Why Growth Matters by Jagdish Bhagwati Read Free Book Online Page B

per capita incomes outperform India along a specific indicator, such as life expectancy, it is often because they started well ahead in the race. Superior past achievements may continue to ensure high current levels of indicators despite poor achievements in more recent decades. Progress over a given period must be judged by the gains made during that period.
    At the outset, we should dispel any lingering doubts about India’s having done poorly relative to the countries in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of vital statistics in the context of its per capita income. In Figure 5.1 we show the position of India relative to that of all sub-Saharan African countries along four indicators of health plotted against per capita income in 2009: life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and deaths due to malaria. As is readily seen, India scores very well relative to the countries with the same per capita income or less and, indeed, in many cases relative to countries with higher per capita income as well.
    But how does India compare with the critics’ favorite countries, Bangladesh and China? Table 5.1 provides vital statistics for these countries and India, as reported in the 2011 World Health Organization (WHO) publication.
    Take Bangladesh first. Without discounting its achievements, we must deflate them relative to those of India, refuting the unwarranted encomiums for Bangladesh and the exaggerated criticisms directed at India.
    The performance of Bangladesh relative to that of India in terms of health indicators is significantly more equivocal than has been reported by the critics. Indians and Bangladeshis enjoy the same life expectancy at birth. Bangladesh has a lower infant mortality rate than India (41 per 1,000 live births against the latter’s 50) but its rate of stillbirth more than offsets the difference (36 per 1,000 births against India’s 22): an inconvenient fact that almost all observers emphasizing the lower infant mortality in Bangladesh ignore. 2 The maternal mortality rate in Bangladesh is, in fact, much higher than in India. Mortality due to malaria is similar while Bangladesh edges out India only marginally on nutrition indicators.

    Figure 5.1. Comparing India to the countries in sub-Saharan Africa in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and deaths due to malaria
    Source: World Development Indicators for per capita incomes and WHO (2011) for other indicators
    Table 5.1. Selected indicators: Bangladesh, China, and India, 2009

    Source: World Development Indicators of the World Bank for per capita GDP and World Health Organization (2011) for the remaining indicators
    In comparing Bangladesh and India, we must also take into account history. According to the United Nations (World Population Prospects, the 2010 revision), life expectancy in Bangladesh during 1950–1955 was forty-five years compared to just thirty-eight years in India. The 1971 war led to a major dip in most health indicators of Bangladesh but they recovered in the following decades. At least some of the accelerated progress Bangladesh has achieved during the 1980s and beyond is therefore to be attributed to its return to the initial conditions.
    This point is reinforced when we compare Bangladesh to West Bengal, with which it has a shared history and geography. Not only are the two entities located in the same region, but they also were once part of the same larger state in preindependence India. It turns out that West Bengal outperforms Bangladesh in terms of health indicators. Already during 2002–2006, it enjoyed a life expectancy at birth of sixty-five years. And its infant mortality rate of 33 per 1,000 live births in 2009 and maternal mortality of 141 during 2004–2006 were considerably lower than the corresponding rates reported for Bangladesh in Table 5.1 . 3
    Turn next to the India–China comparison. Some critics of Indian performance on health argue that despite