Many of the inconsistencies have been catalogued by Dani Rodrik, a Harvard economist, in a blog.
You can indeed righteously argue, as Rodrik does, that we should consider what exists today as that default.
FORBES: Dani Rodrik on the Distributional Effects of Free Trade
India's past two decades should teach economists to be humble, Mr Rodrik claims.
According to Messrs Rodrik and Subramanian, India owes its take-off not to Mr Singh or Mr Gandhi, but to Indira Gandhi.
Coming from an economist of Mr Rodrik's standing, this is provocative stuff.
This shift in attitude, Messrs Rodrik and Subramanian claim, sent a powerful signal to India's cowed industrialists: India was now safe for capitalists to make money.
If, as Mr Rodrik believes, economists have been too quick to press their case, it is India's decades of wasted potential that best explains their impatience.
As Dani Rodrik, a Harvard economist, points out, many of the strategic trade and industrial policies that helped South Korea get rich would be illegal under current WTO rules.
Worse, obsessed with the idea that globalisation threatens the social contract in rich countries, Mr Rodrik almost forgets that both rich and poor countries stand to benefit enormously from trade.
The governments of sending countries might play a role too: Harvard's Mr Rodrik suggests giving them a quota for migrants that is reduced by the numbers that fail to return on time.
In work with Dani Rodrik of Harvard and Charles Sabel of Columbia University, Mr Hausmann argues that governments should emulate venture funds, backing new enterprises in the hope that one will make the leap into a more densely forested area.
Granted, Mr Rodrik is correct to point out areas where economic research has been lacking: too much time has been spent poring over the statistical link between trade and wages, for example, and not enough on the broader effects of trade on labour markets.
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