Confessions....(II)

This is a great read, would highly recommend this. Finished this book a while back, just havent had time to blog. It reads very well, a very fast moving book, as fast as any great fiction I have read.

I am sure there might be critics of John Perkins who might doubt the veracity of his statements, especially those with far-reaching consequences - for example, planned assasinations of Omar Torrijos, president of Panama, Jaime Roldos, the President of Equador. If you are interested in what John is right now upto, visit Dreamchange.

John takes us through his early career as an EHM (Economic Hit Man) with his stint in Indonesia, followed by Iran, Equador, Panama, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, etc. I was particularly impressed by the character of President Omar Torrijos, of Panama who defiantly resisted US pressure to hand over the Panama Canal to US control.

So, why Iraq?

Contrary to common public opinion, Iraq is not simply about oil. It is also about water and geopolitics. Both the Tigris and Euphrates river flow through Iraq; thus, of all the countries in that part of the world, Iraq controls the most important sources of increasingly critical water resources. In addition to this, Iraq is situated in a very strategic location. It borders Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and Turkey and has a coastline on the Persian Gulf. It is within easy missile striking distance of Israel, China & the former Soviet Union. Today, it is common knowledge that whoever controls Iraq holds the key to controlling the Middle East.

Some information about OPEC I was not aware of that helps in understanding some of the key strategies of international politics:

During the 1960s, a group of countries had formed OPEC, the cartel of oil-producing countries, largely in response to the power of the big refining companies. Iran was also a major factor. The heads of state of petroleum-rich countries knew that the major international oil companies, known as "Seven Sisters" were collaborating to hold down petroleum prices - and thus the revenue they paid to the producing countries - as a means of reaping their own profits. OPEC was organized in order to strike back.

This all came to a head in the early 1970s, when OPEC brought the industrial giants to their knees. A series of concerted actions, ending with the 1973 oil embargo threatened to bring on an economic catastrophe rivaling the Great Depression. The oil crisis could not have come at a worse time for the US - reeling from a humiliating war in Vietnam, Nixon's Watergate, scandal, etc. The international monetary system took a blow; the network of fixed exchange rates, which had prevailed since WW II, essentially collapsed.

Here is another part that really interested me - on the future of US corporatocracy.

The end of Saddam, like the end of Noriega in Panama, would change the formula. Once we controlled iraq, could we break OPEC? Would the Saudi royal family become irrelevant in the arena of global oil politics? There is another possible outcome: the OPEC could reassert itself. With the US controlling Iraq, the other petroleum-rich countries might have little to lose by raising oil prices and/or reducing supplies.

In the final analysis, the global empire depends to a large extent on the fact that the dollar acts as the standard world currency, and that the US Mint has the right to print those dollars. Thus, we make loans to countries like Ecuador with the full knowledge that they will never repay them; in fact, we do not want them to honor the debts, since this is what gives us our leverage. The US prints currency that is not backed by gold. Indeed, it is not backed by anything other than a general worldwide confidence in our economy.

As long as the world accepts the dollar as its standard currency, this excessive debt does not pose a serious obstacle to our corporatocracy. However, if another currency should come along to replace the dollar, and if some of the US's creditors (Japan or China for example) should decide to call in their debts, the situation would change drastically. In fact, today, the existence of such a currency is no longer hypothetical - the Euro is growing in prestige and power with every passing month. If the OPEC decides to substitute the Euro as its standard currency, and if one or two major creditors were to demand that we repay our debts in Euros, the impact would be enormous.

Wow.

Confessions of an Economic Hitman

or How the United States Uses Globalization to Cheat Poor Countries Out of Trillions

I had heard about this book from Vinod, and he just sent me this link to an interview with John Perkins by Amy Goodman on Democracy now.

John Perkins was a self-professed Economic Hit Man. He worked for a score and more years as chief economist at an international consulting firm in Boston called Chas. T. Main. His job was to persuade countries that are strategically important to the U.S. - such as Indonesia, Panama, Ecuador, Iran and Saudi Arabia - to accept enormous loans for infrastructure development from USAID and World Bank and then to make sure the lucrative projects were contracted out to U.S. corporations. This ensured that the principal money moved only from Washington D.C. to New York, Boston and San Francisco. The countries which received all the infrastructure improved the lot of the top 2% of their elite and further marginalized bulk of their poorer population. Stuck with extraordinarily huge debts which they couldn't possibly repay, these countries came under the control of the U.S. government and other U.S.-dominated aid agencies. Terms of repayment were meted out and the foreign powers were forced to hand out free or cheap oil, allow U.S. military bases and other atrocious empire building actions.

