Vijay Joshi

India and the Impossible Trinity

In the 1990s, India responded to the well-known trilemma of macroeconomic policy by adopting an intermediate exchange rate system combined with selective capital controls. This regime enabled the country to balance exchange rate stability, exchange rate targeting and monetary autonomy, and to weather successfully various shocks that included contagion from the East Asian crisis. Indias experience serves to reinforce doubts about the desirability of bipolar exchange rate regimes for developing countries as an integral element of a new international financial architecture.

India's economic reforms: Progress, problems, prospects

This paper is a review of Indias progress in the 50 years of Independence, which is regarded as a mixture of the impressive and the disappointing. The country has managed to protect national unity, preserve democracy and dilute traditional social hierarchies. There has been economic growth and a reduction in the proportion of people falling below a standard poverty line. But the main requirement now is a sustained increase in the growth rate of national income that also increases the demand for labour. The relative failures of past decades are considered, and ways in which the reform programme begun in July 1991 could be strengthened are suggested.

Capital Controls and the National Advantage: India in the 1990s and Beyond

Capital controls played a crucial role in insulating India from the East Asian crisis and from volatile capital flows in the 1990s more generally. In the near future, India would be well advised to continue its cautious approach to capital account convertibility. Indias experience holds some lessons for other developing countries and for the redesign of the international financial architecture.

Macroeconomic Management in India, 1964–94

Jagdish Bhagwati’s work on India is surely one of the highlights of his remarkable contribution to economics. As a prescient, searching and constructive critic of India’s inward-looking development strategy, he is an intellectual progenitor of the country’s current drive to reform. The main focus of his work has been on issues of trade and resource allocation.1 Indeed, we have several times heard him declare that he is no macroeconomist and, amazingly enough, given the multiplicity of his writings, it seems to be true that he has largely avoided the subject. We have been less wise, but hope that he will consider this essay an appropriate way to honour him.2

Alternative Strategies for the UK

The major controversies over alternative strategies for the UK economy are surveyed and evaluated in a non-technical manner, concentrating on the positions of three groups prominent in economic forecasting and policy analysis-the National Institute, the London Business School Centre for Economic Forecasting and the Cambridge Economic Policy Group.