c*******2
发帖数: 617 | 1 好文欣赏
关键点： 为了避免民主轮胡搅蛮缠， 作者迅速从中印对比转向印孟对比。
从印度能否追上中国的伪问题， 反问“印度能追上孟加拉国吗”
I was awakened early one morning recently by someone who said he was
enormously enjoying my on-going debate on economic growth in India. I was
very pleased that I had given someone some joy, but I also wondered what on
earth he could be talking about, since I have not been involved in any such
debate. As it happens, I am getting a steady stream of telephone calls and
electronic communication about this alleged debate. Since I could not
generate the memory of any such debate, I tried to recollect any solitary
remark on economic growth in some other context that I might have made in
the last few months. I managed to resurrect the memory of having said in
passing, in a meeting of TIE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) in Delhi in December,
that it is silly to be obsessed about overtaking China in the rate of
growth of Gross National Product (GNP), while not comparing ourselves with
China in other respects, like education, basic health, or life expectancy.
Since that one-sentence remark seems to have been interpreted in many
different ways (my attention to that fact was drawn by friends who are more
web-oriented than I am), I guess I should try to explain what that remark
was about.
GNP growth can, of course, be very helpful in advancing living standards and
in battling poverty (one would have to be quite foolish not to see that),
but there is little case for confusing (1) the important role of economic
growth as means for achieving good things, and (2) growth of inanimate
objects of convenience being taken to be an end in itself. One does not have
to “rubbish” economic growth — and I did not do anything like that — to
recognise that it is not our ultimate objective, but a very useful means to
achieve things that we ultimately value, including a better quality of life.
Nor should my remark be taken to be a dismissal of the far-reaching
relevance of comparing India with China. This is a good perspective in which
to assess each of the two countries and a lot of my past work — on my own
and jointly with Jean Dreze — has made use of that perspective. It is of
some historical interest that comparing India with China has been the
subject matter of discussion for a very long time. “Is there anyone, in the
five parts of India, who does not admire China?” asked Yi Jing (I-Tsing,
in old spelling) in the seventh century, on returning to China after being
in India for ten years, studying at the ancient university in Nalanda. He
went on to write a book, in 691 AD, about India, which presented, among
other things, the first systematic comparative account of medical practices
and health care in these two countries (perhaps the first such comparison
between any two countries in the world). He investigated what China could
learn from India, and what, in turn, India could assimilate from China.
Comparisons of that kind — and more — remain very relevant today, and I
have discussed elsewhere the illumination we can get from such comparisons
in general, and in comparative medical practice and health care in
particular (“The Art of Medicine: Learning from Others,” Lancet, January
15, 2011).
What goes wrong in the current obsession with India-China comparison is not
the relevance of comparing China with India, but the field that is chosen
for comparison. Now that the Indian rate of economic growth seems to be
hovering around 8 per cent per year, there is a lot of speculation — and
breathless discourse — on whether and when India may catch up or surpass
China's over-10 per cent growth rate. Despite the interest in this subject,
comparable to that in the race course (the betting comes from the West as
well as Asia), this is surely a silly focus. This is so not merely because
there are so many elements of arbitrariness in any growth estimate (the
choice of prices for weighting is only one of the problems, as any serious
economist knows), but also because the lives that people are able to lead —
what ultimately interest people most — are only indirectly and partially
influenced by the rates of overall economic growth.
Let me look at some numbers, drawing from various sources — national as
well as international, in particular World Development Reports of the World
Bank and Human Development Reports of the United Nations. Life expectancy at
birth in China is 73.5 years; in India it is still 64.4 years. Infant
mortality rate is 50 per thousand in India, compared with just 17 in China,
and the under-5 mortality rate is 66 for Indians and 19 for the Chinese.