As an economic hit man, chief economist John Perkins' job of persuasion entailed coming up with projected economic growth rate charts over a futuristic 25 years in the event of the country accepting the generous loans of the empire-building aid agencies. According to Perkins, when he and his ilk failed to convince the heads of state, the CIA (he calls them sharks) would move in and silently assassinate the president and instead place a puppet at the head who would agree to the terms of the loan. When this failed, U.S.A. would go to war, an Iraq would occur.

Very lucidly in his new book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, John Perkins takes one through his career, from being hired as an econmic hit man to his actions in Indonesia, Equador, Panama, Saudi Arabia and Colombia.

I have to buy this book soon.

More on The Bottom of the Pyramid

OK, so continuing my summary/review of C.K. Prahalad's book, here are some of his principles of innovation for BOP markets (I quote directly from his book along with examples, taken from other chapters):

1. Serving BOP markets is not just about lower prices; it is about creating a new price-performance envelope. The best example here is the incredible growth the world has seen in the use of cell phones. What used to once cost $1,000 in India (GSM handsets used to be that expensive!) now is so cheap, and India is now the second largest growing wireless market. Another example is the Aravind Eye Care System, the largest eye care facility in the world, headquarted in Madurai, Southern India. Cataract operations that cost about $2,500-$3000 in the US cost about $50-$300 here, including the hospital stay and post-operative care. This case study is truly worth reading more about! I was amazed.
2. Innovation requires hybrid solutions. Most scalable, price-performance-enhancing solutions need advanced and emerging technologies. A case in point here is the how Hindustan Lever Limited (HLL), an Indian conglomerate innovated the manufacturing of iodized salt. More than 70 million Indian children suffer from iodine deficiency disorder (IDD), which can lead to mental retardation. Same with Africa. Only 15% of salt sold in India is iodized. Salt, to be effective as a carrier of iodine, must retain a minimum of 15 ppm of iodine. Due to harsh conditions of storage & tranportation, and furthermore due to the cooking habits, the challenge of creating iodized salt that will release the iodine only on ingesting cooked food is truly great. HLL innovated their process by performing what is called molecular encapsulation. Unilever is now using this innovation from HLL to other countries like Ghana, Ivory Coast and Kenya.
3. Solutions must be designed for ease of adaptation in similar BOP markets. How does one take a solution that worked in India to Brazil? This is a key consideration for gaining scale.
4. Developed markets are accustomed to resource wastage. All innovations must focus on conserving resources.
5. Product development must start from a deep understanding of functionality. Marginal changes to products developed for rich customers in the US or Japan will not do. One case study here is that of the Jaipur Foot. The artificial limb business is not new, it has been around since the American Civil War. In India alone, there are 5.5 million amputees, and about 25-30,000 are added each year due to polio, accidents, etc. Traditional artificial limbs were found to be both expensive (about $7,000 per prosthetic foot) as well as not serving the needs/requirements of the Indian life style - for example, most Indians squat (hence the need for dorsiflexion of the limb), they sit cross-legged (need for transverse rotation), walk on uneven ground (need for inversion and eversion) and walk barefoot (need for natural look). This unique set of requirements (well, not that unique, since this was adopted to Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Cambodia, Congo & Vietnam) led to a master design. Master craftsman Ram Chandra & Dr. P.K. Sethi, along with their Jaipur design team, developed a prosthetic that meets all he criteria for less than $30.
6. Deskilling work is critical - most BOP markets are poor in skill.
7. Education of customers on product usage is key. Most BOP markets live in "media dark" zones, without access to radio or TV.
8. Products must work in hostile environments - noise, dust, unsanitary conditions, low quality of infrastructure such as electricity, water, etc. ITC, the Indian conglomerate, was building this network for connecting Indian villages in a seamless supply chain. The PCs placed in the villages had to work in conditions unthinkable in the West. For example, the voltage fluctuated between 90-350 volts (against the rated 220 volts), and sudden surges are very common. ITC engineers had to add an UPS, and a solar panel that would allow at least 3-4 hours of uninterrupted, quality electricity. For communication, they had to depend on satellites.
9. Research on interfaces is critical. Given the multitude of languages, ethnicities and diversities in culture, this is no surprise. The interfaces could be either of - iconic, color-coded, voice-activated, fingerprint and iris-recognition interfaces. This is another area of crucial research, in my opinion. There is already a lot of work that has been done in this area. For example, the Baraha software is a wonderful tool to create documents in about 13 different Indian languages. Incidentally, my cousin was the key person who developed this during his spare time.

