Ajay Shah, Renuka Sane and Ananya Goyal have a very interesting blogpost out, the title of which is “What year in the history of an advanced economy is like India today?”
India has been stepping out from poverty into middle income. It is estimated that the proportion of persons below the PPP$1.90 poverty line has dropped to an estimated 87 million in 2020. In thinking about India’s journey, it is interesting to ask: In the historical journey of advanced economies, What year in the history of the US or UK roughly corresponds to India of 2021? This is a good way to obtain intuition on where India is, in the development journey.
https://blog.theleapjournal.org/2021/08/what-year-in-history-of-advanced.html
It’s a good blogpost, and the section before they get to comparisons about GDP is worth reading in full, because they come up with a good set of warnings about overdoing analysis like this. Read it, but we’ll get down to the fun part right away. As they mention in the blogpost, India today is at about 6800 dollars per person in terms of GDP, adjusted for PPP and inflation. When in its history was the UK at this point? What about the US? Well, the blogpost gives the answers, but I prefer to show you screenshots of my favorite software, Gapminder:
And I won’t show you the United States here, but it’s around the same point – the late 1800’s, in effect. Or put another way, if you want to use a this very simple way of asking how long to go before we reach the same level of per capita GDP as the United States, we have about 140 years to go.
And Gapminder, of course, has the ability to allow you to do this for every single metric that is available on the software. The blogpost written by Ajay Shah, Renuka Sane and Ananya Goyal speaks about asset ownership and women’s labor participation as other things to compare India’s current level of development with America’s past – but you can, of course, take a look at whichever metric you want.
This blogpost reminded me of a chart that The Economist had come up with earlier:
As with many charts from The Economist, it takes a while to get what is going on, but the chart is worth that effort. Here’s a quick explanation to get you started: life expectancy at birth for China is 73. India is at 65. And China was at 65 36 years ago. Once you get this, the other rows in the chart become easy to interpret. Note that this chart was published by The Economist a decade ago.
These sort of analyses are fun, but of course one shouldn’t take them too seriously. There are other things that are at play beyond the data points that are worth taking into account, but are difficult to quantify. And most notable among these is culture.
That is, sure, China was at 65 in terms of life expectancy 36 years ago, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that we will take even approximately the same amount of time to reach 73. Could be lesser, could be more – and that because of changing technology, different culture, different political structures, different – well, a whole host of things.
But this much is true: both the blogpost that I cited and the chart above shows that we have, as the poet put it, miles to go before we sleep.
By the way, a fun exercise if you are a student today is to see if you can recreate The Economist’s chart updated with today’s numbers. Give it a shot, why don’t you?