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This book moves beyond the usual economic analysis of the Indian growth story and provides a fresh perspective on the determinants of growth episodes in post-independence India, based on its political economy. Using a robust and novel technique, the authors identify four such episodes during this period. The first, running from the fifties to 1992, was mostly characterized by economic stagnation, with a nascent recovery in the eighties. The second, covering the period 1993 to 2001, witnessed the first growth acceleration in the economy. A second acceleration ran from 2002 to 2010. The fourth and final episode started with the slowdown in 2010 and continues to this day. The book provides a theoretical framework that focuses on rent-structures, institutions and the polity, and demonstrates how changes in these can explain the four growth episodes. Kar and Sen argue that the transitions from one growth episode to another can be explained by the bi-directional relationship between growth outcomes and institutional arrangements, and by the manner in which institutional arrangements and their transitions are determined by the political bargains struck between the elite groups in Indian society.

Developing countries face a trade-off between the twin objectives of structural transformation and inclusive growth. This is the 'developer's dilemma'. This study analyses the dilemma as it manifested itself in the Indian context, and identifies two distinct episodes over the post-independence period. We characterize these two episodes as 'inclusion without growth' and 'growth without inclusion'. We argue that the trade-off in each of these episodes is explained by political factors and the economic ideology pertaining during this period, which in turn, drive the policy regimes and economic outcomes. We draw a few conclusions. First, economic ideology played an important role in driving structural transformation in India. Second, structural transformation did not lead to manufacturing-based industrialization in India due to increasing political competition. Third, the lack of manufacturing growth intensified the dilemma in the Indian context. Finally, we predict three alternative trajectories that structural transformation and inclusiveness may follow in this country.

The cross-country empirical literature on the finance-growth relationship has debated three propositions. These are (i) Financial deepening has a strong impact on the growth process (ii) Measures of financial "activity" rather than the "size" of the sector plays a more significant role in the growth process and (iii) Financial structure (bank-based versus stock market-based) has no impact on the growth process at all. The present study re-examines the validity of these propositions for a developing economy using the Vector Error Correction Model (VECM) methodology. In the context of the "size versus activity" debate, we also test whether these two aspects of the financial sector can impact growth rates independently. The results support the strong impact of financial deepening on growth but finds that the other propositions are not as robust.

The objective of this paper is to understand and measure the contribution of various sectors towards the divergence of regional output in India in the era of liberalization. We have first described a framework that enables us to decompose the rate of divergence into the contribution made by various sectors. Next, we have used this framework to focus on the role of the agricultural, industrial and the services sectors of the Indian economy in bringing about changes in the level of regional inequality in the period following the liberalization of the economy. The results show that while the services and industrial sectors are largely responsible for the divergence during this period, the agricultural sector was offsetting some of the divergence.

The World Bank's Doing Business reports have evoked an intense policy debate about whether countries should simplify regulatory rules in order to stimulate investment and growth, or make them more stringent in order to achieve public policy objectives. Both sides of this debate, however, assume that the business environment in developing countries is defined and determined by the exact implementation of these rules by the state and by firms - an assumption demonstrated to be false by a number of studies. These studies seem to indicate that, rather than these rules, doing business in developing countries is based on deals struck between firms and the political or bureaucratic arms of the state. In this paper, we undertake a cross-country analysis of the relationship between the rules related to doing business and these deals, particularly in the context of the state's capability in implementing them. Using data from the Doing Business reports, the World Bank's Enterprise Survey and other sources, we show that (i) while there is a relationship between rules and deals, it is a weak one; and (ii) this relationship is itself dependent on the level of a country's state capability, with the impact of rules on deals getting further weakened if the state capability is low; and (iii) with stringent rules and very low levels of state capability, the relationship becomes perverse, with more stringent rules leading to less compliance, rather than more. Based on these results, we provide a diagnostic approach to rules reform, where the appropriate reform depends on the level of stringency of the rules in a country, and the level of its state capability.

When are developing countries able to initiate periods of rapid growth and why have so few of these countries been able to sustain growth over decades? Deals and Development: The Political Dynamics of Growth Episodes seeks to answer these questions and many more through a novel conceptual framework built from a political economy of business–government relations. Economic growth for most developing countries is not a linear process. Growth instead proceeds in booms and busts, yet most frameworks for thinking about economic growth are built on the faulty assumption that a country's economic performance is largely stable. Deals and Development explains how growth episodes emerge and when growth, once ignited, is maintained for a sustained period. It applies its new framework to examining the growth of countries across a range of institutional and political contexts in Africa and Asia, using the examples of Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Thailand, Ghana, Liberia, Malawi, Rwanda, and Uganda. Through these country analyses it demonstrates the explanatory power of its framework and the importance of feedback cycles in which economic trends interact with political behaviour to either sustain or terminate a growth episode. Offering a lens through which to analyse complex scenarios and unwieldy amounts of information, this book provides actionable levers of intervention to bring around reform and improve a country's chance at achieving transformative economic growth.