Are China and India Likely to Miss the Convergence?

Arvind Subramanian, Chief Economic Adviser (CEA) to the Government of India between 2014 and 2018, is now Senior Fellow, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs and Distinguished Senior Fellow, Center for Global Development. Previously, he was Professor at Ashoka University (2020-21), taught at the Harvard Kennedy School (2018-2020), and was the Dennis Weatherstone Senior Fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics (2011-2014). Foreign Policy magazine named him as one of the world’s top 100 global thinkers in 2011. As CEA, he oversaw the publication of the annual Economic Survey of India, which became a widely read document on Indian economic policy and development. For example, the 2018 Survey had 20 million views from over 190 countries in its first year of publication. Among the major ideas and policies he initiated and helped implement were a simplified goods and services tax (GST), attempts to tackle the Twin Balance Sheet challenge, creating the financial and digital platform for connectivity (the so-called JAM trinity), charting a new fiscal framework, and Universal Basic Income. Announcing his departure as CEA, the former Finance Minister, Mr. Arun Jaitley wrote a Facebook post, Thank You, Arvind. His award-winning book Eclipse: Living in the Shadow of China’s Economic Dominance was published in September 2011 and had printed 130,000 copies world-wide in four languages. His latest, best-selling book, reflecting on his time in India, “Of Counsel: The Challenges of the Modi-Jaitley Economy,” was published by Penguin Random House in December 2018.

Joshua Felman is currently the head of JH Consulting, providing economic advice to academics and policy practitioners. Before that, he was for many years a senior official at the IMF, where he specialized in Asia and especially India.

His familiarity with India started in the 1980s, when he first began analyzing the economy, as it started to open up to the outside world. During the boom of the mid-2000s, he moved to Delhi to take charge of the IMF’s India office. And in 2015 he returned to India to work for several years in the Office of the Chief Economic Adviser in the Ministry of Finance.

Mr. Felman also has extensive familiarity with crises. During the East Asian crisis, he was posted to the IMF’s Jakarta office, where he worked closely with the authorities as they reconstructed a shattered financial system, following the collapse of more than 200 banks. Then, he led the IMF’s operations in the Philippines, as they sought to overcome the lingering effects of the crisis. And after that he led the IMF’s work in Korea, when that country was suffering from a household debt crisis.

Following the Global Financial Crisis, he was appointed Assistant Director in the IMF’s Research Department, where he worked closely with Chief Economist Olivier Blanchard, analyzing the implications for the global economy — and also for our understanding of economics.

Mr. Felman did his graduate work at Oxford University in England.

Dr. Kalpana Kochhar is Director, Development Policy and Finance at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Prior to taking this position, she spent 33 years at the IMF, ending her career there as the Director of the Human Resources Department of the IMF between 2016 and 2021. She has also held positions as Deputy Director in the Asia and Pacific Department of the IMF where she worked on India, China, Korea, Japan and several other Asian countries, and in the Strategy, Policy and Review Department where she launched the IMF’s work on the macroeconomic implications of gender inequality and women’s economic empowerment. Between 2010 and 2012, she was seconded to the World Bank as the Chief Economist for the South Asia Region of the World Bank. Ms. Kochhar’s research interests and publications have been on emerging markets including India and China, and jobs and inclusive growth, gender and inequality issues, structural reforms, and regional integration in South Asia. She holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. in Economics from Brown University and an M.A. in Economics from Delhi School of Economics in India. She has a B.A in Economics from Madras University in India.

David Dollar is a senior fellow in the John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution and host of the Brookings trade podcast, Dollar&Sense. He is a leading expert on China’s economy and U.S.-China economic relations. From 2009 to 2013, Dollar was the U.S. Treasury’s economic and financial emissary to China, based in Beijing, facilitating the macroeconomic and financial policy dialogue between the United States and China. Prior to joining Treasury, Dollar worked 20 years for the World Bank, serving as country director for China and Mongolia, based in Beijing (2004-2009). His other World Bank assignments focused on Asian economies, including South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Bangladesh, and India. Dollar also worked in the World Bank’s research department. His publications focus on economic reform in China, globalization, and economic growth. He also taught economics at University of California Los Angeles, during which time he spent a semester in Beijing at the Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in 1986. He has a doctorate in economics from New York University and a bachelor’s in Chinese history and language from Dartmouth College.