The Crisis of Globalization and India’s Economic Prospects

The premise of this paper is that globalization faces a endogenously generated crisis which has both economic and political dimensions, a result of the specific combination of continuity and change that has marked its historical trajectory. While western dominance, financialization, and the emergence of global production networks based on openness of the world to cross border trade and capital flows, were mutually reinforcing features of globalization that facilitated the rise in inequalities across the world, it also produced major shifts in the geography of world production. Placing in this background the specific pattern of India’s insertion into the process of globalization that underlay its ‘emergence’, the paper examines the future prospects of the Indian economy. Highlighting the narrow social base of Indian growth and the absence of a manufacturing centred and export-based process of its rise in the world economy, the paper provides evidence of India already confronting a crisis. It then explores the likelihood of the resolution of this crisis in the emergent global scenario.