Retarded economics: foreign domination and class relations in India and other emerging nations

The first part of this volume focuses on the exchanges between the poor and the rich nations. Did western aid, private capital and technology really help India, or was it the other way round? Granting that both sides made some gains, did the USSR derive undue advantage through her bilateral trade and aid transactions with the third world? Can the of unequal exchange explain the growing economic hiatus between the north and the south?

The second part is concerned with the domestic scenario in India. The author tries to relate the overall stagnation in material production per capita to the balance of class forces that emerged after independence as a result of a strategy of industrialisation based on import substitution. Long term trends in aggregate and sectoral outputs, the terms of trade between industry and agriculture, real wages and unemployment rates, savings and investment, private monopoly capital, etc are analysed in this context. Further, the existing laws and regulations on private sector monopolies are also examined from the same perspective. The final essay is a critique of the recent tilt, inspired by the IMF and the World Bank, towards liberalism in India's economic policies.