Tag Archives: Economics

The popular image of the village moneylender is often that of a rapacious scoundrel who impoverishes people by lending money at exorbitant rates, a monopolist who retards the development of free market forces, someone who needs to be eliminated in the name of progress. This line has been propagated both by the government (right from the colonial times through enactments such as the Usurious Loans Act) and the Reserve Bank of India.

Around the time India became independent, almost everybody who was anybody within the country agreed, or at least pretended to, that India’s economic development required a strong dose of centralized economic planning. Big Business wanted planning to provide import protection and Keynesian demand management, even some redistribution to ward off Communism.

This racy, jargon-free yet well researched book, interspersed with interesting anecdotes and illuminating facts, demonstrates quite convincingly how foreign talent that found a welcoming environment in the US has transformed American society in general and its science and engineering in particular. It is the author’s contention that recent happenings in the US, particularly the hostility against immigrants, consequent to growing inequality within the US and across the globe.

Aulakh and Kelly provide readers with a brilliant conceptual framework to situate the themes of interdependent capital and labour mobilities. The choice of Asia is dictated by the latter’s phenomenal economic growth in the last couple of decades, it being both the source and destination of significant new migration corridors, as well as its distinctive institutional arrangements created to regulate these mobilities. Besides mapping the standard forms of capital mobility, the authors emphasize the significant role that remittances play in economic development at both local and national levels in the countries of origin of Asian migrants.