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A Q&A with Ingi Iusmen on international adoption

In recognition of Adoption Month, we interviewed two scholars, Peter Hayes and Ingi Iusmen, about intercountry adoption (ICA) to raise awareness of some of the complexities presented by intercountry adoption. Today, we present a brief Q&A with Dr. Ingi Iusmen, Lecturer in Governance and Policy at the University of Southampton and author of “The EU and International Adoption from Romania” in the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family.

Where is independent, intercountry adoption (ICA) legal?

Private international adoption occurs outside the legal framework of the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption (1993) as in those countries where the Convention has been implemented, private adoption is forbidden. Private adoption entails that the adoptive parents are responsible for arranging the adoption directly with the child’s country of origin, according to the legislation of that country. For instance, countries such as Haiti, Republic of Korea, or Nepal have signed but have not yet ratified the Hague Convention, therefore, in theory, private international adoption is legal in these countries.

Why has ICA become an increasingly contentious issue?

There are a number of reasons which make ICA a contentious legal and political matter. Legally, some countries and political actors don’t interpret the provisions in the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption in conjunction with the articles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989). Whilst the ‘best interests of the child’ have to be prioritised — by both conventions — whenever a decision on a child’s international adoption has to be taken, the UN Convention also highlights the need for any childcare solution to preserve the cultural identity of the child (Article 20). To this end, in-country childcare solutions have been prioritised over international solutions, such as international adoption. Politically and demographically, we witness a general trend of Western families who tend to adopt children from poor or developing countries due to the drop in birth rate in the West. Sometimes, these children are, indeed, orphans and their adoption by Western families seems to be the best childcare solution available to them. Yet, most often the children in developing countries end up in institutions due to their families’ poverty and not due to being orphans, and, in these circumstances, their international adoption violates international provisions in this area, according to which the state has to support a child’s biological family not to abandon the child. Finally, poorly regulated or unregulated cases of intercountry adoption have often been associated with child trafficking, particularly where post-accession monitoring mechanisms are lacking and there are no means to trace what happened to the child after he/she has been adopted internationally.

In what ways is ICA both being extended and restricted?

I think that ICA has been extended recently due to the declining birth rates in the West and the public’s perception that there are many children in need of a family in the poorer countries. This explains why most of the Western countries are the receiving countries in relation to international adoption. Of course, international adoptions can become more restricted whenever issues such as child trafficking and corruption come into play. The restriction of ICA can also be an upshot of a reformed system of child protection and children’s rights legislation – as was the case in Romania during EU accession negotiations – which prioritise in-country childcare solutions and target child abandonment. At the same time, ICA can be restricted due to a better regulated international system of ICA, whereby the abuses and irregularities contained in the practice of ICA are prevented from occurring in the first place.

What are some of the factors which shaped the European Union’s changing policy on ICA in relation to Romania?

A number of factors have shaped the EU’s position on ICA in relation to Romania after 2007. First, the Union institutions provide easy access to various interest groups and actors which try to influence the EU’s policy process. In the Romanian case, given the ban on ICA (with few exceptions) provided by the Romanian legislation post-2007, various adoption agencies and NGOs have lobbied EU institutions demanding that the Romanian government relaxed its policy on international adoptions. Therefore, it can be argued that some of the EU institutions were receptive to this pro-adoption lobby. At the same time, the Union has recently developed a child rights policy and role, which of course, could be extended to international adoptions as well. In other words, some of the EU institutions, such as the Parliament, justified their pro-ICA position by connecting it to the EU’s child rights agenda, which, indeed, has become more developed lately. Finally, sensitive media reports of cases of child abuse in care institutions in Romania provided pro-ICA actors and the European institutions with the justification for their demands that the Romanian government relax the legislation on ICA

What does Adoption Month mean to a scholar of ICA policy?

Perhaps this month can bring into the spotlight and raise public awareness of what international adoption involves and how it can impact, both negatively and positively, on the protection of children’s rights and particularly on children’s lives. Often the views on ICA seem to fall into two opposing camps, namely those who support ICA and those who oppose it; however, in reality, the situation of children who need a family is more nuanced, and hence complex…Therefore, I hope that the Adoption Month can raise awareness of not only the legal and policy frameworks regulating the practice of ICA, but also of the specific circumstances of children and their families whose lives are fundamentally affected by the decision to allow for a child to be adopted internationally.

Dr Ingi Iusmen is a Lecturer in Governance and Policy at the University of Southampton. She has conducted research on the EU’s human rights policy and regime, Eastern enlargement, children’s rights and child protection in Romania and the EU’s children’s rights policy. She is the author of “The EU and International Adoption from Romania” (available to read for free for a limited time) in the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family.

The subject matter of the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family comprises the following: analyses of the law relating to the family which carry an interest beyond the jurisdiction dealt with, or which are of a comparative nature; theoretical analyses of family law; sociological literature concerning the family and legal policy; social policy literature of special interest to law and the family; and literature in related disciplines (medicine, psychology, demography) of special relevance to family law and research findings in the above areas.

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Image credit: Three little girls holding hands and running. © ktaylorg via iStockphoto.

