CashNews.co
India needs to take advantage of the potential for urbanisation to unlock the growth that triggered its rival China, Nobel laureate Paul Romer said, adding that the future would be almost entirely urban.
The big question for India right now is how to get the momentum back on urbanisation, the former chief economist of the World Bank said while addressing global leaders at the NDTV World Summit 2024 in New Delhi on Monday. “Successful urbanisation was a very important key to the success in China. India needs to take advantage of the potential there.”
Romer underscored that the challenge with urbanisation was the problem of land assembly. “If you can assemble (a) large parcel of land, you can take that land, which is worth very little, and turn it into land, which is phenomenally valuable by creating a modern city there.”
The key location where most of the gross domestic product across the world gets produced is concentrated in urban centres, the Nobel Laureate said. “There are few things like agriculture and minerals that require resources of land, but all of the others are produced in cities.”