India is Asia’s tortoise, plodding along as China races off with a leading chunk of the world’s direct foreign investment. Its infrastructure is an embarrassment, its bureaucracy a major economic headwind and its crushing poverty a reminder of challenges facing the world’s second-most populous nation.
For all its warts, India boasts a level of ground-up entrepreneurship China’s top-down model can’t match. It has created world-class, globally competitive companies and a real stock market, unlike the financial casinos that pass for equity bourses in China…
Democracy can be an inefficient, messy process and nowhere is that truer than in India. Yet it is civil society, a free press and accountable government that offer stability. China’s transition from a command economy to capitalism poses many risks, including social instability.
See also “At Davos, ‘the world’ means the West” from the International Herald Tribune.