More recently, notable research in some of these areas:

• MIT announced the $100 laptop that has a hand-powered crank that can charge up the battery and comes in the form of a rugged, rubberized case so that it can survive under harsh conditions. More here.
• Intel Research, Berkeley, is working on real-world deployments of Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTN) that considers the networking usages of satellite-based connections. More details here and here.

Some other key areas the book focuses on: Governance, and the interaction/importance of governmental interaction with NGOs, conglomerates and getting the common people involved in a transparent manner. This is a critical factor - lack of transparency, bureaucracy and corruption are the leading obstacles towards making the Millenium Developments a reality.

Case studies in the second half of the book illustrates in a very nice manner how millions of lives have been transformed by these projects:

• Casas Bahia (Brazil) - Innovation in retailing
• CEMEX (Mexico) - Innovation in Housing for the Poor
• The Annapurna Salt Story (India) - Solving the Iodine Deficiency problem for India
• Selling Health: HLL and the Soap Market (India)
• Jaipur Foot: Challenging Convention (India)
• The Aravind Eye Care System: Delivering the most precious gift (India)
• ITC e-choupal Story: Profitable Rural Transformation (India)
• Voxiva: Disease surveillance and response (Kosovo, Peru, Iraq, Africa, India)

All in all, a terrific read! I would highly recommend this book.

Whew, that was a lot of stuff. I hope I havent bored anyone off from the web site!

The Market at the Bottom of the Pyramid

I finally got down to jotting down some notes from C.K. Prahalad's recent book The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, I thought I will put them here.

The book starts off on a very ambitious note, and he surely doesn't disappoint the reader throughout the book. Here is an excerpt from the first chapter:

Turn on your television and you will see calls for money to help the world's 4 billion poor - people who live on far less than $2 a day. In fact, the cry is so constant and the need so chronic that the tendency for many people is to tune out these images as well as the message. Even those who hear and heed the cry are limited in what they can accomplish. For more than 50 years, the World Bank, donor nations, aid agencies, governments, and civil society organizations have all fought the good fight, but have not eradicated poverty. The adoption of Millenium Development Goals (MDG) by the United Nations only underscores that reality; as we enter the 21st century, poverty - and the disenfranchisement that accompanies it - remains one of the world's most daunting problems.

The purpose of this book is to change that familiar image on TV. What we need is a better approach to help the poor, an approach that involves partnering with them to innovate and achieve sustainable win-win scenarios where the poor are actively engaged and, at the same time, the companies providing products and services to them are profitable.

Now, for some observations that I thought were interesting:

1. There is money at the BOP (Bottom of Pyramid): The dominant assumption has been that the poor have no purchasing power and therefore do not represent a viable market. Prahalad shows that we should take aggregate purchasing power into consideration. To do this, we convert GDP-based purchasing power (for example China with a population of 1.2 billion and $1000 GDP represents a $1.2 trillion economy) into its dollar purchasing power parity (PPP). I think this means that you take into account the local currency and not just the dollar units. Nine countries - India, China, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Indonesia, Turkey, South Africa & Thailand - collectively home to about 3 billion people, represent about 70% of the developing world population. In PPP terms, this group's GDP/aggregate Purchasing power is $12.5 trillion. This is not a market to be ignored.
2. BOP consumers accept advanced technology readily: This has been clearly shown by the ready acceptables of wireless devices, PC kiosks, etc. in different parts of the world. For example, ITC, the Indian conglomerate, decided to connect Indian farmers with PCs in their villages. This has allowed them to check prices not only in the local aution houses, but also prices of soybean futures at the Chicago Board of Trade! This has helped improved their profit margins, because they now how when to sell, how much to sell, and at what price they have to sell their produce. I thought this was really amazing.

