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AS INDIA GOES to the polls, Narendra Modi, the prime minister, can boast that the world’s largest election is taking place in its fastest-growing major economy. India’s GDP, at $3.5trn, is now the fifth biggest in the world—larger than that of Britain, its former colonial ruler. The government is investing heavily in roads, railways, ports, energy and digital infrastructure. Many multinational companies, pursuing a “China plus one” strategy to diversify their supply chains, are eyeing India as the unnamed “one”. This economic momentum will surely help Mr Modi win a third term. By the time he finishes it in another five years or so, India’s GDP might reach $6trn, according to some independent forecasts, making it the third-biggest economy in the world.

But India is prone to premature triumphalism. It has enjoyed such moments of optimism in the past and squandered them. Its economic record, like many of its roads, is marked by potholes. Its people remain woefully underemployed. Although its population recently overtook China’s, its labour force is only 76% the size. (The percentage of women taking part in the workforce is about the same as in Saudi Arabia.) Investment by private firms is still a smaller share of GDP than it was before the global financial crisis of 2008. When Mr Modi took office, India’s income per person was only a fifth of China’s (at market exchange rates). It remains the same fraction today. These six books help to chart India’s circuitous economic journey and assess Mr Modi’s mixed economic record.

Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future. By Raghuram Rajan and Rohit Lamba. Penguin Business; 336 pages; $49.99

Before Mr Modi came to office, India was an unhappy member of the “fragile five” group of emerging markets. Its escape from this club owes a lot to Raghuram Rajan, who led the country’s central bank from 2013 to 2016. In this book he and Mr Lamba of Pennsylvania State University express impatience with warring narratives of “unmitigated” optimism and pessimism about India’s economy. They make the provocative argument that India should not aspire to be a manufacturing powerhouse like China (a “faux China” as they put it), both because India is inherently different and because the world has changed. India’s land is harder to expropriate and its labour harder to exploit. Technological advances have also made services easier to export and manufacturing a less plentiful source of jobs. Their book is sprinkled with pen portraits of the kind of industries they believe can prosper in India, including chip design, remote education—and well-packaged idli batter. Both authors regret India’s turn towards tub-thumping majoritarianism, which they think will ultimately inhibit its creativity and hence its economic prospects. Nonetheless this is a work of mitigated optimism.

New India: Reclaiming the Lost Glory. By Arvind Panagariya. Oxford University Press; 288 pages

This book provides a useful foil for “Breaking the Mould”. Arvind Panagariya took leave from Columbia University to serve as the head of a government think-tank set up by Mr Modi to replace the old Planning Commission. The author is ungrudging in his praise for the prime minister and unsparing in his disdain for the Congress-led government he swept aside. Mr Panagariya also retains faith in the potential of labour-intensive manufacturing to create the jobs India so desperately needs. The country, he argues in a phrase borrowed from Mao’s China, must walk on two legs—manufacturing and services. To do that, it should streamline its labour laws, keep the rupee competitive and rationalise tariffs at 7% or so. The book adds a “miscellany” of other reforms (including raising the inflation target, auctioning unused government land and removing price floors for crops) that would keep Mr Modi busy no matter how long he stays in office.

The Lost Decade 2008-18: How India’s Growth Story Devolved into Growth without a Story. By Puja Mehra. Ebury Press; 360 pages; $21

Both Mr Rajan and Mr Panagariya make an appearance in this well-reported account of India’s economic policymaking from 2008 to 2018. Ms Mehra, a financial journalist, describes the corruption and misjudgments of the previous government and the disappointments of Mr Modi’s first term. The prime minister was exquisitely attentive to political threats but complacent about more imminent economic dangers. His government was, for example, slow to stump up the money required by India’s public-sector banks after Mr Rajan and others exposed the true scale of their bad loans to India’s corporate titans. One civil servant recounts long, dull meetings in which Mr Modi monitored his piecemeal welfare schemes, even as deeper reforms languished. “The only thing to do was to polish off all the peanuts and chana.”

The Billionaire Raj: A Journey Through India’s New Gilded Age. By James Crabtree. Oneworld Publications; 416 pages; $7.97

For a closer look at those corporate titans, turn to the “Billionaire Raj” by James Crabtree, formerly of the Financial Times. The prologue describes the mysterious late-night crash of an Aston Martin supercar, registered to a subsidiary of Reliance, a conglomerate owned by Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man. Rumours swirl about who was behind the wheel, even after an employee turns himself in. The police tell Mr Crabtree that the car has been impounded for tests. But he spots it abandoned on the kerb outside the police station, hidden under a plastic sheet. It was still there months later. Mr Crabtree goes on to lift the covers on the achievements, follies and influence of India’s other “Bollygarchs”. They include Vijay Mallya, the former owner of Kingfisher beer and airlines. Once known as the King of Good Times, he moved to Britain from where he faces extradition for financial crimes. Mr Crabtree meets him in drizzly London, where the chastened hedonist is only “modestly late” for the interview. Only once do the author’s journalistic instincts fail him. He receives an invitation to the wedding of the son of Gautam Adani. The controversial billionaire is known for his close proximity to Mr Modi and his equally close acquaintance with jaw-dropping levels of debt. The bash might have warranted its own chapter in this book. But Mr Crabtree, unaccustomed to wedding invitations from strangers, declines to attend.

Unequal: Why India Lags Behind its Neighbours. By Swati Narayan. Context; 370 pages; $35.99

Far from the bling of the Bollygarchs or the ministries of Delhi, Swati Narayan’s book draw son her sociological fieldwork in the villages of India’s south and its borderlands with Bangladesh and Nepal. She tackles “the South Asian enigma”: why have some of India’s poorer neighbours (and some of its southern states) surpassed India’s heartland on so many social indicators, including health, education, nutrition and sanitation. Girls in Bangladesh have a longer life expectancy than in India, and fewer of them will be underweight for their age. Her argument is illustrated with a grab-bag of statistics and compelling vignettes: from abandoned clinics in Bihar, birthing centres in Nepal, and well-appointed child-care centres in the southern state of Kerala. In a Bangladeshi border village, farmers laugh at their Indian neighbours who still defecate in the fields. She details the cruel divisions of caste, class, religion and gender that still oppress so many people in India and undermine the common purpose that social progress requires.

How British Rule Changed India’s Economy: The Paradox of the Raj. By Tirthankar Roy. Springer International; 159 pages; $69.99

Many commentators describe the British Empire as a relentless machine for draining India’s wealth. But that may give it too much credit. The Raj was surprisingly small, makeshift and often ineffectual. It relied too heavily on land for its revenues, which rarely exceeded 7% of GDP, points out Tirthankar Roy of the London School of Economics. It spent more on infrastructure and less on luxuries than the Mughal empire that preceded it. But it neglected health care and education. India’s GDP per person barely grew from 1914 to 1947. Mr Roy reveals the great divergence within India that is masked by that damning average. Britain’s “merchant Empire”, committed to globalisation, was good for coastal commerce, but left the countryside poor and stagnant. Unfortunately, for the rural masses, moving from rural areas to the city was never easy. Indeed, some of the social barriers to mobility that Mr Roy lists in this book about India’s economic past still loom large in books about its future.

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The Federal Reserve is stuck in a mode of forecasting and public communication that looks increasingly limited, especially as the economy keeps delivering surprises.

The issue is not the forecasts themselves, though they’ve frequently been wrong. Rather, it’s that the focus on a central projection — such as three interest-rate cuts in 2024 — in an economy still undergoing post-pandemic tremors fails to communicate much about the plausible range of outcomes. The outlook for rates presented just last month now appears outdated amid a fresh wave of inflation.

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