Pranab promises investors ‘decades of growth’

Finance minister Pranab Mukherjee on Sunday held out the prospect of decades of ''high growth'' as he sought to woo investors to Asia's third-largest economy.

''In the short term, it is reasonable to expect that the economy will go back to the robust growth path of 9 per cent average that it was on before the global crisis slowed it down,'' Mukherjee told the India Economic Summit in New Delhi. ''We are in a position to sustain high economic growth in the coming decades.''
 
The challenge then is "to cross the double-digit growth barrier in the coming year or two", he added.

 The Indian economy grew by 8.8 per cent between April and June this year. It is the second-fastest-growing economy in the world behind China.

 "We are all witness to an emerging new world order," Mukherjee said, which would lead to a "more equitable arrangement for global prosperity."
 
The finance minister's comments come just two days after the G20 meeting of the world's leading economies in South Korea.

The meeting was dominated by discussions about global currency values, and how global trade imbalances could be resolved, with emerging economies relying on exports and more developed economies relying on domestic consumer consumption.

 
India needs $1 trillion of investment in infrastructure including roads and ports between 2012 and 2017, double the estimated spending in the previous five years, to narrow the gap with China, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's government says. China's economy, which was about the same size as India's $183 billion in 1980, has swelled close to $5 trillion, four times that of India, after it boosted public spending.

About 800 company executives and investors including Ellen Kullman, chief executive officer at DuPont Co., the third- biggest U.S. chemical maker, and Jon Fredrik Baksaas, CEO of Telenor ASA, the Nordic region's largest phone company, are attending the annual event organized by the World Economic Forum in the national capital.

''We have the political will to do the needful to sustain this momentum'' of growth, Mukherjee said. He added that the government is confident of faster economic growth in the coming decades as ''the demographic dividend begins to pay off'' with the rise of the working-age population.