India's current economic growth _ averaging 8.5 percent annually over the past four years _ appears sustainable, but the country can do even better by further opening its markets and easing government control, ap quoted the sources of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as saying Tuesday. The Paris-based economic grouping of 30 countries gave much of the credit for India's rapid economic expansion in recent years to its government's efforts in the early 1990s to switch from a socialist-style state to a market driven economy. Over the past 15 years, India has significantly opened its markets to foreign competition, cut down government intervention in economic activities and liberalized policies to allow a bigger play for private capital. As a result, «the sustainable growth rate of the (Indian) economy has reached 8.5 percent,» the OECD said in its first ever survey of India released in New Delhi. That is the average pace at which the economy grew in the past four years. Separately Tuesday, credit rating agency Standard & Poor's predicted an 8.6 percent growth for India's gross domestic product in the current fiscal year ending March 2008. Such economic expansion will help India double its per capita income in a decade, the report said. It would have taken India 55 years to double average incomes if it had stayed on the growth path experienced in the three decades following the country's independence in 1947, the OECD report said. OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria said «it is possible» for India to accelerate its economic growth to 10 percent if the country moves quickly to build infrastructure, reforms its labor market and further opens up to foreign capital, especially in the financial and energy sectors that still are dominated by state-run firms. «The impressive response of the Indian economy to past reforms should give policy makers confidence that further liberalization will deliver additional growth dividends and foster the process of pulling millions of people out of poverty,» the report said.
