The impressive growth performance of Asian economies in the last three decades, despite external shocks, including the increasing onslaught of globalisation in recent years , has raised hopes that the continent will soon overcome the crushing burden of population pressure that had weighed down its progress for centuries.

In the last century, first Japan, then the East Asian tigers and after them China and South East Asian countries have posted impressive growth records, steadily shortening the periods in which per capita incomes have been doubled. Some of them have now become or are now knocking at the doors of OECD and other exclusive developed economy clubs.

Can this benign growth contagion finally enfold South Asia, is a question being seriously debated in the region, especially in India and Pakistan. The larger debate about the developmental lag between East Asia (including China) and South Asia has been for the moment eclipsed by a sharper focus on the relative performance of the economies of the three large and geographically contiguous countries, China, India and Pakistan, which have had a history of fluctuating relationships among them.

While, at least since the late 1950s, Pakistan has enjoyed a long period of friendship and cooperation and India has had a rather bitter rivalry with China since 1962 until the recent thaw in Sino-Indian relations, both countries have envied the tremendous development in China, particularly its impressive and uninterrupted growth record for over two decades.

Pakistan and India have also been, apart from their debilitating political and military confrontation over the years, engaged in a see-saw tortoise-hare economic race, which the Indian tortoise seems to be winning in the home stretch.

However, the growth experience of both India and Pakistan are qualitatively quite different from that of China and both South Asian countries have a long way to go, either in terms of the growth trajectory itself or the quality of growth generated by it.

In particular, the ethos of the development between India and Pakistan and South Asia generally and China, along with other East Asian countries, is quite different.

The recent resurgence of GDP growth in India after a prolonged period of stagnation in its growth rate of around 3.5 percent, often referred as the Hindu growth rate, has raised considerable hopes in India that it may soon approach, if not outstrip, Chinese growth.

Pakistan, whose growth performance was substantially better than India's GDP growth rate (although much less so in terms of per capita income growth) before the 1990s, has been recording a much lower growth rate in some years, even a decline in per capita incomes in the 1990s which some government analysts have termed a lost decade, has undergone a series of adjustment and stabilization measures and has for the first time this year achieved a growth rate of around 5 percent.

While the Pakistan Government circles have often made claims that the economy is on the verge of a take-off, most independent observers are sceptical that such a miracle is likely to happen soon.

Moreover, Pakistan's better economic performance vis-a-vis India is also counterbalanced by a generally much poorer performance in social and human development record, especially in terms of poverty alleviation.

Both countries suffer significantly on that score in comparison with China. The trajectories of growth of the three countries are markedly different. Pakistan's growth has mainly been in spurts, rather than following a steady path.

The two periods of high growth, averaging over 6 per cent in GDP and over 3 per cent in GDP per capita terms, occurred in the 1960s and 1980s. In the 1970s and 1990s, the rate of GDP per capita growth was less than 1.5 per cent, despite some lowering in the population growth rate in the 1990s.

The Indian GDP per capita growth rate, though low, was fairly steady around 3 per cent, with the exception of 1970s when it fell below 1 per cent. The Chinese per capita growth rate, which was already averaging 4 per cent in the 1970s, rose to 7.8 per cent in 1980s and 9.0 per cent% in the 1990s.

China has thus consistently stayed in a higher growth trajectory, well above those of either India or Pakistan.

Much of the euphoria about India's current growth and Pakistan's hoped-for future growth has been based on the reforms undertaken since the early 1990s. China's reform process began in the late 1970s.

The nature and impact of economic reforms, however, has been quite different in the three countries. Chinese economic reforms date back to the late 1970s after the demise of the old guard, such as Mao Zedong and Zhou En Lai, who saw no room for market forces to determine economic outcomes in a socialist economy.

With the ascendancy of a more pragmatic leadership, headed by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese economy became more decentralized and market-oriented as a result of far-reaching economic reforms and carried forward the economic successes achieved in the previous three decades.

Significantly and in marked contrast to India and Pakistan, Chinese economic reforms were introduced without any external pressure and were first introduced in the agriculture, rather than in the manufacturing and financial sectors.

Pakistan and, to a much lesser extent, India introduced the reforms as a result of deteriorating external sector conditions and under the auspices of IFI's adjustment and stabilization programmes.

The focus of these reforms was on financial, fiscal, trade and manufacturing sectors. There was much less attention paid to the pivotal agricultural sector and rural industrialization, which was the main source of rapid growth in China.

A comparison of impact of reforms on growth in the three countries is quite revealing. In 1978, at the inception of its reforms, China's per capita GDP (in constant 1995 U.S.$) was $148, whereas that of India and Pakistan in the same year was $236 and $260, respectively.

Seven years after it began its reforms, in 1986, China caught up with India in per capita GDP terms ($278 vs. $273) and a decade after reforms in 1988 was comfortably ahead of India with a per capita GDP of $342 compared with India's $312. In the first post-reform decade, the Chinese economy grew at 10.1 per cent while the Indian economy grew at 5.7 per cent in the corresponding post-reform decade (1990s).