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Plato’s mistake

By Norman Solomon

It started innocently enough at a lunch-time event with some friends at the Randolph Hotel in the centre of Oxford. ‘The trouble with Islam …’ began some self-opinioned pundit, and I knew where he was going. Simple. Islam lends itself to fanaticism, and that is why Muslims perpetrate so much violence in the name of religion.

The pundit saw himself as Christian, and therefore a man of peace, so I had my cue. ‘Look out of the window. Over there in the fork of the road you see the Martyr’s Memorial. In 1555 the Wars of Religion were in full spate, Catholics were burning Protestants at the stake, Protestants were no less fanatical when their turn came, and things got even worse with the Civil War. So why are Muslims any worse?’

Memorial to Oxford Martyrs. St Giles, Oxford.

‘But that was 500 years ago. We’ve come a long way since then! And what about you, and all those atrocities in the Old Testament?’ That stung me. Ignoramus – didn’t he know that Judaism has moved a long way from the days of the ancient Hebrews?

‘That was 2,500 years ago!’ I retorted, and we moved onto a less contentious topic.

Being Jewish, I am of course impartial as between Christianity and Islam, both of which shout for peace but have bloody histories, with violence committed in the name of God by Christian against Christian, Muslim against Muslim, one against the other or either against some other unfortunate victim, such as the Jews.

Judas Maccabaeus

But can I really wash my hands of all this? Not a Jewish problem, at least not for thousands of years? Well now, think again. The Bible is still a part of my history and I have to take some attitude to the fact that it often encourages violence in the name of God. We are about to celebrate the Jewish festival of Chanukah, so do I take sides with the ‘valiant Maccabees’ who – in God’s name – carried on a guerrilla war against the Seleucids and eventually, with much bloodshed and mutual slaughter, gained control of Judea? (OK, the story is not in the Hebrew scriptures, and the events are more recent by a couple of centuries, but so what?) By modern standards the Maccabean warriors were violent religious fanatics. Judas Maccabeus is not the sort of man I would be comfortable to invite to tea; I would be pretty guarded in my answers if he asked me any awkward questions, and probably looking over my back to see if I was being watched by MI5, or the Seleucid equivalent. One person’s religious fanatic is another person’s freedom fighter; hardly an excuse, more like a choice between the devil and the deep blue sea.

The dilemma is ancient. Ambivalence towards past violence comes out in the way the rabbis told the story of Chanukah. There is a vague reference to some ‘victory over the Greeks’, but the kernel of the story is about a miracle that happened with a jar of oil when, following the victory, they rededicated the Jerusalem Temple. The idolatrous ‘Greeks’ had contaminated all the oil, but one jar was found with the high priest’s seal still on it, and that miraculously lasted for 8 days until pure oil could again be sourced. Nowhere else — in the copious contemporary or near-contemporary accounts of the military campaigns and of atrocities perpetrated by the ‘other side’ — is such a story mentioned. No. The rabbis retold the story their way, using it not to incite violence but to instil faith in God’s saving grace. Which has at least dissociated them from the violence of the situation, even it from time to time others have revived the older stories and set up the Maccabees as models for emulation.

So why head this blog ‘Plato’s mistake’? Don’t blame the Greeks! Because my Islamophobic friend and others like him who generalize about Muslims, or Christians, or Jews, or whatever other group they happen to target have fallen prey to the just error made by the great philosopher. It was Plato who dreamed up the notion of perfect forms (ideas) to which we can only aspire, and even though his own disciple Aristotle spotted the confusion, the error of essentialism took root and people still like to believe that there is some entity out there which is the ‘true’ Christianity, Islam or Judaism, just as Plato taught there was a true ‘good’ whose existence was superior to anything on earth.

But there really is no such thing. ‘Islam’, ‘Christianity’, ‘Judaism’ are abstractions, not real things. What actually exists are Muslims, Christians, Jews – and of course, Hindus, Buddhist, Sikhs and so on. Real individual people in relationship with others who share a common name. There are violent Muslims; it does not follow that ‘Islam is violent’, or that they are not ‘really’ Muslims. Conversely, I would not be right to claim, ‘Judaism is peaceful’. All I can say is that this, that or the other Jew is a peaceful person. All of us can tell our stories in many different ways. Some are violent, some peaceful.

Nor is the secular world different. Nationalism, socialism and other secular creeds are all as variable as the individuals who take them on. Crimes have been committed in the name of each and every philosophy, and good has been done in the name of most of them too. It is not the creed that should shoulder the blame, but we ourselves.

Norman Solomon is Fellow in Modern Jewish Thought at the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and the author of Judaism: A Very Short Introduction.

The Very Short Introductions (VSI) series combines a small format with authoritative analysis and big ideas for hundreds of topic areas. Written by our expert authors, these books can change the way you think about the things that interest you and are the perfect introduction to subjects you previously knew nothing about. Grow your knowledge with OUPblog and the VSI series every Friday and like Very Short Introductions on Facebook. Subscribe to Very Short Introductions articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.

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Image credits: (1) Martyr’s Memorial, by Kenneth Allen [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons; (2) Juda-Maccabaeus [Public Domain] via Wikimedia Commons

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Music we’re thankful for in 2013

Compiled by Taylor Coe

With Thanksgiving as a time of the year to reflect on what brings joy to our lives, we thought it would be a good time to reflect on the music that we’re thankful for having in our lives. After polling Oxford University Press staffers about the music for which they are thankful, we collected their responses below.

