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China
Throughout, Sharma has been seen as something of a pessimist on the biggest economy story of the century, the rise of China. As early as Breakout Nations [Breakout p 17-18], he was arguing that both bullish forecasts of continued double digit growth, and bearish predictions of a coming collapse, were overwrought. Fundamental historic patterns were however pointing to a likely slowdown in China, including its aging population, its mounting debts, and its entry into the middle class of nations, which has always made it near impossible for countries to sustain a double digit growth rate.
By 2016, Sharma was warning in the pages of the NY Times [“How China Fell Off the Miracle Path”, NYT June 3 2016] that China was in the midst of the biggest debt binge every indulged by an emerging economy, and that binges of that scale had always, in the past, led to a severe recession, a financial crisis or both. Four years later, also in the NY Times [“How Technology Saved China’s Economy” Jan 20, 2020] Sharma pointed out that growth had in fact slowed sharply, from double digits to 6 percent (officially) and even slower by private estimates, weighed down as he had expected by demographics, debt, and economic maturity.[19]
But there still had been no major recession and no crisis. China had been “saved” by the emergence of a new growth driver: its booming tech sector, and the giant internet companies it is generating. In the summer of 2021, asked on CNBC about the widening crackdown Beijing had launched against multibillionaire internet tycoons, Sharma pointed out the risk and irony of the moment: China was targeting its economic saviors [“Didi crackdown appears part of China’s reaction to ‘unbridled capitalism’; Youtube June 7, 2021].[20][21]
India
Sharma argued as early as 2012 that India had the best chance among the BRICs to become a breakout nation (one that grows faster than rivals in the same income class) but its chance at only 50/50.[22] That provoked debate in India, where many said he was too pessimistic (link to “50-50 India” Shreyashi Singh, The Diplomat, April 26 2012.) Sharma argued for some time that India’s growth shows a clear pattern, rising and falling with the tides of the global economy, never getting ahead of the pack.[23] He has written that to break out, India needs to develop a stronger, more sustained will to reform, as East Asian success stories have in the past.[24]
Sharma has also made the case that India is less a country than a continent, with more different states, communities and languages than the European Union [India’s States of Excellence, Time, May 20, 2013].[25] Thus he has argued that India is best governed as a federation, allowing each distinct wide latitude to control its own destiny, rather than trying to centralize power in Delhi—as prime minister Narendra Modi has done [“As Modi discovered, India’s economy will never look like China’s” Washington Post April 25 2019].[26]
In his 2019-book about India, Democracy on the Road,[27] Sharma chronicled his quarter century of travels through his homeland, putting in thousands of mile covering major state and national elections. He writes that while he grew up hoping for a Ronald Reagan-type reformer, he has grown to accept that India’s political DNA is fundamentally socialist and statist, and that this basic outlook defines the worldview of all the leading parties.[28]
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