National Council of Applied Economic Research
Second in NCAER’s Looking East Video Conversation Series with key policymakers in East Asia
This dialogue brought together Chinese and Indian policymakers and analysts for a discussion on how the Asian landscape will evolve as regional linkages and partnerships in Asia take more concrete shape over this decade. Jointly organised with the Asian Development Bank (ADB) through the ADB-PRC Regional Knowledge Sharing Initiative, this conversation is a part of NCAER’s Looking East Video Series of live conversations with key East Asian policymakers, scholars, and analysts.
As 2016 unfolds, the list of worries about the world economy continues to remain longer than that of reasons for hope–many emerging markets are grappling with excessive debts, slow growth, plunging currencies, and rising inflation. In these troubled times, it is easy to forget the future and how different approaches to initiatives such as regional cooperation will shape that future. The broad ranging discussions held in this dialogue hope to bridge the gap between the optimists on regional cooperation and those seeped in realpolitik. The three broad areas discussed in this conversation were Policy, Execution and Way forward . On Policy, there is China’s One Belt One Road Initiative and India’s Look and Act East Policy. On execution, besides issues of financing, including by multilaterals, there are concerns about the asymmetry of the incidence of costs and benefits between the host and the foreign partner. Looking a decade ahead, will China’s and India’s regional initiatives converge, complement, or diverge?
Dr Min Tang, Counsellor at China’s State Council and Executive Vice Chairman of the YouChange Foundation, Professor Yunling Zhang, Director of International Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and Mr Hamid Sharif, ADB’s Country Director for China, connected from Beijing. They were joined in New Delhi by Dr Sanjaya Baru, Director for Geo-Economics and Strategy at the International Institute of Strategic Studies in London, Mr Dinesh Sharma, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Finance and India’s Director on the Board of the AIIB, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank in Beijing, and Professor Prabir De, Coordinator of the ASEAN-India Center at the Research and Information Systems for Developing Countries. The conversation was co-moderated by NCAER Director-General Dr Shekhar Shah and Distinguished Fellow Mr Rajat Nag.
NCAER’s Looking East Dialogues are policy conversations designed to provide an opportunity for live, focussed dialogue among public policy practitioners in India and East Asia. These two-hour, tightly organized video conversations at NCAER are driven by mutual interest and intellectual curiosity, with the invited East Asian policymakers selected for their intimate knowledge and involvement in their country’s public policy experience and their own interest in learning about how Indian policymakers are meeting similar challenges.
The ADB-PRC Regional Knowledge Sharing Initiative (RKSI) facilitates the exchange of development knowledge among the Asian Development Bank’s member countries drawing on China’s vast experience with rapid economic growth and social transformation over the past 30 years. RKSI supports networking among knowledge institutions in Asia and the Pacific Region to promote greater effectiveness in development and enhance cooperation and integration.
