NEW DELHI: Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman had good news to offer at the Airtel Economic Times Global Business Summit, both general and particular.India is definitely a country of the future, if not the definitive country of the future. Further, he announced the demise of taper tantrums, the phenomenon of emerging markets being roiled and their currencies plummeting whenever the US Federal Reserve even thought about raising policy rates, to taper off quantitative easing that had seen it create liquidity at an annualised rate of nearly $1 trillion.Krugman said he could not claim to have specialised knowledge of the Indian economy, and confessed to having been deterred from specialising in development economics when he was a graduate student, as “development economics actually meant no development in reality”.The first global economy, towards the end of the 19th century, with its steam engines, telegraph and hectic commerce and colonies, saw the rich countries grow faster than poor ones. A snapshot of the second global economy, available in the last decade of the 20th century and the first decade of the 21st, shows a remarkably different picture. Poorer countries grew much faster, led, of course, by China and later, India. The role of globalisation in this process was shown by the steady rise in the share of exports in world GDP over the second half of the last century.The American economist, living up to his liberal reputation, showed another chart, which plotted growth against the distribution of global income. Those at the bottom percentiles grew faster than those higher up the food chain. Except right at the highest percentile, when again, growth shot up vertically. In other words, globalised growth has been leveling incomes across nations, but the richest people of the world have been growing ever more richer.Krugman made an interesting distinction between a country’s ability to grow fast and its ability to weather adversity.During the Great Depression, fast-growing US suffered far more than more stodgy Britain. Something like that played out after the financial crisis of 2008. China has shown the ability to grow faster than most nations, but when it comes to global turbulence, India has shown more resilience than China has been able to. China has too little consumption and too much investment.India has no such problem. “China scares me,” he said. India, on the other hand, shows promise.Of course, India has had a problem with inflation, inability to press ahead fast enough on infrastructure or on reforms. But India has shown greater resilience than China. The fact that there is such a big deficit of infrastructure here is actually promising, there is so much to build, so much to drive growth.So, while Brazil has been laughing at their self-deprecatory joke, that Brazil is the country of the future and will always remain the country of the future, India does not need to share this joke. India is definitely poised to grow. The government here understands the problems, but this, of course, is not the same thing as solving them. “India has a happy story to tell.”