Introduction to the special issue

摘要

After a long period (even centuries) of relative stagnation, China and India, containing more than one-third of the world population, have been growing at remarkably high rates over the past quarter century or so. This has been one of the most spectacular events in the recent history of the global economy. Even in the current global downturn their speedy recovery to achieve respectable rates of growth, long before the richer economies could restore their own balance, has attracted a great deal of attention. When the Editors of this Journal requested us to organize a symposium on the comparative developments of these two countries but within a relatively short space, we decided to focus on long-term structural changes, rather than on the short-term macro-economic issues or the current crisis. But even there our problem was one of selection of a very short range of topics (and appropriate authors) which will give the readers some flavor of the important issues surrounding the economic achievements and failures, without any attempt to be comprehensive, as any attempt at the latter could be the subject of several books rather than a small number of articles in the Journal.