“This year, I’m thankful for Led Zeppelin’s ‘Bron-Yr-Aur.’ Not to be confused with the better known ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp,’ this solo acoustic tune, written and played by the great Jimmy Page, is pretty much the opposite of everything I think of when I think of Led Zeppelin. I’ve tried to figure out the fingerings for some time, but failed. It wasn’t until I came across a tab for it that explained the unusual string tuning that I got it. And now it’s running under my fingers pretty much every evening, much to the irritation of those who are stuck sharing an apartment with me. I find the song a bit magical because it doesn’t look on the page anything like how it sounds when you hear it. I kept feeling like I was playing it wrong because I couldn’t hear the melody, and then one day, all of a sudden it came charging into the foreground. The secret is letting the strings ring and letting that create the rhythm. When I come home still worrying about my day, this song has a way of unraveling everything that bothers me. It feels good under your fingers.”


—Anna-Lise Santella, Editor, Grove Music/Oxford Music Online and Music Reference

“‘E-Bow the Letter’ is a song on one of my favorite albums, New Directions in Hi-Fi, also R.E.M.’s last great album. It was the final album they recorded with their original drummer Bill Berry and even features Patti Smith singing back-up vocals on this track (there is a version out there with Thom Yorke singing her part). The album struck me as very ambitious at the time in its sound and lyrics and helped me find and appreciate more challenging music. Also for a band to deliver an album of this quality this late in a career – that’s also something to be thankful for!”


—Jeremy Wang-Iverson, Senior Publicist

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“I am thankful for my mysterious upstairs neighbor, who plays the piano so beautifully (and thankfully never when I am trying to sleep). The music is soft and lovely to listen to, especially in that it helps me focus on something other than the construction going on right outside my bedroom window. I’ve lived in a number of shoe-box New York City apartments, and have heard my fair share of high-heel stomping and hammering from upstairs and across the hall, and so this mystery pianist is my favorite neighbor yet.”


—Victoria Davis, Marketing Coordinator, Online

“I’m thankful for the music of Roscoe Holcomb, whose high, piercing voice and intense banjo and guitar playing made such an impression on me when he visited my house when I was 14 years old. I had never before seen someone who had smoked so much that their fingernails had turned yellow. Roscoe’s family didn’t appreciate his music, but he was a unique artist who influenced a young Bob Dylan, who described him as having ‘an untamed sense of control.’ He sang with an intensity and conviction that made the old songs and ballads come to life. ‘If you cut my head off,’ Roscoe said to me, ‘I’d go on singing.’”


—Richard Carlin, Editor, Music and Art

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“OUP’s recent publication of the biography, Nilsson by Alyn Shipton, reminded me of some classic songs I’ve always loved but only rediscovered recently during the publicity campaign for the book. Nilsson songs to be thankful for? ‘Coconut,’ for schmaltzy ballads the earworm ‘Without You,’ and the classic that any film buff will recognize from Midnight Cowboy (1969) starring Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman, ‘Everybody’s Talkin’. The one and perhaps only time you’ll hear me ever say this, ‘I have to agree with Yoko Ono’ when it comes to Nilsson, who said, ‘He had this beautiful voice, soft and velvety.’ And for that soft velvetiness I am thankful for these songs and hope you enjoy them too this holiday season.”


—Christian Purdy, Director of Publicity

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“I think it’s safe to say we’re all ‘word people’ here, this being the place that makes the dictionary and all. That, combined with experiencing that first insane year at my word-person job, makes the Weakerthans’ song ‘A New Name for Everything,’ a plea for well-defined terms, all the more appealing. Moving to New York from a place actually called Littleton couldn’t have been a harsher transition, and one that has reworked my definitions for words like ‘home’ and ‘space.’ The opportunity to work with scientists—some of the most particular people on earth when it comes to terminology, and rightly so—and their unique books has been a blessing. In this song, leading man John K. Samson is asking for the most basic of liberties: for words to mean what they should. I find myself reflecting on this a lot lately, as my definition of editorial work continues to expand and evolve. Samson puts it best when he declares, ‘Fire every phrase, they don’t want to work for us anymore.’ A metaphor on metaphors. For word people like us, what could be better?”


—Erik Hane, Editorial Assistant, Academic/Trade Books (Sciences)

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“It would not feel like the holiday season in my family if we did not repeatedly listen to The Caroleer Singers & Orchestra’s Sleigh Ride / Jingle Bells, an album of little-known children’s Christmas songs from the 1960s that was a particular favorite of my sister’s growing up. This is why I am thankful for the technology that allows us to digitize music. When the family record player was finally retired in the early 1980s, we had to go without our beloved Christmas songs for several years. About 15 years ago, I had the vinyl record digitized and gave the CD to my sister as a gift. Now, her children will grow up with the same holiday soundtrack we enjoyed as kids. And, even if the now-precious CD is ever lost, I’ve just discovered we can download it on iTunes.”


—Sara McNamara, Associate Editor, Journals

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“I’m thankful to ‘Billie Jean’ for the introduction of the moonwalk, my favorite party trick (provided I’m in socks and on smooth flooring).”


