OM DENNE EPISODE
Since 1950, only a handful of countries have made the jump from poor to rich, and nearly all of them did it in a similar way. Put a lot of people in factories, sell cheap goods into open Western markets, and climb, one rung at a time, for forty years. Today, the tariff walls are going back up, the trade rulebook is fraying, and China sits on every rung of that ladder. The fashionable verdict is that India's window has closed. Has it?
In this final episode of Turbulence, Anupam Manur is joined by Shruti Rajagopalan, Senior Research Fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and host of Ideas of India, who refuses the premise. The path to prosperity, she argues, is not controlled by Washington or Beijing. It is blocked closer to home by what she calls India's regulatory cholesterol, and by the land conversion certificate you need before a factory can go up on a field. The conversation ranges across China, services beyond software, women and work, land, and state capacity, before landing somewhere unexpectedly hopeful: the biggest levers are still in India's own hands.
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