I have to rush out now. I promise a post later in the day covering the other parts of the book.

Amartya Sen's new book

The Guardian has high acclaims about Amartya Sen's new book on India called The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. Here is the Guardian's review.

Every year, the 1998 winner of the Nobel Prize for economics returns to Santiniketan, the tiny university town 100-odd miles from Calcutta. In Santiniketan, the former Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, can be seen on a bicycle, friendly and unassuming, chatting with the locals and working for a trust he has set up with the money from his Nobel Prize. One of the most influential public thinkers of our times is strongly rooted in the country in which he grew up; he is deeply engaged with its concerns. There can, then, be few people better equipped than this Lamont University Professor at Harvard to write about India and the Indian identity, especially at a time when the stereotype of India as a land of exoticism and mysticism is being supplanted with the stereotype of India as the back office of the world.

In this superb collection of essays, Sen smashes quite a few stereotypes and places the idea of India and Indianness in its rightful, deserved context. Central to his notion of India, as the title suggests, is the long tradition of argument and public debate, of intellectual pluralism and generosity that informs India's history.

This is a book that needed to have been written. The perception of India in the West and, indeed, among Indians themselves has never been more amorphous as it is now. The Argumentative Indian will provide a new dimension and perspective to that perception. It would be no surprise if it were to become as defining and as influential a work as Edward Said's Orientalism

I just bought it yesterday. Yet to start though.

The End of Poverty - II

Oh wow, it has been a month since I blogged. How do people find the time to blog regularly???

Anyways, I did a bit of travel over the last month (first to Cochin to attend a friend's wedding) and another to Delhi and Dharamshala and the good thing about traveling, especially on train is the amount of time you have to just sit & read. So, as it turned out, I finished reading The End of Poverty towards the end of my Delhi/Dharmshala trip. BTW, Dharamshala is a beautiful place, situated at the foothills of the Dhauladhar Himalayas. McLeoydgunj, about 10 kms up north from Dharamshala is the official residence of the current Dalai Lama. Although I wasnt lucky enough to get a glimpse of him, I did manage to visit a few monastries and the Chinmoy Tapovan. I ran out of luck with heavy rains & had to cut short my plans of a trek to Triund and Indrahar Pass, and just head back to Delhi.

So, The End of Poverty was a brilliant read, for me at least. It got very interesting from the point where Sachs starts describing his experiences with helping different economies of the world. Starting with Bolivia, where he helps solve their problems with hyperinflation and more importantly, how understanding a nation's history of economics helps with solving the longer term problems. There is this interesting anecdote, where Sachs reveals how the IMF is driven, and controlled by large conglomerates like Citibank. Sach's scorn for how IMF's debt strategy is sometimes determined by international banks was quite evident.

During the course of his campaign for nullyfying the international debt that some of the developing countries are heavily burdened with (so heavy that there is really no use of any amount of economic liberalization within the country), Sachs seems to have made a good bit of enemies in the US government.

Onto Poland, Russia, China & India. The story of Poland's return to modern Europe was quite fascinating. Poland was considered the most liberal of the communist countries, but it went under martial law between 1981 & 1989, during which it was a freewheeling, chaotic country & economy, with black marketing, smuggling. In 1989, in one of the biggest demonstrations of voux populi in recent history, Poland held its first free elections, resulting in a political earthquake with the public screaming in unison "we want the communists out". On invitation from the Polish Solidarity Party, Sachs worked out a comprehensive plan, the first in history, for transforming a socialist economy to a market economy. The plan covered questions of trade, exchange rates, stabilization, industrial policy, debt cancellation and slow privatization. The rest of the chapter describes how the plan actually worked, and how Poland's proximity to mainland Europe went a long way in getting Poland out of trouble.

Russia, on the other hand, is a much sadder story. Russia's economic crisis started in the mid 80s. Russia depended heavily on oil and and gas exports to earn foreign exchange, and on its own use of oil & gas in an energy-intensive heavy industry. World oil prices plummeted in the mid 80s when Soviet oil production peaked and then sharly fell due to depletion of old oil fields and a lack of investment in new harder-to-reach fields in the tundra. This lead to increased international debt, the economy was caught in a crises, without a hope of salvage. Around the same time, Gorbachev's efforts with perestroika failed miserably. Coupled with this were the complications around USSR's recent split into multiple countries - currency convertibility was an issue with so many currencies, hardly any foreign assistance, growing international debt, etc.

