India's Economy: Growth, Governance and Reform Introduction to the Special Issue
"India Review publishes social science research across disciplines on Indian politics, economics, society and international relations." This is the avowed aim of the journal in which appears this introduction and the collection of articles that follow. Yet there has been a powerful and long- running trend toward specialization, so that journals focus on particular fields and sub-fields. Among the social sciences, economics is prominent as a representative of these forces, though by no means the only discipline to follow such a route. However, this has not led to a distribution of attention and access that comes even close to matching what might seem to be consistent with the origins of economics as "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations." For example, Das et al. 1 examined articles published in the top-five economics journals from 1985 to 2004 (a 20-year span) and found 2,383 papers on the US, 65 papers on China, 39 papers on India, and 34 papers on all of Sub-Saharan Africa. The latter three countries and regions, of course, are significant in encompassing the great majority of the world's population that are attempting to bring their material well-being to levels that might be considered morally acceptable in the modern world. So the geographic bias of economics journals is one reason for conceiving and putting together this special issue of India Review. However, it might be argued that the Indian economy has already generated a large number of overviews, analyses and narratives from among the large and distinguished cadre of (mainly Indian) economists who think about the subject, published in the form of books rather than in journals. This is indeed true. Some of these books are single-authored or co-authored, 2 which would differentiate the collection being introduced here. But there are also significant and important collections of essays on the Indian economy, each with its own group of multiple, prominent contributors. 3 The current collection is indeed close to the last category. What differentiates this set of articles from all the other collections that have come before? Perhaps the main factor here is timeliness, and the novelty that comes with it. Many collections of papers on a topic such as the Indian economy undergo a long process (often beginning with a conference) of finding a publisher, getting reviews and revisions and winding their way through the