"China and India: Learning From Each Other" - and they could teach the IMF

By Vijay Kumar

The International Monetary Fund has released a book "China and India: Learning From Each Other”. At a meeting to launch the book yesterday,Steve Dunaway, Deputy Director, Asia and Pacific Department, IM, said,

The book comes out of a conference that we put on last year in Beijing, and our intention was--this was a second of two conferences that we ran on China and India, and our attention was to bring people from India and China together to talk about their experiences in various aspects of reform, because in some aspects, India has been more successful than China, particularly in terms of financial market banking reform. The Indians have progressed further. And the Chinese are probably done a better job in terms of fiscal policy, also in labor market development.

So, by talking to each other, we thought that there might be some lessons that came out of that, that they would learn from each other, hence the title of the book, and I guess an appropriate subtitle of the book would be--and they could teach the IMF because one of the big advantages, I guess, that we have is that we can draw on the experiences of our membership in helping individual countries, and particularly in terms of the reform process, and that was the motivating factor behind putting--pulling together the papers at the conference and putting this book out, that we wanted to help inform the policy debate in both India and China on those issues, and we also thought, well, maybe some other countries might benefit as well.

Now, one of the unique aspects of the book is what we did was, we invited market participants for the conference, not academics, so--and we mixed it up. It's a combination. For example, in terms of banking reform, where we had the head of one of the largest Indian banks to talk about bank reform in India. On the Chinese side we brought in one of the senior people from the Chinese Bank Regulatory Commission to talk about it from the regulatory--reform from the regulatory side. On the securities market, the equities market, we had one of the leading people in India who was working on reform--who had worked on reform of the stock market in India, and we had the head of the Shanghai Stock Exchange exchanging views on it.

So, we thought in that way this would be much more practical in the advice, and people could gain more from the experiences, particularly focusing on such key reforms as financial markets, integration on a global sense, and other policies supporting growth.