The central theme of this paper is that sustained rapid growth cannot be achieved without rapid growth in trade. A review of the experience during the past four decades offers virtually no examples of countries achieving sustained rapid growth - called miracles in this paper - without...

This paper offers a political economy analysis of the Doha Ministerial Conference with special reference to developing countries. One of my key objectives is to understand the politics underlying the negotiations with a view to assessing the influence developing countries exerted on the outcome...

Today, agriculture remains the most distorted sector of the world economy. Therefore, agricultural liberalisation in the Doha negotiations is rightly the top priority. But the public-policy discourse on the subject remains fogged by a number of fallacies. These fallacies probably originated with...

This paper systematically analyses the issue of trade liberalisation in the South Asia region and offers a qualitative assessment of alternative approaches. I compare two broad approaches to trade liberalisation: non-discriminatory and preferential. The former approach can be pursued on a...

Though India has been growing at six per cent annually since the late 1980s, it trails behind China, which has been growing at ten per cent per annum since 1981. The single most important factor explaining this difference is the relatively poor performance of Indian industry. Whereas the share...

This paper expounds on a well-known and widely influential paper 'Domestic Distortions, Tariffs and the Theory of Optimum Subsidy' (1963) by Bhagwati in collaboration with V. K. Ramaswami. The message of the paper, which set in trail a number of publications, was that in the case of a small open...