Young Turk's book advises India to row on poor global winds

Ruchir Sharma explains to CNBC-TV18, with excerpts from his book, that Indian policymakers should not depend on global tailwinds to initiate measures to boost growth and development.

Below is an edited transcript of the analysis on CNBC-TV18.

Ruchir  Sharma: When India was just about opening up to the world in 1991, I had a really keen interest in global economy. So, I started writing for the Economic Times and held the view that economics could be used as a tool for investing. After writing for 20 years, I believed there was a book in me, but I was unsure of the theme

As a keen reader of economic history, I observed that the theme that captures the imagination at the start of every decade, loses relevance by the end of the decade. In 2000, the theme was TMT Technology, Media and Telecom. In 2010, the theme was the rise of emerging markets, and particularly, the rise of BRICS. But then the occurring of a few incidents got me thinking and it dawned upon me that the phenomenon of BRICS and the rise of emerging markets is not going to play out as imagined and there are fundamental flaws in this argument.

Emerging markets like Brazil might have one good decade and then lag behind as another takes its place in the next decade. So all these countries will of have spurts of growth, but they are not able to sustain that spurt for any length of time. There are about 180 economies under the aegis of the IMF. Out of these, only about one-third have been able to grow at above 5%.

Another fad that discovered was the shift in forecasting from the old rule of forecasting as often as possible to remind people when you were right, to the new rule of predicting so far out in the future that neither you nor I will be there to know who was right.