China's adult literacy rate is 94 per cent, compared with India's 65 per
cent, and mean years of schooling in India is 4.4 years, compared with 7.5
years in China. In our effort to reverse the lack of schooling of girls,
India's literacy rate for women between the ages of 15 and 24 has certainly
risen, but it is still below 80 per cent, whereas in China it is 99 per cent
. Almost half of our children are undernourished compared with a very tiny
proportion in China. Only 66 per cent of Indian children are immunised with
triple vaccine (DPT), as opposed to 97 per cent in China. Comparing
ourselves with China in these really important matters would be a very good
perspective, and they can both inspire us and give us illumination about
what to do — and what not to do, particularly the glib art of doing nothing.
Higher GNP in China has certainly helped it to reduce various indicators of
poverty and deprivation, and to expand different aspects of the quality of
life. So we have every reason to want to encourage sustainable economic
growth, among the other things we can do to augment living standards today
and in the future. Sustainable economic growth is a very good thing in a way
that “growth mania” is not. We need some clarity on why we are doing what
(including the values we have about our lives and freedoms and about the
environment), and getting excited about the horse race on GNP growth with
China is not a good way of achieving that clarity.
Further, we have to take note of the fact that GNP per capita is not
invariably a good predictor of valuable features of our lives, for they
depend also on other things that we do — or fail to do. Compare India with
Bangladesh, where, as Jean Dreze pointed out in an article many years ago,
“social indicators” are “improving quite rapidly” (“Bangladesh Shows
the Way,” The Hindu, September 17, 2004). In terms of income, India has a
huge lead over Bangladesh, with a GNP per capita of Rs.3,250, compared with
Rs.1,550 in Bangladesh, in comparable units of purchasing power parity.
India was ahead of Bangladesh earlier as well, but thanks to fast economic
growth in recent years, India's per-capita income is now comfortably more
than double that of Bangladesh. How well is India's income advantage
reflected in our lead in those things that really matter? I fear not very
well — indeed not well at all.
Life expectancy in Bangladesh is 66.9 years compared with India's 64.4. The
proportion of underweight children in Bangladesh (41.3 per cent) is a little
lower than in India (43.5), and its fertility rate (2.3) is also lower than
India's (2.7). Mean years of schooling amount to 4.8 years in Bangladesh
compared with India's 4.4 years. While India is ahead of Bangladesh in male
literacy rate in the youthful age-group of 15-24, the female rate in
Bangladesh is higher than in India. Interestingly, the female literacy rate
among young Bangladeshis is actually higher than the male rate, whereas
young females still do much worse than young males in India. There is much
evidence to suggest that Bangladesh's current progress has much to do with
the role that liberated Bangladeshi women are beginning to play in the
country.
What about health, which interests every human being as much as anything
else? Under-5 mortality rate is 66 in India compared with 52 in Bangladesh.
In infant mortality, Bangladesh has a similar advantage, since the rate is
50 in India and 41 in Bangladesh. Whereas 94 per cent of Bangladeshi
children are immunised with DPT vaccine, only 66 per cent of Indian children
are. In each of these respects, Bangladesh does better than India, despite
having less than half of India's per-capita income.
This should not, however, be interpreted to entail that Bangladesh's living
conditions will not benefit from higher economic growth — they certainly
can benefit greatly, particularly if growth is used as a means of doing good
things, rather than treating it as an end in itself. It is to the huge
credit of Bangladesh that despite the adversity of low income it has been
able to do so much so quickly, in which the activism of the NGOs as well as
public policies have played their parts. But higher income, including larger
public resources, will enhance, rather than reduce, Bangladesh's ability to
do good things for its people.
One of the great things about economic growth is that it generates resources
for the government to spend according to its priorities. In fact, public
resources typically grow faster than the GNP: when the GNP increases at 7 to
9 per cent, public revenue tends to expand at rates between 9 and 12 per
cent. The gross tax revenue, for example, of the Government of India now is
more than four times what it was in 1990-91, at constant prices — a bigger
rise than GNP per head.