The industrial and agricultural output declined during 1990-91 leading to a drastic fall in gross national product and national income. By 1991 the Soviet economy had stopped declining and gone into complete collapse. How did perestroika fail so miserably? First of all Gorbachev never planned to remake the Soviet system, he merely wanted to modernise it. He attempted to curb the production and sale of alcohol. While alcoholism was a major problem in the USSR he inadvertently forced production underground. Like America during prohibition the Mafia took control and has plagued Russia ever since. Other measures introduced under perestroika were leasing land to farmers (all land was owned by the state), allowing loss making factories to go bankrupt and limited numbers of private enterprises to open. McDonalds even opened a branch in Moscow although its prices were out of reach for the average person. The most promising measure of all was a cut in state spending especially in military expenditure. The reforms while on the right track were not comprehensive enough to overcome the sluggishness in the Soviet economy. When more radical changes were made they were mostly too late to prevent the slide in the economy and often had adverse effects. This was the case with the long overdue 1991 price rises which caused panic buying of any and all goods. Perestroika was to little too late to revive the Soviet economy.

The failure of perestroika was exacerbated by Gorbachev's continual boasting about the results that the reforms would have. In the last years of perestroika erratic policy shifts were common with wide ranging reforms soon clamped down on. Gorbachev's failure to approve Grigory Yavlinsky's 500 day economic plan (Rajeev's note: this by the way, was the plan Jeffrey Sachs came up with working with Yavlinsky) in September 1990 after much earlier enthusiasm lost him any remaining support he still had from the Soviet people. By steering a course between the conservatives and the reformers Gorbachev alienated almost everybody leaving himself with few allies. The Soviet economy was in decline as Mikhail Gorbachev took office and after much early hope he could not prevent economic collapse. His insistence on slow gradual economic reforms annulled any positive effects that the reforms might have had. This reluctance to introduce meaningful free market reforms to the Soviet economy lost Gorbachev the support of the people.

Sachs also reveals how US foreign policy, especially towards Russia was another big reason why Russia failed to look up again. In his own words,

I had supposed in 1991 and 1992 that the United States would be rooting for Russia's success much like it was rooting for Poland's. With hindsight, I doubt if this was ever the case. Poland was viewed by US strategists as the eastern flank of the Western alliance. Poland was a candidate for the European Union and for the NATO. Bolstering Poland was, therefore, umambiguously bolstering Western interests as well. I had believed the same was true for Russia as well, but I now doubt that (Dick) Cheney and (Paul) Wolfowitz ever shared that perception. Russia was not destined to become a member of the European Union, and was certainly not a candidate for NATO. It was still a country with more than 20,000 nuclear weapons. It now seems plausible to me that bolstering Russia's quick recovery was viewed as inimical to US interests by the Bush and the defense establishment.

Russia did become a market economy, although lopsided towards oil and gas. Economy has grown since 1998 on the basis of high international energy prices. But will Russia become a democracy is a big question no one dares to try to answer I guess. Though Vladimir Putin rules with constitutionalism and multi party democracy, he has also successfully centralized power, tamed the media and muzzled the independent opposition. Its efforts of privatization has led to highly acute imbalance of a lot of power with a few oil magnates, leading to a lot of corruption and ill gotten wealth.

Whew! I guess India's story is more well known (at least to us Indians). So I will leave that for now.

The next half of the book is about Africa and parts of Asia that are in extreme poverty, and Sach's detailed plans on how much aid is required to help African nations out of their misery. According to Sach's 0.7% of the GNP of developed countries, if targeted correctly towards the extreme poor, can help bring them out of poverty and onto a path whereby they can try and get onto the next rung of economic development.

I would highly recommend this book.

The End of Poverty

A few weekends ago, I spent a few hours in one of the latest of those malls that seem to be crowding the Bangalore cityscapes. I actually went there with my sister and friend to watch a movie, but the Landmark bookstore there drew me like a bee to a flower. I ended up ditching them for the movie, and instead bought a couple of books and spent the next couple of hours in a blissful state just reading by myself. I started reading The End of Poverty by Jeffrey Sachs. The place did get awfully crowded by noon with swarms of people all over the place, but it was a nice Saturday morning for sure. Since I moved back from the US, I dont think I had spent quality time like that by myself reading at a bookstore.

