypotheses and Evidence’, Economic and Political Weekly, 29(4), 1994; S.R. Bhalotra, ‘The Puzzle of Jobless Growth in Indian Manufacturing’, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 60(1), 1998, 5–32; K.V. Ramaswamy, ‘The Search for Flexibility in Indian Manufacturing: New Evidence on Outsourcing Activities’, Economic and Political Weekly, 34(6), 1999, 363–368. For a survey of this literature and an interpretation of the 1990s, see B.N. Goldar, ‘Employment Growth in Organized Manufacturing Growth in India’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35(14), 2000, 1191–1195. On labour issues see Dabashish Bhattacharjee, ‘Globalising Economy, Localising Labour’, Economic and Political Weekly, 35(42), 2000.

  22. 22.

    T. Roy, ‘Growth and Recession in Small-scale Industry: A Study of Tamil Nadu Powerlooms’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1999; H. Damodaran, India’s New Capitalists: Caste, Business, and Industry in a Modern Nation, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008; Sharad Chari, Fraternal Capital. Peasant-Workers, Self-Made Men, and Globalization in Provincial India, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

  23. 23.

    M.H. Bala Subrahmanya, ‘Small Industry and Globalisation: Implications, Performance and Prospects,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 2004, 1826–1834.

  24. 24.

    Maureen Liebl and Tirthankar Roy, ‘Handmade in India: Status Report on India’s Artisans’, Economic and Political Weekly, 38(51–2), 2003–4, 5366–5376.

  25. 25.

    See, for example, several essays in Konosuke Odaka and Yukihiko Kiyokawa, eds., Small and Medium Scale Industry in India and the Model of Japan, New Delhi: Allied Publishers, 2008.

  26. 26.

    Discussed in Ramesh Subramanian, ‘India and Information Technology: A Historical and Critical Perspective,’ Journal of Global Information Technology Management, 9(4), 2006, 8–46.

  27. 27.

    Murali Patibandla, Deepak Kapur, Bent Petersen, ‘Import Substitution with Free Trade: Case of India’s Software Industry,’ Economic and Political Weekly, 35(15), 2000, 1263–1270.

  28. 28.

    Elizabeth Chacko, ‘From Brain Drain to Brain Gain: Reverse Migration to Bangalore and Hyderabad, India’s Globalizing High Tech Cities,’ GeoJournal, 68(2/3), 2007, 131–140.

  29. 29.

    K. Kalirajan and S. Bhide, ‘The Post-reform Performance of the Manufacturing Sector in India’, Asian Economic Papers, 3(2), 2005, 126–157.

  30. 30.

    John Sutton, ‘Indian Machine Tools Industry: A Benchmarking Study’, New Delhi: ICRIER, 2000.

  31. 31.

    KPMG India, Indian Chemical Industry: New Directions, New Hopes, 2002. Available at http://www.in.kpmg.com/pdf/KPMG_Chemtech_Report.pdf (accessed 1 August 2016).

  32. 32.

    Kwok Tong Soo, ‘From Licence Raj to Market Forces: The Determinants of Industrial Structure in India after Reform’, Economica, 75, 2008, 222–243.

  33. 33.

    Baldev Raj Nayar, ‘Business and India’s Economic Policy Reforms’, Economic and Political Weekly, 1998, 2453–2468.

  34. 34.

    Sukhpal Singh, ‘Contracting Out Solutions: Political Economy of Contract Farming in the Indian Punjab’, World Development, 30(9), 2002, 1621–1638.

  35. 35.

    S.S. Bhalla and T. Das, ‘Pre- and Post-reform India: A Revised Look at Employment, Wages, and Inequality’, Delhi: India Policy Forum, 2006.

  36. 36.

    This is counterintuitive. Economists often analyse such opening-up effects with the help of the Stolper-Samuelson model on the interaction between trade and factor markets. The prediction of the model is that the demand for the abundant factor and goods intensive in that factor, should rise after liberalization, and the demand for factors that had been scarce but protected before, should fall.

  37. 37.

    R. Chamarbagwala, ‘Economic Liberalization and Wage Inequality in India’, World Development, 34(12), 2006, 1997–2015.

  38. 38.

    A useful set of essays on changes in the labour regime can be found in Dipak Mazumdar and Sandip Sarkar, eds., Globalization, Labor Markets and Inequality in India, London: Routledge, 2008.

  39. 39.

    Jayati Ghosh, ‘Globalization, Export-Oriented Employment for Women and Social Policy: A Case Study of India’, Social Scientist, 30(11/12), 2002, 17–60.

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Roy, T. (2017). Trade and Industry I: India. In: The Economy of South Asia. Palgrave Studies in Economic History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54720-6_8

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