—Kate Pais, Marketing Assistant, Academic/Trade

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“There’s a time in anyone’s social development when they’re particularly naïve and impressionable. When I was about 10, I got introduced to punk music in probably the bluntest way possible. I was rollerblading, (feel free to point and laugh) in San Diego, CA outside my grandma’s house. I was wearing a Weezer t-shirt, which in retrospect was pretty awesome for any 10-year-old in 1999. While I was gliding down the sidewalk, this surly-looking dude with tribal tattoos and a pitbull called me out. He said, ‘Kid, why are you rollerblading and listening to nerdy music? You should be skateboarding and listening to punk music.’ The beach bro then gave me a copy of Minor Threat’s Complete Discography on CD and told me to go home and listen. I still have that CD to this day. I look back at that moment as a turning point in my musical consciousness and world outlook. So this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for Punk Rock and the San Diego beach bro, who gave me a CD that flipped my world upside-down.”


—Sam Blum, Publicity Assistant

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Your Oxford Thanksgiving 2013 playlist:

Oxford University Press is a leading music publisher, including books, journals, sheet music, reference, and Grove Music Online. Follow @OUPMusic on Twitter for the latest updates from all our music publishing.

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The Richardsons: the worst of times at Oxford University Press?

By John Feather

From 1715 to 1758, Stephen and Zaccheus Richardson were successively the ‘Warehouse Keepers’ for Oxford University Press. The seemingly innocuous title conceals more than it reveals and yet is telling. In William Laud’s original vision of a university press at Oxford in the 1630s—a vision that John Fell adopted and adapted after the Restoration—at the heart of the enterprise was to be an individual known as the ‘Architypographus’. He was to be a scholar-businessman, a man who understood the book trade and could manage the Press but who could also find books to publish, authors to write them and booksellers to buy and sell them. However, by the early eighteenth century the office had fallen into disuse, leaving the Warehouse Keeper as the effective manager of the Press’s daily activities.

The Richardsons could do none of the things expected of the Architypographus. At best (and their best was not very good) they were the keepers of inventories and account books, not learned publishers. Under their regime (son succeeded father on the latter’s death in 1756), the Press accounts were always cursory and formulaic, and at times almost non-existent. The Delegates of the Press were too supine to intervene. One Vice-Chancellor, Robert Shippen, a notorious crypto-Jacobite (and not always terribly crypto), signed off a single account to cover the four years of his term of office (1719-23). This was the nadir, yet the accounts is in a perverse way a very fair representation of the Press under the first two Hanoverians: barely functional, ill-managed, unproductive.

Some books were printed even in the worst of times. But almost without exception the substantial books printed at the Press in the Richardson years were either privately printed for their authors, or were printed on commission for booksellers — and more often London booksellers than those in Oxford. At times even the privately printed work was little more than vanity printing for clerical Oxford: many of them sermons preached before the university and printed to draw the world’s attention (and more particularly the attention of potential patrons of livings) to their authors. The Press was not inactive in the middle decades of the eighteenth century — that is a myth — but it was certainly not the learned press commanding a European audience to enhance the reputation of the University which had been envisaged by Laud and Fell, and which had been partially realised at the very beginning of the eighteenth century.

This was the Press investigated by William Blackstone, following his appointment as a Delegate in 1755. He found that the University had ignored (and perhaps forgotten) its rights and obligations. It seems to have been this which really riled him. Most of the reforms which he persuaded a reluctant Vice-Chancellor and indifferent University to adopt were little more than a reassertion of the earlier agreements reached by Laud and Fell about how the University would support the Press from its limited funds. But Blackstone also made one critical practical contribution. He consulted Daniel Prince, a prominent and well-established Oxford bookseller, about the Press, and it was from him that he learned enough about the trade to understand what was wrong. He also began to understand how to solve the problems. Prince was appointed as ‘Overseer of the Press’ in 1758, and with the support of Blackstone and other Delegates, he began to forge the links with the London book trade which eventually turned the Press into both a successful commercial enterprise and a learned publisher. From its early Georgian nadir, the Press began the ascent which led it to become the world’s leading academic publisher by the end of the nineteenth century.

John Feather, a former President of the Oxford Bibliographical Society, is a Professor at Loughborough University and the author of A History of British Publishing and many other works on the history of books and the book trade. He has contributed to both volumes 1 and 2 of The History of Oxford University Press.

With access to extensive archives, The History of Oxford University Press s the first complete scholarly history of the Press, detailing its organization, publications, trade, and international development. Read previous blog posts about the history of Oxford University Press.

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Image credit: A West Prospect of the City of Oxford by John Boydell, 1751. Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts (GMII). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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A Q&A with Peter Hayes on international adoption

In recognition of Adoption Month, we interviewed two scholars, Peter Hayes and Ingi Iusmen, about intercountry adoption (ICA) to raise awareness of some of the complexities presented by intercountry adoption. Today, we present a brief Q&A with Peter Hayes, Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sunderland and author of “The legality and ethics of independent intercountry adoption under the Hague Convention” in International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family.

Where is independent, intercountry adoption (ICA) legal?

An independent ICA can be interpreted to mean a private adoption that has not been scrutinised and endorsed by either the sending or receiving state. This will almost certainly be illegal. However, more usually an independent ICA means one where an initial match is made without the involvement of official state agencies, although the state authorities in either the sending or receiving state do decide whether or not to authorise the match. This form of independent ICA is much more likely to be legal.

