Singapore gets it. I am at the Funan Center, a shopping center, for lunch. Besides lunch, I also get to check mail on the wireless broadband provided gratis by the city. I flipped open my laptop, connected to wireless@sg and here I am blogging away.
The availability of public goods increases the utility of private goods. It is also true that one has to sometimes compensate for the lack of public goods by a greater investment in private goods. Places like Singapore are to some extent rich because the …

Flashback
The year is 2020. For nearly 12 years, India has seen an average annual GDP growth rate of over 12 percent more than quadrupling the per capita GDP from US$500 in 2008 to $2000, placing India in the league of middle-income economies. Stark poverty is a thing of the past. In much less than a generation, the population transitioned from being 70 percent rural to being less than 20 percent rural. Agricultural labor is only 15 percent of total labor participation, down from 60 percent in 2008. Farm incomes are …