Spence lauds India’s growth at varsity event

India’s leap on technology front will be a key catalyst for the economic expansion of the nation, said the 80-year-old American economist.

India has developed the best digital economy and financial architecture in the world, said Nobel laureate Michael Spence during a panel discussion at Bennett University.

Michael Spence (Bloomberg)

“As somebody who has spent the last 25 years thinking about growth in one form or another in virtually every corner of the world, let me just say that the major economy with the highest potential growth rate is India,” Spence said.

India’s leap on the technology front will be a key catalyst for the economic expansion of the nation, said the 80-year-old, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001 along with George Akerlof and Joseph Stiglitz, for laying the foundations for the theory of markets with asymmetric information.

Responding to a question from a student on crypto assets, including bitcoin, Spence said, “Crypto currency is not a currency…because a currency is a store of value and medium of exchange. If its value changes by a factor of 20 or 30% in a week, it is hard to believe it is a store of value. It is only a currency for those people who want to hide in the dark net.”

He added, “What we will have are central bank digital currencies. They are like regular currencies because the central banks control that. They are going to solve extreme data security challenges... The notion that we will have an economy running on a currency that’s entirely decentralised is not going to happen.”