Economic Reforms, Poverty and Inequality in China and India

I In various writings over the years Amartya Sen has shown his acute interest in comparative performance of China and India, the two largest countries of the world, both with poor, agrarian economies and with rich, ancient civilizations. While high economic growth in both countries in the last decades has attracted a lot of attention, particularly in the international financial press, Sen's interest has usually been more in issues relating to poverty, inequality, and gender inequities in general, and health and education matters in particular, in both countries. At various times his thoughts on the better achievements of China in literacy and life expectation than India, on the era of market reform in China coinciding with the decline of basic public health services there, democratic Kerala's better demographic performance (significantly linked with female education) achieving more than China's coercive one-child policy, the 'missing women' in both China and India attributed to gender discrimination, China doing much better than India in