The Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP) hosted a seminar titled “Political Economy of High-Tech in Brazil, with Comparison to India” on Friday, January 17, 2025.

The seminar featured a presentation by Aaron Schneider, Leo Block Professor, University of Denver, followed by a conversation with Deepak Maheshwari, Senior Policy Advisor, CSEP. The seminar was chaired and moderated by Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Distinguished Fellow, CSEP and former Deputy Chairman, Planning Commission, Govt. of India.

About the event

Brazil and India were only recently heralded as leading, democratic members of the BRICS alliance of emerging powers. Their economies were booming, democracies deepening, and international prominence growing, but busts have followed, as happened in prior moments. Every few decades, countries like Brazil and India experience booming growth only to suffer debilitating crisis. Middle power busts are particularly worrisome because they tend to go along with populist and authoritarian gambits at home and unpredictably illiberal behaviour internationally. This project explores patterns of boom-bust in India and Brazil in terms consistent with the study of state capacity in middle powers.

The specific piece of the study presented explores a leading sector in Brazil (aeronautics) with comparisons to a leading sector in India (information and communication technology). In these sectors, booms have been the result of open-economy industrial policy backed by coalitions of dynamic domestic elites allied to international capital. In one version, a cross-class alliance of dynamic elites and lower classes support open-economy industrial policy while promoting greater democratization and more equitable distribution. An alternate path to boom is an upper-class alliance of dynamic elites and international capital with accommodations for declining elites, but this coalition depends on anti-democratic measures to exclude lower classes and avoids distribution. A host of domestic and international factors can disassemble these coalitions, leading to bust.

Presenter

Aaron Schneider 

Aaron Schneider’s work focuses on the intersection of wealth and power, and he has conducted research in Latin America, India, and Sub-Saharan Africa. In particular, he emphasises the study of public finance as a window into the political economy of development and democracy. The way governments secure contributions from key social groups and how states decide what to do with the money tells a story about the nature of national political communities – who is in, who is out, and who will enjoy what benefits of membership.

Professor Schneider has published books on state-building in Central America, urban development in the United States, China in Latin America, and digitalisation. This presentation touches on his ongoing comparative project on India and Brazil. The project explores the position and role of emerging powers in the midst of global capitalist crisis and contemporary world disorder.

Chair & Moderator

Montek Singh Ahluwalia

 Montek Singh Ahluwalia, an economist, and civil servant, was former Deputy Chairman of Planning Commission, Government of India. He joined the Government in 1979 as Economic Adviser in the Ministry of Finance, after which he held a series of positions including Special Secretary to the Prime Minister; Commerce Secretary; Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs; Finance Secretary in the Ministry of Finance; Member of the Planning Commission and Member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister. In 2001, he was appointed as the first Director of the newly created Independent Evaluation Office of the International Monetary Fund. He resigned from that position in 2004 to take up the position of Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission which he held from 2004 to 2014.

Mr Ahluwalia has been a key figure in Indian economic policy. He writes on various aspects of development economics and has been published in prominent Indian and international journals and books. He co-authored Re-distribution with Growth: An Approach to Policy, which, published in 1975, was a path-breaking book on income distribution. In February 2020, he published his book, Backstage: The Story Behind India’s High Growth Years, an insider’s account of policymaking from 1985 to 2014.

For his outstanding contribution to economic policy and public service, he was conferred the prestigious ‘Padma Vibhushan’ in 2011, India’s 2nd highest civilian award for exceptional and distinguished service.

Mr Ahluwalia graduated from Delhi University and holds an MA and an MPhil in Economics from Oxford University. He is an Honorary Fellow of Magdalen College Oxford.

Discussants

Laveesh Bhandari

Laveesh Bhandari is President and a Senior Fellow at CSEP.  Dr Bhandari has published widely on subjects related to sustainable livelihoods, industrial, economic, and social reforms in India, economic geography, and financial inclusion. He received his PhD in economics from Boston University for which he was awarded the Best Thesis in International Economics. He has taught economics at Boston University and IIT Delhi. Apart from applied economics research, Dr Bhandari has built, seeded, and exited from three companies in the research, analytics, and digital domains, including Indicus Analytics, a leading economic research firm. Currently, he is conducting research on issues of inclusion, India’s energy transition, and how it will impact the government as well as the economy.

Deepak Maheshwari

Deepak Maheshwari is a policy professional with a keen interest in the interplay of technological innovation and socio-economic development. He is Senior Policy Advisor at the Centre for Social and Economic Progress (CSEP), Advisor at the Indicus Centre for Financial Inclusion (ICFI) and Advisory Board Member of Software Freedom Law Centre (sflc.in). Earlier, he led the public policy function in Microsoft, Mastercard, Symantec, and Sify for over two decades spanning India, South Asia, ASEAN and China regions.

Please contact Gurmeet Kaur at GKaur@csep.org for general queries and Ayesha Manocha at AManocha@csep.org for media queries.