If you havent heard about the book, there are a whole bunch of web resources on this, including some great NPR radio stories on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, etc. with Prof. Jeffrey Sachs. Here is the official website on the project at the Earth Institute of Columbia University. Prof. Sachs is Professor of Sustainable Development at Columbia University; professor of health policy and management; and special advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan. He headed the United Nations' Millenium Development Goals project recently, has spent over two decades working with economists and leaders of developing nations, helping and advising them on economic policies, steps to tackle basic problems of hunger, health policies, etc.

My first thoughts on the book (I havent completed it yet) - it is a great read for anyone who wants to understand how some of the world's economies have fared, how economics of a nation effects the common man, hurdles to eliminating poverty, disease, etc. Sachs has the experience to talk about this, and nothing in the book so far seems to be spun out of yarn.

An excerpt from the first chapter:

The path from poverty to development has come incredibly fast in the span of human history. Two hundred years ago, the idea that we could potentially achieve the end of poverty would have been unimaginable. Just about everybody was poor with the exception of a very small minority of royals and landed gentry. Life was as difficult in much of Europe as it was in India or China. With very few exceptions, your great-great-grandparents were poor and most likely living on the farm. One leading economic historian, Angus Maddison, puts the average income per person in Western Europe in 1820 at around 90 percent of the average income of sub-Saharan Africa today. Life expectancy in Western Europe and Japan as of 1800 was probably about 40 years.

If we are to understand why vast gaps between rich and poor exist today, we need therefore to understand a very recent period of human history during which these vast gaps opened. The past two centuries, since around 1800, constitute a unique era in economic history, a period that the great economic historian Simon Kuznets famously termed the period of Modern Economic Growth, or MEG for short. Before the era of MEG, indeed for thousands of years, there had been virtually no sustained economic growth in the world and only gradual increases in the human population...

Ok, so now onto some of the interesting facts, at least things I found interesting.

1. On the idea that the rich (here we mean Western Europe and the USA) have gotten richer because the poor have gotten poor, he says "this interpretation would be plausible if gross world production had remained roughly constant, with a rising share going to the powerful regions and a declining share going to the poorer regions. However, GWP (Gross World Product) rose nearly fifty-fold, with every region of the world experiencing some economic growth, but some regions experienced much more growth than the others. The key fact here is not the transfer of income from one region to another, by force or otherwise, but rather the overall increase in world income, but at a different rate in different regions."
2. There is a very interesting analysis of the effects of the two World Wars on world economies, the Great Depression, political (in)stability across the world and the rise of the world democracies. Most of the time between WWII and the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 went into reconstructing a new global economy. It seems to me from this part of the book, that the countries that were already industrialized (and some of them were the colonial powers) - USA, Europe, Japan had the biggest advantage here in terms of definining the new world order, the new global economy and international trade. Agencies like GATT (General Agreement on Trades and Tariffs) made it easier for international trading, helping boost these countries. In my opinion, this is one place where countries that were still struggling to find a foothold in the post-colonial era lost out since they had no say in the matter, and worse still, the long colonial era had left them in deep suspicion of some of these international powers.
3. Why are we called Third World countries? The First World countries were the truly capitalistic ones - Europe, USA, Japan that grew tremendously since WWII. The Second World was the socialist world, that created by Lenin and Stalin in the wake of WWI. The second world remained cut off economically from the rest of the world until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR in 1991. The main characteristics of the Second World were state-owned production, planning of production, one-party rule by communist parties, etc. The Third World included the rapidly rising number of postcolonial countries. Today, the word Third World is used simply to mean poor. In actuality, the term came about with these countries emerging from imperial domination that chose neither to be part of the capitalistic first world or the socialist second world. The main ideas in these countries were, in general, "we will develop on our own, we will nurture industry, some through state ownership, sometimes through private enterprises, but we will do it without foreign investments by multinationals. No open international trade. We do not trust both the First World or the Soviet Union."

I am about half way through the book. Will post more soon, I hope. I did jump across into the chapter devoted to the rise of the Indian economy, Indian economic reforms by Dr. Manmohan Singh, P. Chidambaram, advised by Prof. Jagdish Bhagawati, & Jeffrey Sachs himself.

Have a good weekend, all!