Noah Smith, Columnist

How India Can Get Growth Back on Track

Banks need help cleaning up their balance sheets now, but a long-term recovery requires more urbanization.

February 25, 2020 at 2:00 AM UTC

Noah Smith is a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He was an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University, and he blogs at Noahpinion.

Urbanization might help.
Photographer: Prashanth Vishwanathan/Bloomberg

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India has more than a sixth of the world's population. It’s also still a poor country. So what happens there is incredibly important for the welfare of the human race.

For a long time, good things were happening in India. Cautious pro-business reforms in 1980s were followed by the dismantling of much of the country’s overbearing regulatory state in the 1990s and 2000s. At the end of a long boom, India was five times richer per capita than in 1980.