When state adoption authorities were asked about the legality of independent ICA in 2010, their responses were more or less equally divided between states that said that it was not permitted (e.g. China) and states which said that it was (e.g. France). It was not always clear, however, which definition of independent ICA was being used. The United Kingdom ducked the question by replying ‘not applicable’. In fact, ICAs in which the initial match was made by non-state actors have been authorised by the British courts so independent ICA is legal in the United Kingdom.

The 1993 Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption provides a framework for arranging ICA, and independent ICA, in the sense of independent preliminary matching, is permitted under the Convention at the discretion of each state. When the Convention was drawn up there were mixed views on whether to sanction independent ICA. However, a majority of state representatives were in favour of allowing for it; the United States in particular made it clear that it would only sign up to a treaty that permitted independent ICAs. After the United States implemented the Convention in 2008 the arguments against independent ICA were reinvigorated by the Permanent Bureau’s Guide to Good Practice, which claimed incorrectly that independent ICA was inconsistent with the 1993 Convention. This misleading guidance has become the source of continuing confusion over the legality of independent ICA.

Why has ICA become an increasingly contentious issue?

The great majority of children adopted internationally have experienced successful placements. There have, however, been concerns raised over unethical practices toward birth mothers. A reasonable and pragmatic policy response to this situation is to develop ICA policies that help as many needy children as possible, while ensuring that the difficulties and pressures facing birth mothers are at least made no worse, and that any support offered to them during and after pregnancy is unconditional. This approach sees well-regulated ICA as helping to uphold children’s rights in a way that is combined with the recognition of the rights of birth mothers.

ICA is contentious in part because its critics dispute that such an aim is possible or even desirable. Critics tend to reason that (1) if the world was fair there would be no need for ICA, therefore, (2) if we ban ICA, the world will become fairer. The premise is reasonable but the conclusion is false. One can ban ICA at the stroke of a pen. It is far harder and more time consuming to change the world for the better by transforming the economic and social conditions that underlie the need for these adoptions. Until these changes happen, needy children denied the chance of an ICA may be left in a dire position. Critics tend to say little about this, although they sometimes assume that the children will be adopted domestically, or that they never really needed adopting at all. These assumptions are overly optimistic. Infanticide, high rates of child mortality, cruel forms of child labour, extreme poverty, poor institutional care, poor health, and stunted growth are all problems in many parts of the world. It is likely that some such fate awaits many children of impoverished and marginalised mothers if they are not adopted.

In what ways is ICA both being extended and restricted?

ICA is continually renewed and extended by thousands of individual initiatives by birth mothers and adoptive parents as well as ventures by adoption mediators. These societal ventures are often small scale and localised but can grow into extensive organised programmes, such as the Holt agency.

The success or otherwise of these initiatives depends very much upon the permissive or restrictive attitude of child welfare authorities, visa and border control authorities, and the judiciary.  At a policy level these state authorities can often be often restrictive. In particular an adoption initiative that steps outside the standard pattern of an established ICA programme (e.g. when parents adopt a child while living abroad and then try to return home), is liable to face a labyrinth of obstacles. However, by no means all officials tasked with implementing restrictive policies are obstructive; some will use their discretion to help rather than to hinder ICAs and are spoken of with gratitude by adoptive families.

What are some of the factors which shaped the EU’s changing policy on ICA in relation to Romania?

The controversy over ICA is exemplified by Romania where opponents’ concerns over corruption are set against supporters’ concerns over children living in very poor conditions. When Romania applied to join the European Union, opponents succeeded in ensuring that a moratorium on ICA was made a condition of membership. Romania acquiesced and the ban was progressively implemented from 2001. Those who backed the moratorium hoped that domestic adoption would increase as a consequence. This has still not happened. The most recent figures state that 966 children were placed for domestic adoption in 2012. This is the lowest annual figure since 1998.

ICA from Romania has been particularly contentious because of how it began. After the fall of the Ceausescu regime, it was discovered that Romania’s orphanages were crammed with children living in appalling conditions. In response to this tragic realisation, an extraordinary social movement arose as thousands of European families travelled to the country to adopt. These adoptions rescued many children and helped to alleviate the conditions for those who remained. Almost all of these Romanian adoptions have been successful for the children and their families. In fact they have been at least as successful, if not more so, than domestic adoptions arranged through professional matching.

The scale and effectiveness of the response to the crisis in Romania shows the potential of independent ICA to help needy children. However, the adoptions were inimical to the rationalistic, planned, highly-organised, and tightly-regulated ICA processes that adoption professionals and policymakers had been developing. This may explain why, instead of supporting these adoptions, many professionals and policymakers viewed them with bitterness, and became determined to stop them.

What does Adoption Month mean to a scholar of ICA policy?

Anything that raises awareness of the practical possibilities for adoption and people’s experiences of adoption is to be welcomed, whether it concerns ICA or domestic adoption. Personal contact with adoptive families, media reports on ICA and even celebrities who have adopted internationally, from Josephine Baker to Madonna, have all played a role in making people conscious of the opportunities to adopt a child from another state. Adoption Month provides an extra chance to highlight the potential of both domestic and intercountry adoption to transform the lives of children.