Expenditure on what is somewhat misleadingly called the “social sector” (
health, education, nutrition, etc) has certainly gone up in India, and that
is a reason for cheer. And yet we are still well behind China in many of
these fields. For example, government expenditure on health care in China is
nearly five times that in India. China does, of course, have a higher per-
capita income than we do, but even in relative terms, while China spends
nearly two per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on health care (1.9
per cent to be exact), the proportion is only a little above one per cent (1
.1 per cent) in India.
One result of the relatively low allocation to public health care in India
is the development of a remarkable reliance of many poor people across the
country on private doctors, many of whom have little medical training, if
any. Since health is also a typical case of “asymmetric information,” with
the patients knowing very little about what the doctors (or “supposed
doctors”) are giving them, the possibility of fraud and deceit is very
large. In a study conducted by the Pratichi Trust, we found cases of
exploitation of the poor patients' ignorance of what they are being given to
make them part with badly needed money to get treatment that they do not
often get (we even found cases in which patients with malaria were charged
comparatively large sums of money for being given saline injections). There
is very definitive evidence of a combination of quackery and crookery in the
premature privatisation of basic health care. This is the result not only
of shameful exploitation, but ultimately of the sheer unavailability of
public health care in many localities around India.
The central point to seize is that while economic growth is an important
boon for enhancing living conditions, its reach depends greatly on what we
do with the fruits of growth. To be sure, there are large numbers of people
for whom growth alone does just fine, since they are already privileged and
need no social assistance. Economic growth only adds to their economic and
social opportunities. Those gains are, of course, good, and there is nothing
wrong in celebrating their better lives through economic growth, especially
since this group of relatively privileged Indians is quite large in
absolute numbers. But the exaggerated concentration on their lives, which
the media tend often to display, gives an incomplete picture of what is
happening to Indians in general.
And perhaps more worryingly, this group of relatively privileged and
increasingly prosperous Indians can easily fall for the temptation to treat
economic growth as an end in itself, for it serves directly as the means of
their opulence and improving lifestyles without further social efforts. The
insularity that this limited perspective generates can even take the form of
ridiculing social activists — “jholawalas” is one description I have
frequently heard — who keep reminding others about the predicament of the
larger masses of people who make up this great country. The fact is, however
, that India cannot be seen as doing splendidly if a great many Indians —
sometimes most Indians — are having very little improvement in their
deprived lives.
Some critics of huge social inequalities might be upset that there is
something rather uncouth and crude in the self-centred lives and inward-
looking temptations of the prosperous inner sanctum. My main concern,
however, is that those temptations may prevent the country from doing the
wonderful things it can do for Indians at large. Economic growth, properly
supplemented, can be a huge contributor to making things better for people,
and it is extremely important to understand the relevance and role of growth
with clarity. | c*******2
发帖数: 617 | 2 顶一下。 原作者是印度裔， 美国哈佛教授， 诺贝奖得主 | w***u
发帖数: 17713 | 3 印度的问题不是民主不民主的问题，而是印度的种姓制度传统。
不理解他们的识字率为啥那么低？我总觉得这些拼音文字扫盲很快的，越南采用拼音文
字后，识字率很快就上去了，俺闺女在家说中文的英语都还不怎么利索，今年秋季才上
一年级，现在在K上面，也不是啥聪明人，读个3-40页的公主仙女的英文小说也没问题
。 | m*****u
发帖数: 15526 | 4 阿三文字语言太杂。国家又没个统一的标准。执行不力。所以才一直这样
【在 w***u 的大作中提到】
: 印度的问题不是民主不民主的问题，而是印度的种姓制度传统。
: 不理解他们的识字率为啥那么低？我总觉得这些拼音文字扫盲很快的，越南采用拼音文
: 字后，识字率很快就上去了，俺闺女在家说中文的英语都还不怎么利索，今年秋季才上
: 一年级，现在在K上面，也不是啥聪明人，读个3-40页的公主仙女的英文小说也没问题
: 。
| w*********r
发帖数: 42116 | 5 14种官方语言.
