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Why India has less inequality than US

Anja Manuel
INDIA now has more equal wealth distribution than the United States. Steven Rattner, a Wall Street financier and former Obama adminis-tration economic adviser, recently announced this on MSNBC's Morning Joe, while discussing Thomas Piketty's new book, Capital in the 21st Century.
It sounded unlikely, but Rattner's charts and statistics showed that India is indeed a more equal society. The top 1 percent of Americans earn more income and hold more wealth, compared to the nation's poorer citizens, than their Indian counterparts.
Economists are puzzling over how this happened. One key reason could be the massive income-redistribution programmes that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his Congress government have created. Though many programmes are inefficiently run, they have achieved some remarkable successes.
Some 815 million Indians have registered to vote in the world's largest democracy, in an election that runs more than a month, April 7 to May 12. The Congress government now looks likely to lose to the Bharatiya Janata
Party (BJP) under Narendra Modi, who has a strong Hindu nationalist background. This new BJP government is expected to focus more on overall economic growth than equality.
This could shift the economic dynamics that the Congress government has worked hard to create.
India's economic liberalisation in the 1990s—when the current prime minister served as finance minister—unleashed massive economic growth. Yet the wealthy benefited far more than the poor, as is often the case, and inequality increased by some measures. To counteract this, the leftleaning Indian Congress Party, in power since 2004, implemented substantial wealthredistribution policies.
These policies are now weighing heavily on the national budget. But rather than scrap the programmes, a new BJP government should streamline and reform them.
When Singh and his Congress Party won in 2004, Indians hoped he would be a good steward of the economy. For a while, this seemed to be the case. His reform goals included increasing investments in infrastructure, updating labour laws so that employers could hire and fire workers more easily, removing continued restrictions on foreign investment and streamlining licensing requirements. From 2001 to 2010, India's gross domestic product grew, on average, 7.7 percent annually, reaching 8.5 percent in 2010.
But the Indian economy has faltered in recent years. The more ambitious reforms have been left fulfilled. Economic growth has slowed to below 5 percent, and inflation—around 8 percent to 8.5 percent annually—has eroded wages.
Anja Manuel served in the US State Department from 2005 to 2007, working on policy for Pakistan, Afghanistan and India.