With the growth slowdown, Pakistan did much worse in the same period. In the same period the Chinese per capita GDP surged from $426 to $878 in 2001. Quite clearly far from beginning to catch up, India and especially Pakistan fell well behind.

It would be now far harder for India and Pakistan to achieve consistently much higher growth rates in the future than those achieved not only by themselves, but also by what China will achieve in future, even taking into account the likely deceleration in the latter.

The somewhat morbid preoccupation with GDP growth rates, deflects attention from many more significant aspects of development. Qualitatively, Chinese growth has been vastly superior than that of India and Pakistan.

Its ranking in HDI was much higher than of its two South Asian neighbours. By the end of the last century, China had reduced its infant mortality to 32 per 1000, less than half of India's and a third of Pakistan's rate (though still lagging behind Taiwan's 6 and South Korea's 9 per 1000); raised life expectancy to 67 years, (compared with 59.2 years for India and 62 years for Pakistan) and raising adult literacy to 80 per cent (as against India's 48.41 per cent and Pakistan's 40 percent).

In terms of poverty alleviation China's record is even more impressive, with the headcount ratio around 10 percent and India and Pakistan's ranging from a quarter to a third of the population.

Chronic and extreme poverty is much more prevalent in India than in Pakistan. A recent FAO report shows that after a marginal decline in the number of the hungry in India between 1990-92 and 1995-97, the total number of the famished has increased by 19 million between 1995-97 and 1999-2002.

These statistics take away much of the gloss from the wares of the shining India peddled by Indian publicists and the spin constantly put by Pakistani economic managers on the economy's imminent take-off.

These comparisons hardly justify the self-congratulatory euphoria about the achievements of India and Pakistan and their desire to graduate into the same league of development as China and other East Asian countries.

Another important difference between the Chinese and the Indo-Pakistan patterns of development is the nature of structural change that has occurred during the last five decades, especially during the last two decades.

While in India and Pakistan, agriculture still accounts for a quarter of GDP, the share of industry has remained stagnant at around 15-20 per cent, while the service sector has the dominant share.

In China the share of agriculture has fallen to 16 per cent and industry's share has grown further to 51 per cent while services share has steadied at 33 per cent.

The upshot of this is that China has continued to industrialize and diversify its economy further, while India and Pakistan seem to have leapfrogged into the post-industrial phase, without having fully industrialized.

The bulging service sector is not the knowledge-based service sector of the developed economies, but the low technology, underemployed wage labour sector which has been displaced from agriculture and other traditional activities.

In India, a part of the service sector is of course employed in the high-tech IT sector one constantly hears about. But the limits of this expansion are becoming obvious and the majority of the jobs are in the outsourcing of back office jobs which are increasingly under threat as a result of a backlash in the US and other developed countries.

The role of changing development strategies is also emphasized as a reason for the resurgence of growth in India or its expectation in Pakistan. Faster Chinese economic growth in recent years is also attributed to the abandonment of past strategies.

The jettisoning of Mao's communism in China and Nehru's socialism (and its alter ego the Mahalanobis model) are credited with the faster pace of growth in recent years. In fact, however, without the incubating effect of these periods, neither of these economies would have been in a position to perform as well as they are doing now.

This is much more valid in the case of China, as Amartya Sen, the Nobel laureate points out: "China's relative advantage over India is a product of its pre-reform (pre 1979) groundwork rather than its post-reform redirection."

Pakistan's predicament is far more serious than of India's, as it has failed to pay attention to the basic fundamentals of growth in the past five decades and has only sporadically responded to the challenges facing it.

Its greater dependence on external flows has greatly diminished its domestic capacity to deal with its domestic problems. Its hare-like obsession with faster growth and leapfrogging has ironically resulted in its recent lack lustre performance.

It needs a sustained period of attention and diversion of resources to sectors which have been neglected in the past and a greater effort to tax those who have benefited from the rent-seeking policies of the past.

It also needs to pay heed to the unfinished agenda of development, especially land reforms and mobilization of domestic savings, as well as the nagging and unresolved issue of civilian supremacy over defence and security issues.

South Asia's developmental past has not been entirely bleak, despite the many opportunities missed and squandered along the way, in the past half-century.

In the wake of the success of the SAARC summit in Islamabad and the initiation of an Indo-Pakistan dialogue on its sidelines, there is considerable optimism in the region that the South Asian tortoise will finally catch-up with, if not outdistance, the East Asian hare in the foreseeable future.

At least the air of resignation on the fate of such a race which prevailed a decade ago has been lifted and some light at the end of the tunnel is becoming visible even to the cynic.

What is even more significant is that the two major South Asian countries of the region now seem to be inclined to travel on a parallel path rather than on a collision course.

However, the journey for both of them on the development path ahead is going to be long and tortuous, although it could become considerably less strenuous once they begin to rebuild the bilateral and multilateral avenues of peaceful interdependence.

Both India and Pakistan badly need a peace dividend from a diminution in the level of military confrontation between them. This would help them in their ambitions to level up with China's growth.

- sm_naseem@hotmail.com.