Oct 01, 2024 01:53 PM IST
Larry Summers predicts India will be the fastest-growing economy, emphasizing job creation in services and construction.
Larry Summers, the Charles W Eliot University professor and president emeritus at Harvard University, said that India is poised to be the fastest growing in the coming years. The former US treasury secretary told Times of India that India should focus more and more on creating more jobs in services and construction.
On China, the Harvard professor said, “China’s economic problems go back to the suppression of consumption. The US typically spends around 70% of GDP in household consumption and even during the second world war that number was close to 50%. China’s consumption has run somewhere in the less than 40% range. That means there is a large amount of resources that has to be devoted to something else. At some points that has been infrastructure but after laying more concrete in five years than the US did during the 20th century, infrastructure has run into diminishing returns.”
Reflecting on India’s growth journey, “I am optimistic about India’s prospects to increase its GDP six-fold by the century of Independence and be the most rapidly growing economy in the world over the next five years, the next decade and the next generation among major economies.”
Praising PM Modi, he said, “Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi has been spectacularly successful as an energizer, putting in place infrastructure, establishing new initiatives in physical infrastructure and in intangible spheres involving payments or individual identities. I hope that in the years ahead, reform to assure strong and diverse incentives for initiatives allowing market forces to play can run strongly in the way that providing energy to broad public efforts has so far. It is in that way that the promise of the Indian economy best be realized.”