Gita Gopinath and the brain drain of India
Gita Gopinath and the brain drain of India
The appointment of Harvard professor Gita Gopinath as chief economist of the International Monetary Fund raises a question about his native India: Is IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde more likely to hire Prime Minister Narendra Modi with someone with academic credentials? of Mrs. Gopinath?
In the last two years, three high-profile economists trained in the West have left important policymaking positions in India to return to the academy in the US. UU A growing uproar of nativist sentiment, greater political interference in economic decision-making, and the Bharatiya ruler The shrill rhetoric of the Janata Party on cultural issues makes serving the government less attractive to many highly skilled technocrats.
"Many professional economists would hesitate to return," says Kaushik Basu of Cornell, a former chief economist at the World Bank. "There is concern that much of the economic agenda is driven by pure political interests." Mr. Basu served as the chief economic adviser to the previous government led by Congress.
The flight of technocrats from India does not indicate a complete acquisition by the Hindu nationalists, some of whom consider that the dominant economy is incompatible with their faith. Economists with Western pedigrees continue to hold key positions, especially in the Reserve Bank of India.
And at least on the crucial issue of foreign investment, liberalizers seem to have prevailed so far over nativists. The World Bank estimates that India attracted $ 163 billion in foreign direct investment in the first four years of the Modi administration, compared to $ 116 billion in the last four years of the last government.
However, the cooling of India towards trained technocrats in the United States should worry investors who expect Asia's third largest economy to accelerate market-based reforms. After appearing marginalized for the first time by Mr. Modi, the nativists who deeply distrust the dominant economy have regained their influence in the broader Hindu nationalist movement of which the BJP is a part. You can see your fingerprints on the highest import tariffs, the highest crop prices for farmers, the restrictions on genetically modified crops and a stagnant privatization program.
Until recently, someone with background and perspectives of Ms. Gopinath could have become a job in the Ministry of Finance of India. He obtained a doctorate at Princeton and has a chair of economics at Harvard.
Ms. Gopinath is a sensible champion of globalization, to which she attributes having lifted millions of people out of poverty. She defends free trade and greater economic liberalization in India, including the rationalization of companies with losses in the public sector and the reform of obsolete labor laws.
His views on Mr. Modi's record appear to be impartial. He has praised a pioneering tax on goods and services that unites India as a single market, and criticized Modi's far-fetched decision to bomb nearly 90% of India's currency worth overnight. "I do not think I know a single macroeconomist who thinks it was a good idea," he said in a newspaper interview that year. These opinions, which are not exceptional in the academic world, will probably make Ms. Gopinath not welcome in the government of India.
Attacks against Western-educated technocrats began two years ago with a smear campaign by Swamy Subramanian parliamentarian of the BJP against Raghuram Rajan, then governor of the Reserve Bank of India. Mr. Swamy stated that Mr. Rajan, who had served as chief economist of the IMF and taught at the University of Chicago, was "mentally not entirely Indian".
Mr. Swamy also demanded the dismissal of Chief Economic Adviser Arvind Subramanian, another economist who had spent much of his career in the United States before returning to India.
Last year, Arvind Panagariya, a prominent economist at Columbia University, received similar treatment after announcing he was leaving NITI Aayog, the government think tank he led for nearly three years, to return to New York. His successor wrote with approval in a column that "the color of foreign influence" in India was "disappearing".
For the record, Messrs. Rajan, Panagariya and Subramanian do not attribute their deviations to domestic criticism. Even so, the scandalous attacks they faced show how the landscape of economic policy in India has changed. Mr. Modi may not be an accomplice in the smears of party supporters against highly regarded technocrats. But neither he nor the finance minister, Arun Jaitley, have been able to prevent them.
Often, the indictment leader against external experts is Swadeshi Jagran Manch, a protectionist lobbyist linked to the BJP. In a telephone interview, Ashwani Mahajan, a leading SJM leader, complained that "the people who come here after training in the United States do not understand our people, culture, economy or sociology." He believes that they repeat the Washington consensus on globalization instead of taking into account local conditions in India.
Mr. Mahajan does not believe that India can move millions of people from farms to factories, as Western-trained economists advise. "In our nation, agriculture is part of our culture," he says.
For India, the return of nativists could be costly. Instead of excluding the global experience, India needs more. "When it comes to advice, the rule is very simple," says Mr. Basu of Cornell. "You're looking for the best advice, be it on curing gout, launching a rocket or fiscal policy."
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