>> uvj at vsnl.com wrote:
>>
>> India's share in the world trade less than 1%.(It's probably 0.50%
>> of the world trade) How does India contribute significantly to "the
>> First world's" prosperity? How does "the First World" contributes
>> significantly to India's poverty?
>
> Excellent questions. I'd really like to hear some good answers from
> the partisans of the view that it does, but they've been scarce so
> far.
>
> Doug
As it happens, an Indian friend who is a professor of economics has been staying by me and is leaving for JFK to return to Delhi in the next few minutes. While waiting in my apartment for the car I mentioned this interchange to him. He laughed, and said "what part of India's poverty has NOT been 'significantly contributed' by imperialism ?" - and I asked him to set out the ABCs. What follows is his, but his condition is that this is a one-off and not an ongoing conversation since he has quite a bit to do on his return. The assumption of course, which I know at least that Doug shares, is that it is foolish to say that there was once history, but now there isn't any.
john mage
"While it is true that India's _merchandise_ exports to world _merchandise_ exports is around 0.7%, in order to search for an answer to the question posed, we suggest an approach that views the _present_ as history. India's international political-economic relations can be characterised by at least 5 stages. The colonial period (1757-1947), comprising the mercantile period (1757-1810), the competitive industrial phase (1810-1870s), and the monopoly phase (1870s - 1913; 1919-1939 and the two war periods) and the post-independence period in two phases, 1947-1991, and 1991 to the present. The mercantile period was of colonial plunder, the competitive industrial phase was of deindustrialisation, the monopoly phase was of imperialism, and the post-independence phase of neo-imperialism, together "contributing significantly" to the structures of underdevelopment and poverty in India today. The present (1991-2003) is a period wherein FDI [Foreign Direct Investment] and FPI [Foreign Portfolio Investment], especially the latter, have constrained macroeconomic policy including fiscal policy to weaken industrial growth rates since 1996-1997. For India the path of independent capitalist development that enabled Japan's ruling classes to end poverty in that country, let alone any more sophisticated version of the paths taken by the Soviet Union or China that reduced poverty in those countries, are effectively blocked today by "the First World".