'India's job creation engines must fire for rural populace'

Need to broaden jobs; but digital economy good enough to be replicated by rich nations

- Gireesh Chandra Prasad

India's economy has the potential to grow at 7-8% on a sustained basis but, for that to happen, its employment-generating engines need to be broader and more powerful, Canadian-American economist and Nobel laureate Michael Spence said in an interview on a visit to India.

Spence, who co-chairs the Commission on Global Economic Transformation, a panel of 21 experts set up by New York-based think tank the Institute for New Economic Thinking (INET), said there are examples of some economies like China which have registered strong growth for several decades in the past but are now having to deal with a markedly different global economic situation, with geopolitical tensions, climate change, and energy transition.

Underlying all these, he said, is a global pattern of declining productivity after the global financial crisis, which means expanding supplyside capacity is not going to be easy.