Abu Saeed Khan: China and India have been investing on resources on armaments, while countries like Brazil are meeting their Millenium Development Goals. Thoughts? [Paraphrased]
Mehta: If you look at the most astonishing things that have happened in India, I would say one is the rural employment guarantee act in terms of creating a great scale of programs. I think education, especially primary education, there’s a lot of movement there. If India gets GST and if it’s tax over GDP ratio goes up over 16%, you’re talking an extraordinary expansion in the capacity of the state.
The armaments part, we can have this debate. Most of us would like to see a world where these expenditures are much less. By any standards of comparative analysis, India’s are not that large. I think the marginal effect they supposedly have on poverty and growth is overestimated.
Milinda: My sense is that a lot has to do with leadership and a lot has to do with circumstances. It’s easy to generalize, we have to be careful about that.
[Argentinian In Audience] In Brazil, education is not at the top of the policy agenda. Certainly the political stability is helping. In many ways, at least in terms of education and getting real progress out of poverty is a major challenge for Brazil.
Milinda: Many many years ago I was invited to Cordova. To me that was a kind of a case where a group of people committed to reform were able to drive a national agenda. What can we learn from that experience.
[Argentinian]: It was an interesting experiment as a think tank. The vision was clear, but it unfortunately didn’t work out as expected. The idea of a think tank is very unpopular now, because of that experience. It ended up as you know, in the 2001 crash.
Ferdinando: I think armament and development go hand in hand. I you look at IMF and other loan approval for nuclear powers, the probability of the loan passing is above 90%.
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