Panelists Include Branko Milanovic, Research Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Anupama Rao, Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and South African Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University; Carl Riskin, Professor Emeritus at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Mark Frazier, ICI Co-Director and Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research, will moderate the panel. 

The New School India China Institute

Join us for a panel discussion of Vamsi Vakulabharanam’s book, Class and Inequality in China and India, 1950–2010,  published in 2024 with Oxford University Press as part of its India-China series.

China and India have long been central to the world economy. Two and a half centuries ago, they contributed 50% of the world’s output; after suffering a decline thereafter, their share fell to a paltry 9% in 1950 but has since resurged to about 25% today. This book shows that the growth and inequality experiences of China and India have had strikingly similar trajectories, especially after 1980, despite their very different political and social institutions. It offers novel insights using a class lens to analyze and compare the Chinese and Indian inequality stories, locating them within the larger contexts of Asian and global capitalism. Vakulabharanam demonstrates that the interconnectedness between Chinese and Indian growth and inequality dynamics and the transformation and evolution of global capitalism is key to understanding the within-country inequality dynamics in both countries. The book thus offers a new perspective on economic development and inequality that builds on and adds to the insights of Kuznets and Piketty.This book compares the trajectories of growth and inequality in India and China, examining how class structures in these two countries have evolved within the larger contexts of Asian and global capitalism.

The book talk is led by the author and distinguished panelists as they discuss the perspectives offered by the book. Vamsi Vakulabharanam is Co-Director of the Asian Political Economy Program and Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has previously taught at the University of Hyderabad and the City University of New York. His recent research focuses on inequality in India and China and the political economy of Indian cities through the axes of gender, caste, class, and religion. In the past, he has worked on agrarian change in developing economies, agrarian cooperatives, and the relationship between economic development and inequality. In 2013, Vakulabharanam was awarded the Amartya Sen award for his contributions to social sciences by the Indian Council of Social Science Research. 

Panelists Include Branko Milanovic, Research Professor at The Graduate Center, City University of New York; Anupama Rao, Professor of History and Middle Eastern, South Asian, and South African Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University; Carl Riskin, Professor Emeritus at the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University. Mark Frazier, ICI Co-Director and Professor of Politics at the New School for Social Research, will moderate the panel. 

Please register here.