UBUD, Indonesia -- Recently Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made a startling revelation: He pointed out that the urban-rural gap has widened over the past 50 years. By itself, this was neither a remarkable nor surprising conclusion. After all, with the poverty rate for India at about 26 percent of the population, it takes little imagination to envision the grinding poverty that has afflicted too many for too long.
What is surprising is that this is an admission that the political class has failed its citizens. In sum, tens of billions of dollars of aid received over many decades, along with domestic policies, regulations and laws aimed at helping the poor, have mostly missed their target.
These failures arose from a noxious cocktail of misguided economic policy, venal acts of greed and incompetence wrapped in a cocoon of economic nationalism and socialism.