Tiffany Tong
March 19th, 2008
Which Country Made the Better Choice?
China and India, the two Asian powerhouses where 37% of the world population lives, have become the miracles of economic development of the modern world (Current World Population (ranked), 2007). China and India have sustained GDP growth, unmatched by any other country in the history of human kind, of 9.4% and 7% average respectively for over a decade (Dahlman, 2007). The proportion of Indians living in extreme poverty (on $1 a day or less) has fallen from 40% to 25% in a decade, while in China, between 1981 and 2001, the proportion fell from 53% to just 8% (Sharma, 2006). The countries have followed “diametrically opposed development paths (Sharma, 2006)”: one is now the IT-enabled service center of the world and the other is the factory of the world (Dahlman, 2007). In this paper, I will compare the strategies and performances of the economic reforms of China and India and ultimately argue that due to their diverging economical strategies, it is very difficult to conclude which country is superior in terms of economic development; both have major advantages and flaws that will need to be addressed before true sustainable development can be attained.