Economic Democracy Through Pro-Poor Growth (Book Review‪)‬

Economic Democracy through Pro-poor Growth. Edited by Ponna Wignaraja, Susil Sirivardana, and Akmal Hussain. New Delhi: Sage Publications, 2009. Pp. 376. South Asia as a region has several commonalities. Several countries, including India--the emerging giant from the region--Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka, share a common history as erstwhile colonies of the British and gaining independence at around the same time. Indeed, they could be said to share a common culture too. Post-independence, they undertook broadly comparable development strategies with an emphasis on central planning and industrialization. With such strategies not yielding the desired results, somewhere around the beginning of the 1980s, a course correction in their policies came into play, with most of these economies gradually opening up and liberalizing. Having travelled along the path of economic reforms for an effective two decades now (albeit separately), South Asia, on the whole, has grown by nearly 6 per cent per annum on average over this period. Despite such growth rates, which appear to be impressive by all means, the region disturbingly still remains home to the world's "largest concentration of poor people with nearly 500 million people living on less than $1.25 a day" (World Bank, 2011). (1)