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Mon 22 Aug 2022 6:30 pm – 7:45 pm

The Indian Economy at 75

The Future Beckons

 

Speakers

Prasenjit Basu
Economist, Historian & Author
Narayan Ramachandran
Emerging Market Investor
Interlocutor

Date & Time

Monday Mon, 22 Aug 2022

Categories

Location

Bangalore International Centre
7, 4th Main Road, Domlur II Stage
Bangalore, Karnataka 560071 India

Contact

[email protected]

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Through most of human history, India’s has been the world’s largest economy. But between 1750 and 1990, India faced the most precipitous decline in share of world GDP that any surviving nation/civilisation has suffered. This talk considers why India’s share of world GDP continued declining until not just 1900 and 1950, but also a further 40 years. Since 1991, the external sector has been the key driver of India’s transformation. But 31 years later India’s share of world GDP is still lower than in 1900.

Labour reforms (signed by the President but not yet gazetted) are key to spurring the labour-intensive manufacturing that has been the basis of every successful economy’s emergence since 1750. In capital- and resource-intensive manufacturing India (like the rest of the world) confronts the challenge of China’s over-capacity, created by a quarter-century of Chinese over-investment that has caused an investment drought in the rest of the world. China rode the liquidity surge of the last 14 years (as China’s M2 expanded 5-fold since 2008, while the US’s only expanded 180%), but will now face a financial crisis that will dwarf the bursting of Japan’s bubble 20 years ago. With the PLI scheme, labour reforms, and globally-competitive corporate tax rates, India is poised at last to take the baton of global growth leadership.

Speakers

Prasenjit Basu

Economist, Historian & Author

Prasenjit K. Basu is an economist, historian and author of “Asia Reborn”, which won the Best First Book award (non-fiction) at the Tata Literature Live! Mumbai Lit Fest 2018 and bronze medal at the 2020 Golden Door awards for non-fiction (Singapore). He was Chief Economist for Southeast Asia & India at Credit Suisse First Boston, Chief Asia Economist at Daiwa Securities (each for 5 years), and has had shorter stints in senior research roles at Wharton Econometrics, Maybank group, Khanazah (Malaysia), Macquarie and UBS.

Prasenjit has taught Economics at ESSEC Asia Pacific Business School (Singapore) and SP Jain School of Global Management (Singapore and Dubai) and International Relations and IPE at the University of Pennsylvania. Mr Basu was the President of Singapore’s India Club from 2006 to 2018, and has written articles for the Financial Times, New York Times, Business Times (Singapore), Star & New Straits Times (Malaysia), India Today, Times of India, Economic Times, etc, and has appeared as an expert on the BBC, CNN, CNBC, TimesNow, Republic TV and NDTV. He is currently the chief economist at ICICI Securities, based in New Delhi.

Narayan Ramachandran

Emerging Market Investor

Narayan Ramchandran is father of two girls, husband of writer, social entrepreneur, columnist and emerging market investor in that order. He worked on Wall Street (mostly at Morgan Stanley) for over 20 years, most recently as head of global emerging market investing and then country head of Morgan Stanley in India.