China: Energy, Environment, and Limits to Growth

China has achieved rapid economic growth over the past three decades. However, the benefits of growth have not been shared evenly and the growth has been achieved with very high environmental costs. The underlying trends in term of air pollution, water usage and pollution, soil erosion and land degradation, as well as energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions are unsustainable. The current trends could potentially lead to major collapses of China’s as well as the global ecological systems. It is unlikely that the current trends can be reversed within an economic system dominated by private ownership of the means of production and market competition. An alternative system based on democratic planning and social needs may be required for China to deliver ecological sustainability while meeting the population’s basic needs.

The Social Consequences of Demographic Change in India

Since the mid-1960s, India has experienced several notable shifts in its population dynamics that will have social implications for decades to come. This paper first sketches some of the central parameters of a complex picture that is characterised by regional and intra-regional contrasts. The main body of the paper considers the likely impact of these demographic processes by addressing the following themes: whether India is likely to benefit from the ‘demographic dividend’ derived from declining fertility; whether declining fertility combined with sex selective abortion might result in a ‘marriage squeeze’ that disadvantages young men and results in a decline in the significance of dowry payments; whether low fertility will impact positively on gender politics (including women’s access to employment and their position within their marital homes); and the implications of an increasingly ageing population for the intergenerational contract.

The Social Consequences of Demographic Change in China

China, like India, has experienced rapid demographic change in recent decades. Combined with the dramatic economic growth which started with the introduction of market-orientated economic reforms from the late 1970s, demographic change has had enormous impacts on Chinese society, marriage, family relations and family building. This paper starts with a general overview of the ‘planks’ of this demographic change: rising life expectancy and lowered fertility, the distorted child sex ratio, and migration and urbanisation. It then moves on to a discussion of some of the consequences of these changes focusing on marriage, the shortage of brides and marriage finance; the implications of lowered fertility for women; and population aging and its challenge to the intergenerational contract. Marriage migration is discussed both in the context of the shortage of brides, and as one of the changes especially affecting women.

India and the World Economy

The paper aims to analyse three questions which arise naturally in examining India’s closer engagement with the world economy in the last two decades. First, how has it evolved and what is its extent? Second, what is its impact on India? Third, what is its impact on the world? Evolution and Extent: For four decades after independence, India’s economic policies had a marked autarkic bias and by 1990 it had become one of the most closed economies in the world. A major goal of the historic reforms launched in 1991 was to reintegrate the country into the global economy, and there has been a progressive move in this direction Effect on India: In post-independent India, many sceptical voices made dire predictions about the effects of opening up, such as deindustrialisation and destabilisation of the economy, and impoverishment of the people. After opening-up, these alarming prophecies did not materialise. Undesirable features of India’s development, such as inadequate poverty alleviation despite rapid growth, have domestic causes and are not the result of globalisation. Effect on the World: India’s effect on the world economy is growing but has to be seen in the context of China’s simultaneous rapid rise. It is very likely that on all the major contentious global economic issues such as exchange rate coordination, trade liberalisation, and climate change mitigation, global action will have to involve the participation of China and India. For good or ill, China and India will matter in the 21st century both for each other and for the world.

China: Development, Inequality, and Imbalance

China, like India, presents a case of growth with increasing income inequality. In China this has gone hand in hand with a number of serious structural imbalances. It is clear that China’s problems of growing inequality and of structural imbalance are closely linked. The forces that produced imbalance also enlarged inequality. Both imbalance and inequality are byproducts of a growth model dominated by a combination of surplus labour, on one hand, and government policies that have repressed consumption and hindered employment growth, on the other. While the government has tried without much success to alter this growth model, rebalancethe economy and reduce economic disparities, two recent developments have had a major impact: First, China began to encounter shortages of labour. Second, the stimulus package launched to counter the 2008 recession itself affected the rebalancing objective in complex and conflicting ways.

Environment and Development in India

The purpose of this chapter is to explore some of the key debates about India’s environment and development. It begins by summarising some of the country’s key sustainability indicators. It then examines the natural resource management sector, focusing on forestry and irrigation. Finally, it explores the threats posed by environmental risks of technological origin – by considering five high profile cases – the Bhopal Gas Disaster of 1984; the controversy over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs); the seismicity concerns of the TEHRI dam; the handling of pollution and transportation policy in New Delhi; and the debate on nuclear safety.

‘Lopsided’, ‘Failed’, or ‘Tortuous’: India’s Problematic Transition and its Implications for Labour

The structural transformation of the Indian economy is incomplete. While the share of agriculture in GDP has declined sharply, its share of the labour force has not. The agricultural economy is still characterised by extensive small-scale household production, and only a small minority of farming households can produce an income sufficient for family survival. Employment in agriculture has increasingly stagnated and rural non-agricultural employment not expanded as much as might have been hoped. More than 90 per cent of all jobs are ‘informal’ and the absolute numbers of protected ‘formal sector’ jobs declined between 2000 and 2005. There is evidence of the existence of an inverse relationship between output growth and employment growth, and of the effective exclusion of a large share of the labour force from the dynamic, productive sectors of the economy. In these circumstances the Government of India has been introducing major new programmes offering social protection in order to compensate for the failures of the ‘inclusive growth’ promised in the Eleventh Five Year Plan.

The Modalities of Geographical Mobility in China and their Impacts, 1980–2010

Geographical mobility in China–the critical component of which is rural to urban movement–and the problem of the migrants’ inclusion into the ranks of city citizens have always been, at base, matters of the expenditure and transfer of state resources. A secondary, related dimension has been the institutionalised discrimination that incomers from the countryside have faced in the metropolises, the result of state-devised barriers (and the attendant attitudes among municipal officials and dwellers that have grown up around and bolstered these barriers). I show that today’s migrants began as captives of the state plan, and have ended as hostages of the changed financial relations between central and local levels that came with the market reforms. My argument is that blockages created by the government, along with the biases and behaviours that have developed over some 50 years in conjunction with these blockades, have been grounded in the command of material resources, plus struggles over their disposition.

The Challenges of China and the International Economy

This paper examines the role of China in the international economy and the changing relationship between the two. China is currently undergoing a transition from investment and export-led growth to an economy more based on consumption expenditure. This involves a major readjustment of the domestic economy and its international relationships. Foreign direct investment which has been a key stimulus to growth and to exports is now being diverted to serving the domestic consumer and is also being encouraged to relocate from the coast regions to Western China. These strategies imply a shift from “made in China” to “created in China” which involves a move from cheap labour intensive production to higher value activities. This must be conducted in the face of a relative slow down in Chinese growth and the effort to correct the imbalances such as income distribution and coastal/inland inequalities. Current turbulence in the global economy notably the Eurozone exacerbates policy difficulties.