The Impact Of Imf And World Bank Policy Stances On The Economic Planning Debates In India

Indian development economics has a long-standing intellectual support for "liberal" neoKeynesian and "radical" neo-Ricardian visions of economics. "Liberalising" neo-classical economics is a relative newcomer though its rise to ascendancy in the 1980s was meteoric. Neo-Ricardian economics underpins wider dependency perspectives, with its Indian Gandhian variant, through its model of market prices at global and local levels merely reflecting and reproducing the underlying, structural power inequalities. Markets and technology transfer are not neutral with respect to power; and not to act consciously to create new political orders is to be complicit in perpetuating the in-built inequalities of the old orders. Neo-Keynesian planning models, with connection 19 Nehrovian perspective, are analytically similar but tended to be more sanguine on the possibilities of benign state indirect intervention. These rather economist approaches link to a wider contemporary "institutionalist" development literature in which any meaningful distinction between market and institutional forces disappears. Applying these perspectives to contemporary issues in India is producing a determined resistance to the application of "Iiberalisation" models which so dominate contemporary global political economy. This paper aims to demonstrate the underlying coherence of these India-based objections to "globalliberalisation" drawing on an unpublished lecture by a leading Indian intellectual.