Peter Hayes is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sunderland. He has published on international adoption policy, on transracial adoption, on adoption in Japan and in Korea, and on “early” puberty amongst internationally adopted children. His articles include “The legality and ethics of independent intercountry adoption under the Hague Convention” in The International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family.

The subject matter of the International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family comprises the following: analyses of the law relating to the family which carry an interest beyond the jurisdiction dealt with, or which are of a comparative nature; theoretical analyses of family law; sociological literature concerning the family and legal policy; social policy literature of special interest to law and the family; and literature in related disciplines (medicine, psychology, demography) of special relevance to family law and research findings in the above areas.

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Image credit: Family portraits. © theboone via iStockphoto.

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The Crab Nebula

By Professor Sir Francis Graham-Smith, FRS

The Crab Nebula and the pulsar at its centre are endlessly fascinating. The pulsar is a neutron star, with the same mass as our Sun but only the size of a city. It rotates 30 times per second, flashing like a lighthouse as it does so. It is very nearly, but not quite, an ideal clock, without any outside influence to disturb it. At Jodrell Bank Observatory we have been watching the pulsar for over 40 years, timing it without missing a beat while it rotated more than 30 billion times. This sounds boring, but it is not much trouble as we only use a small radio telescope for our daily observations. We provide a daily record of its behaviour to other observatories, and especially to telescopes on spacecraft which observe pulses from the pulsar at X-ray and gamma-ray wavelengths. Putting together the results from our radio observations with data from the opposite end of the electromagnetic spectrum has proved remarkably rewarding.

The pulsar has slowed down from 30.2 to 29.7 rotations per second while we have been watching it. This is not unexpected: the energy stored in the rapid rotation powers not only the pulses which we observe but the whole of the Crab Nebula. This little neutron star is acting as a huge electrical generator, spinning at the same speed as a dynamo in a terrestrial power station but with a magnetic field billions of times greater. So far so good, but as is often the case, it is the odd things that seem to be going wrong that we are really interested in.

The Crab Nebula

First we are watching for glitches. These are sudden changes in the regular sequence of pulses, showing that the rotation has suddenly speeded up, then recovered and started on a new regime of slowing down. We have seen this happen a couple of dozen times. The explanation involves some very strange physics inside the star. Although it is so condensed, the whole of the inside is liquid and only a thin crust is solid. Furthermore, the inside is superfluid, which allows it to rotate independently of the crust. Some times, however, it clutches onto the crust and the whole rotation rate suddenly changes; this is what causes the glitch.

What we have found recently is less obvious, having taken the whole of the 40 years to show up. The radio pulse is actually double, like a lighthouse with two beams. These two beams are nearly, but not quite, in opposite directions; how are they formed? Fortunately the Fermi gamma-ray telescope has helped us understand the strange geometry of the atmosphere outside the star, where the beams are formed. The whole of this atmosphere is rotating with the star itself, swept round by the powerful magnetic field. It is called a magnetosphere, and it is forced to move so fast that it reaches relativistic speeds; the radiation appears to originate at a location so far outside the surface that it is moving with half the velocity of light. Now comes some more new physics.

The inside of a neutron star is superconducting as well as superfluid. This means that the strength and shape of the huge dipole magnetic field is fixed, or can change only very slowly. So the pattern of the magnetic field in the magnetosphere, where the radiated beams are formed, is fixed. But the star is less than 1000 years old (it was formed in a supernova explosion in the year 1054), so we have been observing it for an appreciable fraction of its lifetime. And we have indeed found a change in the pattern of the double pulse. The two parts are moving apart, at the rate of 3o in the whole lifetime of the star. What this means is that the dipole is not tidily arranged at a right angle to the rotation, as it would be in a power station dynamo, but it is tilted at around 45o and slowly moving to wards the expected orthogonal arrangement. Now the theorists have to take over and explain how that can happen!

The whole project of monitoring the rotation of the Crab pulsar, and some hundreds of others, is a key part of the research organised at Jodrell Bank Observatory by Professor Andrew Lyne. He and his team have been responsible for the discovery of more than half of the known 2000 pulsars. Among these the Crab is still the best!

Professor Sir Francis Graham-Smith FRS, 13th Astronomer Royal 1982-90, is Emeritus Professor at Manchester University. He was Director of Nuffield Radio Astronomy Laboratories, Jodrell Bank 1981-88. As Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory from 1976-81, he was responsible for establishing the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes on La Palma (Canary Islands). He is the author of Unseen Cosmos: The Universe in Radio, which Professor Brian Cox says is ‘A definitive account of the past, present and future of Radio Astronomy from one of its founders and most eminent practitioners.’

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Image credit: By NASA, ESA, J. Hester and A. Loll (Arizona State University) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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Etymology gleanings for November 2013

By Anatoly Liberman

Brave and its aftermath.


During the month of November, the main event in the uneventful life of the Oxford Etymologist (in this roundabout way I refer to myself) has been the controversy around the origin of bravus, the etymon of bravo ~ brave. When this blog was launched on 1 March 2006, the hope was that it would become a forum for all those who are interested in word origins. Since that memorable day in March, I have not missed a single Wednesday, so that by now I can view the undulating landscape behind me with its pinnacles and pits with a measure of objectivity (the topic inspired me to use as many Romance words as I could remember).

