Here's how India scored :
Of the 157 countries that were included (several including Iraq weren't), India was ranked 104th. Significantly, China was ranked 119th. Of the 30 countries in the Asia-Pacific region, India was 19th and our overall score was lower than the regional average.The economy is booming, but we have a long way to go. You can read the report on India here.
10 comments:
Grrrr ... you're always fast. I thought of putting this up too.
Question: Why do we have a long way to go? Is more freedom on all counts necessarily a better thing? Interestingly enough China is ranked lower than us on Economic Freedoms and way ahead of us on economic achievements.
Thanks to the dominance of the western way of life we seem to think the ideal case scenario is more and more freedom. Personally, I think we'd be a far more efficient country is we had less freedom.
The Economic Freedom Index gives an overview of a country on certain parameters which becomes a benchmark for economic development. World Bank tends to use this index. Often countries with more economic freedom enjoys more per capital income, better environmental health, tax structure, government policies toward growth structure and benefits and a conducive platform of industrialization etc. Basically another way of looking at a country's potential in wealth creation. Correct me if I am wrong IQ.
Roop, not only have you put it better than I could, I suspect you have also said more than I know :)
As a creative in my earlier incarnation, I tend to ignore numbers, indexes and quotients. But this one made instant sense. It shows more than just where we are, it shows if we can go somewhere.
I know the West has sold freedom as if its bottled in the mountain springs in America, but it is a universal property and one that is beneficial to all of us.
Psychological studies (with families and larger groups) show that dictatorship and curtailed freedom do work really well in some cases but these systems show little inheritance because the succeeding dictators needn't always have the same good sense as the ones before.
So, in the long run, freedom is our best bet.
In the long run we'll have to wait and see if India manages to outperform China. If the last 15 years are any indication, it won't. Agreed, China is going to have to deal with a rapidly ageing population which will slow down its economic growth. But that's a demographic factor and has nothing to do with freedom. I posit that if you take India's demographics and run them the Chinese way, India will grow much faster than what it is likely to under current 'freer' circumstances.
Uber, agree on your last comment. What China have achieved in the last 15 years, India will take another 30 years to do so even with all the rise in GDP blah blah. Yes, young population is a plus point for India but do this population have the freedom to create wealth at will? Now thats where this Freedom Index come handy. I guess not with the kind of political situation and corruption prevailing in our democracy.
The Buddha said 'Everything that has a begnning will have an end' - an essential truth that we at times ignore and treat the state of things around us as eternal.
UberM, I don't understand the economics and the numbers but I do believe that China may have the upper hand now but the index of economic freedom points to whether it will continue to do so in the future.
"Freedom is nothing else, but a chance to be better." - Camus
Freedom is also a chance to be profligate. I believe the biggest problem with us Indians is our tendency to use other people's resources indiscriminately. We may have among the highest rates of savings in the world but when it comes to wasting other people's money and natural resources, we do it pretty freely. In fact, one of the reasons our public sector enterprises are so badly run is because they're free to do whatever they please. What we need is more control, more discipline. And that doesn't mean more government interference. It means less freedom to do as we please.
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