Getting India to Ten Percent Growth

The 10% growth target for India has had a magical allure. It is hard to say if anyone first held it out publicly as something to strive for realistically, but I do remember Vijay Kelkar as being an early believer. The current Prime Minister has also mentioned this target several times. Yet that double-digit growth rate has remained stubbornly out of reach as a short-term forecast of actual growth. Indeed, it seems that when the Indian economy nears 10% growth, inflation rears its ugly head, and fears of overheating spread. A few years ago, estimates of India’s medium-term potential growth rate tended to be in the 8-9% range. This may be about to change.

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Lady Gaga and Globalization

In the long-standing feverish celebrity culture of the US, pop singer Lady Gaga has scaled new heights. She recently displaced Oprah Winfrey at the top of Forbes magazine’s Celebrity 100 list, and Amazon.com used her latest album as a 99 cent promotion,http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif designed to challenge Apple’s dominant iTunes and its looming iCloud music services. The Amazon promotion garnered a Wall Street Journal headline, “Lady Gaga Wars.”

Now Lady Gaga plans to extend her fame to South Asia. In an interview with the WallStreetJournal.com, she said, “The reason I’m going to India now is because I can. I didn’t have the money or the resources before to travel and bring all of my things with me and reach an entire new territory of fans.” The entry strategy includes several Bollywood-style remixes of her songs, and employment of a firm that specialises in producing and distributing entertainment content aimed at South Asians all over the world.

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