Collection examines India's economy

Economics

10/30/2026

India, the world’s most populous nation, stands at a crossroads.

With more than 1.4 billion people, the fifth-largest economy on the planet and geopolitics that make it potentially preferable to China as a destination for investment, India has rarely faced such a confluence of opportunity and peril. A generation after liberalization transformed its economy, India is again confronting a turning point shaped by artificial intelligence, fractured globalization, climate risk, youth unemployment, rising inequality and a changing world order.

Kaushik Basu, the Carl Marks Professor of International Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S) and the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, is a co-author of “The Indian Economy: Navigating a Global Turning Point,” released Aug. 27 (Simon & Schuster). Basu and co-authors offer an assessment of where India stands and what it must do next.

“The Indian Economy” examines that nation’s development journey, from the early decades of planning and the commanding role of the state, through the liberalization of the 1990s, to the unresolved dilemmas of today’s lower-middle-income market economy.

Threading through contributions from leading economists, business leaders and policy thinkers is a single pressing question: Can India convert its demographic scale, technological capabilities, entrepreneurial energy and geopolitical opening into a model of development that creates good jobs, expands human capabilities, strengthens institutions and shares the gains of globalization and technology more widely?

Basu was chief economist of the World Bank from 2012-16; from 2009-12, during the United Progressive Alliance’s second term as India’s ruling party, he served as chief economic adviser to the government of India.

Co-authors include Sonalde Desai, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland; Ashwini Deshpande, professor and chair of economics at Ashoka University, India; and Nirvikar Singh, professor of economics at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Read the story in the Cornell Chronicle.