Anyone who will search the Internet will discover that etymological blogs are numerous. We are not in competition: the more sources of reliable information, the better. This blog has its own readership and enjoys the popularity it deserves. My formulation is intentionally vague, because it is not for me to assess the dimensions of its popularity. The topics that have attracted the greatest attention over six and a half years are smut, slang, and spelling (the alliteration is unintentional)—a worthy but limited repertoire, and I try not to beat a willing horse to death. People ask questions of the type “Where did such and such a word come from?” Some of those inquisitive people go beyond queries, and their comments are always welcome. A letter from England gave me the idea to add pictures to the text, and so it has been ever since. A recent post, with an applauding audience, reflects my dream: the world in raptures after discovering this blog. I have once referred to the sin of self-love (the phrase is from Shakespeare) and am shyly doing so again.

Along the way I have made my fair share of mistakes. They have always been noticed by our correspondents and corrected. Some time ago, I read that on a medal coined in the Vatican Jesus’s name was misspelled as Lesus. The official confronted by the irate public responded that everybody makes mistakes, and he was quite right, for what else could he say? With such a precedent I feel somewhat more at ease. Occasionally I learn from comments by other bloggers that the etymologies I offer are shockingly superficial or unpardonably wrong. I prostrate myself in humility, mindful of the Russian proverb that the sword does not cut off a repentant head. 

But sometimes, the criticism of what I say happens to be constructive, and I cannot wish for a better reward. This is what happened when Stephen Goranson expressed his strong disagreement with my treatment of kibosh. At one time, I fought the idea of the early origin of the plural in sentences like when a student comes to see me, I never make them wait and found the ensuing discussion productive. (Some results of this stultification are truly enjoyable. A student informs me: “I wanted to make an appointment with John and see if they may be able to look over my paper.” John’s last name is not Jekyll, and he does not suffer from the split personality disorder. Compare the end of this post.) And now I owe to Peter Maher’s remarks on the history of brave my renewed familiarity with his old book and my awakened interest in this word. My database has become twenty items richer. Those include some of Maher’s early articles and everything I could find on the etymology of brave, even though, as I have mentioned before, I try to avoid Romance words. This is an ideal case. Now everyone who wants to know how the adjective brave arose can turn to the sources and judge for him- or herself. I can only hope for more of such interventions.

Should Dr. Jekyll come, never make them wait.

Miscellaneous notes

Swedish bra “good” and Greek nectar.


Yes, bra is related to Scots braw (see my previous gleanings), and yes, I know the works Peter Maher mentioned in his comment on nectar, and a few more. Nektar är bra.

Gobsmacked (an unsolicited explanation in answer to the use of this word by Annie Morgan, our staunchest supporter).


I think gob means the same as gab in the phrase the gift of the gab, that is, “mouth”; so that to be gobsmacked is tantamount to being struck on the mouth; hence to be in a state of shock (flabbergasted).

Can repeating work it over and over again lead one to say twerk?


It probably can, but this origin of twerk, despite the “symbolic” connection between the word and the movement, seems unlikely. The existence of blends is in general hard to prove.

Minotaur (in the picture illustrating the blog on the verb amaze).


The creature in the picture is indeed half-bull, half-man, and Mollymooly clarified the situation in the best way possible. See his comment on that blog. I can only add that the belief in theriomorphic (divine or semi-divine) creatures has been attested in many cultures. Centaurs are half-men, half-horses, the Sphinx is half-lioness, half-woman, and the ancient gods who were later represented as being attended by animals (Athena and her owl, Zeus and his eagle, and others) were at one time hybrids of human-looking deities and beasts or birds, such as the Egyptian god Thoth. Zeus Lycaeus returns us to the times when he was worshiped in wolf shape. The tales explaining the name were invented in retrospect, like all etiological tales. The same holds for the Germanic gods. Thus, Odin seems to have once been venerated as a horse god, and not the world tree but he himself was Ygg-drasill “terrible horse.”

Why, when we are highly amused, do we say that we are in stitches?


Obviously, the reference, as our correspondent suggested, is to laughing so hard that one feels pain (“stitches”) in the side. The problem with this idiom (now mainly or only in the phrase to keep somebody in stitches) is not its origin but its sudden revival. It has been traced to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and then it reemerged in the twentieth century. Was it done in direct imitation of Shakespeare? Probably so. I cannot imagine that the phrase lay dormant for several hundred years and then resurfaced in colloquial usage. Slang words may have such history, but in stitches is not particularly slangy, just colorful. The amazing thing is that, once used, it has caught on and is now universally understood.

Naves, ships, and stables.


Nave, in church architecture, goes back to Latin navis “ship,” but there is no certainty whether the association that gave rise to this word is visual (the main part of a big church is elongated and looks like a ship) or spiritual (a ship of salvation, Noah’s Ark, or Jesus’s ship immune to storms). Our constant reader and correspondent Mr. John Larsson suggests that nave comes from shipbuilding. He also mentions the fact that in Västergötland (Sweden) big pig stables are called skepp, that is, “ships.” This is an interesting observation, to which I should add that skepp “stable” reminds me of English dialectal shippen (a word going back to Old Engl. scyppen) “shed, cowshed,” related to shop. Dictionaries give no Scandinavian cognates of shop ~ shippen, so that, most probably, I have succeeded only in muddying the waters, and skepp “pig stable” means just what it seems to be saying (“a ship”).

