[lbo-talk] Street-fighting Days

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue May 23 14:57:40 PDT 2006


Aditya Mopur wrote:


>I'm sure this has been debated to death and maybe beyond on this
>forum, but I'm fresh off the boat, so please bear with me and feel
>free to point out any errors:)
>
> >> What is exactly "neo-liberal orthodoxy"?

It's really an odd question from Ulhas, as you & several others have noted. The definition is hardly a mystery - the familiar package of deregulation, opening up to foreign trade and capital flows, cuts in social spending, orientation of economic development towards exports, etc.

Most people think India has moved in a neoliberal direction over the last 10-15 years; I didn't think that was really a controversial point. For orthodox economists and market types, it's never enough, but the direction is certainly clear.

As for India, and who's been left behind by the boom in headline economic stats like GDP... I'm not one of those lefties who think that Indian growth is all a sham, but large portions of the population are not joining the newly prosperous. I understand that the estimates of Indian poverty are controversial; this paper <http://www.epw.org.in/showArticles.php?root=2005&leaf=01&filename=8115&filetype=pdf> shows that contrary to official measures, if you use caloric intake as your metric, poverty rates rose in the 1980s and 1990s.

Doug



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