India: the giant slumbers-still

摘要

Today, minds in India are very keenly focused on the period after the elections and on which party will most effectively carry through India's reform programme with only hiccups, rather than repeats of the 1991 crisis, to slow it up. The debt issue still requires a great amount of work, and industrial growth looks like slowing to a near halt this year as inflation rises. Whatever happens - and much will depend on any new government broadly following the current line of liberalisation - India's growth is not expected to be meteoric, as in the case of some of the young Asian Tigers, but more a gradual process. As with China, it is the sheer size of India's population that will support the enormous growth in demand for industrial and consumer products over the coming years, and not a rapid escalation of individual's purchasing power.