How India could become an Asian tiger

Is India achieving its potential? In the year to the third quarter of 2023, the country grew at a blistering rate of 8.4%. Over the next half-decade it is expected to expand at 6.5% a year, which would make it the world’s fastest-growing big economy. So far, so good. The problem, as critics point out, is that China, Japan and South Korea all expanded at 10% or so a year during their periods of rapid growth. Part of the reason for India’s less impressive figures is a slowdown in globalisation. But a new book by Karthik Muralidharan of the University of California, San Diego, called “Accelerating India’s Development”, argues that the crucial barrier to faster development is a lack of “state capacity”.