moderated by Jack Snyder Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations, Department of Political Science and Member, SIWPS

Globalization and Deregulation makes a contribution to the literature on economic change by exploring the transition from state-led import substitution to deregulation and globalization in the world’s most populous democracy – India. It proposes a largely endogenous “tipping-point” model of economic change driven by the power of economic ideas, which is in sharp contrast to the “punctuated equilibrium” model of sudden exogenous shocks that drive change. It reveals how ideas change within the state to generate a tipping point that transformed the institutions of economic governance. The best accounts of India’s political economy explain why the institutions of government intervention within a closed economy were locked in a state-led import-substituting equilibrium. These accounts reveal why the dominant interest groups or classes made political demands with substantial fiscal consequences. They do not engage with the issue of change. This book fills that gap in the literature.

Rahul Mukherji is Associate Professor in the South Asian Studies Programme at the National University of Singapore, having earlier taught at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (New Delhi), the City University of New York and the University of Vermont (Burlington). He is editorially associated with journals such as Pacific Affairs, India Review and International Studies Review and has published in journals such as the Review of International Political Economy, the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Development Studies and Pacific Affairs. Rahul has edited India’s Economic Transition published by Oxford University Press (2007, paperback 2010, 2011) and co-authored with Sumit Ganguly a book titled India Since 1980, published by Cambridge University Press (2011), which is being translated into Portuguese. Rahul holds a PhD in Political Science from Columbia University.