HONG KONG — Which country is growing at close to 8 percent a year but has the potential for double digit-growth, is already in the world's top 10 industrial powers but should be in the top three or four, has the best demographic profile of almost all developing countries but faces immense social and environmental constraints to its development, and has consistently been let down by shortsighted and almost nannylike behavior of successive governments?
Not China, where growth has been spectacularly good, thanks to the government's high ambitions. It is India, where once again this year Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has presented a budget that proclaims bold intentions but lacks imagination, constrained as it is by political vision. Elections are the only distinguishing features on the economic landscape.
Almost unnoticed by the global economic punditry, India has had "a good crisis," as one leading bureaucrat put it. Growth of gross domestic product in the fiscal year ending is estimated at 7.2 percent after 6.7 percent last year.