Drone Surprises in Ukraine | India Rising | Fracking in Europe, and more

question when you do the India-China comparison is where does manufacturing fit in into the scheme of things for India’s economy? Did India miss the boat when it comes to manufacturing, or did it end up just jumping straight to services?
The bulk of labor, when we start the comparison in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, is in agriculture. And China has a head start there in terms of use of fertilizer and investment, everything else. But then the really big difference that opens up between the two economies is that China, from the ’80s onwards, begins to develop as a key hub for global manufacturing, with investment by Western companies, by Japanese, South Korean, Taiwanese companies. They all go into China and make it the big factory of the world. And because China does it, it occupies the space that India could have been. And India misses the opportunity, as globalization really begins in earnest in its modern form in the 1990s, to be in that space. India, at that point, is coming out of its financial crisis of 1991, it is liberalizing rapidly, but the sector which workers went into, overwhelmingly migrant male workers, was construction. So, as the city population of India has boomed, all of the extra population really in the last decades has ended up agglomerated in the cities. And as in China, that has required a huge construction process. It doesn’t quite get the headlines the way Chinese urbanization does. But this has been a massive source of employment for rural-to-urban migrants in India.
The real contrast that hurts, and people don’t really enjoy it when you bring it up, is Bangladesh. As China has developed, it’s no longer a low-cost manufacturing hub. And so the question really is, who moved into the slots beneath? Vietnam is one country which has very effectively moved into that space. And Bangladesh has. Bangladesh now is a world leader in textiles and in garment production in particular. The question is really nagging as to why that didn’t happen in India. And the answers seem to do with regulation, that it was just easier to build bigger businesses, to employ labor, particularly female labor, in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is overwhelmingly Muslim. Muslim women work much more outside the home, in India as well, than Hindu women do. But in Bangladesh, the mobilization of female labor has been much easier.

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