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At the start of the so-called development race sixty years ago, China, showcasing revolutionary socialism, and India, boasting parliamentary democracy, had close similarities in economic structures and levels of development, but striking differences in terms of cultural cohesion, institutional flexibility and political orientation. The outcome of the race is unambiguous: the question is not who won, but why and how? It is argued here that a wide margin had already opened up in China's favour by the time of the systemic or policy-regime switch-points, 1978 in China, and shortly thereafter in India. The author seeks explanations for this differential performance in the divergent institutional configurations of the two societies and economies, especially in the rural sector in the pre-reform period, and highlights the contrast between the power of the Chinese mass mobilization mode of transformation and the persistent institutional rigidities and obstacles in the Indian case. Post-reforms, processes of ‘pervergence’— an emerging congruence in negative social features — appear to dominate over tendencies towards conventional convergence. The author reflects on the historical significance of the two development paths: did Nehruvian state-led planned development and Maoist socialism serve essentially as pioneers of capitalism, leveraging the re-launching of the two once-powerful Asian giants back into the global capitalist game on dramatically revised terms of engagement? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address two major questions. First, the question of whether China and India are displacing the African manufacturing export from the third market. Second, whether there is an evidence of shifting comparative advantage from China and India to Africa. We employed a gravity model with a panel data using 13 African exporters of clothing and accessories for the period 1995–2005 to answer the first question. To answer the second question, we used a flying-geese model and estimated Spearman's rank correlation coefficients on indices of the revealed comparative advantage vectors of the African exporters and China and India for the same period. Both the gravity and flying-geese models predicted similar outcomes. We found that there is strong evidence that China has been displacing African manufactures from the third market while India has been complementing it in the early years of the study. However, the overall third market impact of China and India has been that of complementarity in the later years of the study period. This result is found to vary across countries. Furthermore, we found evidence of shifting comparative advantage from China and India to Africa as the flying-geese theory predicts, South Africa being the leading goose followed by Kenya. The major implication of the study is that, in the world where China and India are reshaping the global economic order dynamically, the outcomes of the traditionally received wisdom of trade liberalization and industrialization policies through export promotion may be uncertain and requires strategic thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to analyze five developing and transition economies to see how they compare in terms of freedom and emissions profiles. All the countries which include China, India, Indonesia, Russia and South Africa have freedom indices at the low to mid-range of economic freedom, Russia the least free of these countries and South Africa the most free. The implications from the analysis are significant. Of course, free nations produce more of everything consumers want, and total emissions may rise if repressed countries became free, but there is no doubt that the world will be richer and more able to adapt to any dangers from the climate if it changes dangerously.