India vs China: The Advanced Industry Production Race

A quarter century ago, it was an open question as to which nation—India or China—would vault ahead in advanced industry production. It was China that won. Between 1995 and 2018, China’s output of advanced industries grew six times faster than India’s. Notwithstanding, India has some key strengths it can build upon.

But as Rob Atkinson and Pradeep Mehta write in Financial Express, to assess India’s performance, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF) examined data from the OECD on seven key industries: pharmaceuticals, electrical equipment, machinery and equipment, motor vehicles, other transport equipment, computers, electronics, and IT and information services. As the Indian economy has grown, many of these have gained global market share. India is a major provider of active pharmaceutical ingredients and the US is the largest market for Indian IT services suppliers such as TCS, Infosys, Wipro etc, which collectively enjoyed some $50 billion in sales in 2020.