Real GDP growth in India 20 years ago

In 2008, I published a paper on real GDP per capita in developed countries and also mentioned some developing ones. The main finding was that (in 2003) China has reached the pace of the most developed countries in the world and India was far-far below its potential growth rate which was >15% per year considering the per capita GDP values.

Citation from this paper:

"Developing counties also can be evaluated according to their compliance to the principal 

characteristic for developed countries. One may often hear about a “fast” growth of some 

developing countries like China and India. There is not criterion, however, to compare their growth 

rate to that expected in the USA, for example, at the same level of economic development. Using 

the mean increment, one can easily estimate a pace for any developing country compared to that 

observed in the developed world. For China, India, and the USSR, the increment evolution 

compared to that for France is represented in Figure 27. One can see that the countries demonstrate 

the per capita GDP increment far below the French mean value (1990 dollars are used as only 

available for all the countries). Having an intention to catch up a developed economy, any 

developing country has to analyze its time history of the GDP per capita increment [Kitov, 2005b]. 

No deficiency has to be allowed on the way to prosperity because any gap is created forever judging 

from the history of such successful developed countries as the USA, France, and others."

Fig. 27. GDP per capita increment for China, India and the USSR for the period between 1950 and 2003 compared to that for France. GDP is expressed in $ 1990, the only available estimates for the non-OECD countries. India is far below the mean increment for France, but China has just reached the pace of leading developed countries. For the period of existence (between 1950 and 1990 in the study), the USSR was only about a quarter as effective as France.