Don't blame education gaps on policy settings

A divergence in public schooling might well have led India's economy to lag China's. But this should arguably be attributed more to complex social constraints than to any policy design

Three-quarters of a century after freedom from British rule, Nehruvian policies continue to animate debates on the extent to which they aided or hobbled the emergence of India's economy. Even before we made a decisive shift in 1991 to reduce the state's role, a leftist critique sought to skewer the policy choices of our formative years for investing in elite education at the cost of mass learning. The economy's rise and passage of time have not eased that criticism. A recent study by Nitin Kumar Bharti and Li Yang of the Paris School of Economics' World Inequality Lab compares the approach taken by India and China to public education over a dozen decades—from 1900 to 2020—to examine its economic impact. That it makes a difference over the long-term wasn't in doubt. That it might explain divergent growth paths between the two economies is what the work of Bharti and Yang would have us think.