【在 m*****u 的大作中提到】
: 阿三文字语言太杂。国家又没个统一的标准。执行不力。所以才一直这样
| xt
发帖数: 17532 | 6 这个在纸张通信的时候确实是个大问题，因为所有的文件需要
印N个版本出来，非常耗费人力物力财力和时间。
现在进入了互联网时代，特别是有了Google翻译之后，情况有了
大幅度改观，人民只需要上网，把原版的东西翻译过来，就可以
达到沟通的目的了。
因此印度的高科技产业也有了很大的进步，进入了世界领先的国家
的行列，相应的印度的GDP的加速度也一举超过专制国家
【在 m*****u 的大作中提到】
: 阿三文字语言太杂。国家又没个统一的标准。执行不力。所以才一直这样
| s*m
发帖数: 1896 | 7 印度比中国差就差在2000年前少了一个秦始皇。。。
was
on
such
and
solitary
【在 c*******2 的大作中提到】
: 好文欣赏
: 关键点： 为了避免民主轮胡搅蛮缠， 作者迅速从中印对比转向印孟对比。
: 从印度能否追上中国的伪问题， 反问“印度能追上孟加拉国吗”
: I was awakened early one morning recently by someone who said he was
: enormously enjoying my on-going debate on economic growth in India. I was
: very pleased that I had given someone some joy, but I also wondered what on
: earth he could be talking about, since I have not been involved in any such
: debate. As it happens, I am getting a steady stream of telephone calls and
: electronic communication about this alleged debate. Since I could not
: generate the memory of any such debate, I tried to recollect any solitary
| xt
发帖数: 17532 | 8 人家有阿育王，比秦始皇统治的时间还要长呢
【在 s*m 的大作中提到】
: 印度比中国差就差在2000年前少了一个秦始皇。。。
:
: was
: on
: such
: and
: solitary
| f**k
发帖数: 15238 | 9 没文化啊,2000年前,印度还是在大夏(泛希腊势力), 月氏和塞人分别统治下,统治者不
同文
也不同种, 三哥那时候是被多国殖民,哪来什么秦始皇.
【在 s*m 的大作中提到】
: 印度比中国差就差在2000年前少了一个秦始皇。。。
:
: was
: on
: such
: and
: solitary
| j******r
发帖数: 1428 | | A*Q
发帖数: 1579 | 11 印度一直是个地理概念，从来没有有过大一统的帝国。
并且印度98%的历史里是由非印地人（印地人占印度人口的绝大多数）统治。
我根本不看好现在的印度（这么大的疆土，印地人统治）。
【在 f**k 的大作中提到】
: 没文化啊,2000年前,印度还是在大夏(泛希腊势力), 月氏和塞人分别统治下,统治者不
: 同文
: 也不同种, 三哥那时候是被多国殖民,哪来什么秦始皇.
| xt
发帖数: 17532 | 12 现在的印度，据印度人说，是波斯人(Parsi/Farsi)统治，
就是伊朗人的同种啊，伊朗是中东第二民主的国家，有民主
传统的
【在 A*Q 的大作中提到】
: 印度一直是个地理概念，从来没有有过大一统的帝国。
: 并且印度98%的历史里是由非印地人（印地人占印度人口的绝大多数）统治。
: 我根本不看好现在的印度（这么大的疆土，印地人统治）。
| l**m
发帖数: 5113 | 13 印度是雅利安人统治
波斯人也是雅利安人
【在 xt 的大作中提到】
: 现在的印度，据印度人说，是波斯人(Parsi/Farsi)统治，
: 就是伊朗人的同种啊，伊朗是中东第二民主的国家，有民主
: 传统的
| f****e
发帖数: 24964 | 14 印度没有占绝大多数的民族
说印地语的只占30%，印度斯坦族只占46%
印度最大的人口共同体是印度教徒，占83%
【在 A*Q 的大作中提到】
: 印度一直是个地理概念，从来没有有过大一统的帝国。
: 并且印度98%的历史里是由非印地人（印地人占印度人口的绝大多数）统治。
: 我根本不看好现在的印度（这么大的疆土，印地人统治）。
|
|
