, Columnist
Authoritarians Flop as Economic Modernizers
The myth of the enlightened despot who spurs growth endures even though democratic reformers have a better record.
Neither is ideal.
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No country has more potential for the improvement of the human condition than India. Home to more than 1.3 billion people and soon to overtake China as the world’s most populous country, India is also still desperately poor -- its gross domestic product per capita is less than $6,000 in purchasing power parity terms, less than half that of China and barely a tenth of the U.S.
So it’s disappointing to see its high-profile prime minister, Narendra Modi, failing to live up to his promise as an economic modernizer. As Bloomberg View’s Mihir Sharma reports, employment growth has slowed to a crawl. Many fewer Indians are employed in the formal sector than in the early 2000s: