From “Green Revolution” to “Economic Liberalization” in 1970s-80s' India: Impacts of Oil Crises in a Global Perspective

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• Shigeru Akita (Osaka University)
• Tuesday 27 May 2025, 17:00-18:45
• Seminar Room 3, Cripps Court, Magdalene College, Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Gareth Austin.

This presentation reconsiders the impacts of the energy crises in the 1970s and the early 1990s, by focusing on the international order for two decades. It gives particular attention to the transformative effects of the three oil crises of 1973-74, 1979 and 1991on economic development of India.

In the 1970s, India achieved a de-facto self-sufficiency in food production, despite the critical impact of the oil crises. I reconsider the progress of India’s ‘Green Revolution’, specifically agricultural development in the 1970s within the context of the two oil crises. How did India achieve ‘Green Revolution’, and what factors contributed to India’s agricultural development in the 1970s? This presentation first focuses on external economic aid to India, especially from the World Bank (WB) group—specifically, the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) and the International Development Association (IDA)—led by its President Robert McNamara (1968–1981). Steady economic growth after the first oil crisis was overturned in 1979 during the second oil crisis. How did India manage to recover from this second economic turmoil in the early 1980s?

As for the historiography of Indian economic development, in 2004, Dani Rodrik and Arvind Subramanian published a very provocative article, ‘From “Hindu Growth” to Productivity Surge: The Mystery of the Indian Growth Transition.’ They pointed out an attitudinal shift on the part of the national government in the 1980s in favor of private business, by Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi administrations. I historicize their argument and reconsider the steady growth of Indian economy and its major achieving targets, including import of foreign private capital for technological innovations, in the latter half of the 1980s. In this process, Indian Government (politicians and officials—-Indian authorities) and Indian economists skillfully responded to financial supports of the IMF and the World Bank group. Through this reconsideration, we can relocate the start or the origin of so-called ‘Economic Liberalization” in India from a longer historical perspective.

Finally, I would like to locate India’s experiences in the 1970s-1980s (energy crises) in a global perspective, especially in comparison with the “East Asian Miracle”. Scholarships on the oil crises have focused on their effects on the advanced Western economies, but their impact on the non-Western world was in many respects even more profound. As this presentation will show, the oil crises of the 1970s and its aftermath in the 1980s and the early 1990s laid the groundwork for the restructuring of the international economic order and the so-called economic miracle in Asia.

This talk is part of the Global Economic History Seminar series.

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• Seminar Room 3, Cripps Court, Magdalene College, Cambridge

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