Another split personality.

There is only one mayor in Toronto, but….


The vocabulary surrounding Rob Ford in press releases has been reduced to two items: hammered and in a drunken stupor. But three sheets in the wind or sober as a judge (mayor?), he knows his plurals. On discovering that he has been stripped of some of his powers, he said “in a flash of remorse”: “If I would have had a mayor conducting themselves the way I have, I would have done exactly the same thing.” Bravo!

Anatoly Liberman is the author of Word Origins And How We Know Them as well as An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears on the OUPblog each Wednesday. Send your etymology question to him care of blog@oup.com; he’ll do his best to avoid responding with “origin unknown.” Subscribe to Anatoly Liberman’s weekly etymology posts via email or RSS.

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Image credit: (1) Title page of the first London edition of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. (2) A figure of Thoth carved on the back of the throne of the seated statue of Rameses II. Photo by Jon Bodsworth, 12 November 2006, the Egypt Archive. Copyrighted free use via Wikimedia Commons.

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Thanksgiving? The deprivations and atrocities that followed

By Stephen L. Pevar

Every schoolchild is taught that the holiday of Thanksgiving commemorates the feast the Pilgrims arranged to thank the Indians for their friendship, for sharing their land, and for showing them how to grow, harvest, and store food. Accounts say that the generosity of the Indians saved the colonists from starvation during the harsh New England winter of 1620.

Very few schoolchildren are also taught, however, about the deprivations and atrocities that occurred to the Indians afterwards, first at the hands of the colonists and then by the United States government. Ironically, if the United States believes today that it has a poor immigration policy, imagine how self-destructive the Indians’ immigration policy was by welcoming the very people who would soon seek to destroy them.

Within 100 years after the United States gained its independence from Great Britain, tens of thousands of Indians were killed in wars defending their homelands. The United States entered into nearly 400 treaties with Indian tribes between 1783 and 1871 (when Congress ended treaty-making with the Indians), during a time when tribes were very powerful. In exchange for Indians relinquishing most of their territories and ending their defense of them, the US set aside smaller portions of land that were forever guaranteed to the treaty tribe.

When the federal government became stronger, however, it broke virtually all of these treaties and confiscated most of the land guaranteed in them. During the 1830s, for instance, Indians living in the Southeast were marched at bayonet point nearly 2000 miles to “Indian Country,” now the state of Oklahoma, during which thousands died.

These land grabs and treaty abrogations were even approved by US Supreme Court. The case of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock, decided in 1903, involved an 1867 treaty in which Congress guaranteed the Kiowa and Comanche Tribes that no additional land would be taken from their reservation unless the tribes gave their express consent. Several years later, the federal government took additional land despite opposition from the tribes. The Supreme Court held that Congress has “plenary power” (full and complete authority) over the Indians and can break a treaty essentially whenever it wishes.

Lone Wolf the Younger, Kiowa. Photo by De Lancey W. Gill. Public domain via Wikipedia Commons.

In addition to taking Indian land, the federal government, during the latter part of the 1800s, encouraged social reformers and missionaries to remove Indian children from their reservation homes and place them in boarding schools (sometimes thousands of miles away), where their Indian culture was literally beaten out of them. The government also prevented the Indians from leaving their reservations to obtain food, and many Indians starved to death. When some Plains tribes continued to resist placement on reservations, the government began slaughtering the bison on which they depended. Millions of bison were killed and left to rot, until by 1900, there were less than a thousand bison left. With their food gone, Indians were forced to surrender. Hatred for the Indians was so profound that General Sheridan, when told by one Indian that he was a “good Indian,” reportedly smirked and said, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” Sheridan was one of the generals who ordered the slaughtering of the bison.

During the past 50 years, conditions have improved for most tribes as a result of a shift in public attitude towards Indians and a change in congressional policies. A few tribes have even become wealthy as a result of casinos. But conditions on most reservations remain substandard and impoverished. As President Barack Obama noted in November 2009, the unemployment rate on some Indian reservations is 80%, nearly a quarter of all Indians live in poverty, 14% of all reservation homes don’t have electricity, and 12% don’t have access to a safe water supply.

Non-Indians often wonder why more Indians haven’t left the reservation to seek a “better” life. But this underestimates and misunderstands the importance to many Indians of their tradition, culture, and religion, much of which is tied to the land. Whereas millions of immigrants came to the United States to join the “melting pot,” many Indians have resisted assimilation and remain deeply rooted in their ancestral homelands.

For those non-Indians who wish to commemorate the origins of Thanksgiving, there are many ways to do so. One would be to urge public schools to tell the whole story about the Indian experience. Another would be to lobby Congress to enact more helpful Indian policies and programs. A third would be to donate to organizations that give assistance to Indians in their efforts to rejuvenate their governments and restore their economic, political, and social structures, such as the Native American Rights Fund, the Association of American Indian Affairs, the National Indian Child Welfare Association, and the National Congress of American Indians, among many.

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday. Hopefully, this year and in years to come we will spend part of the holiday reflecting on its origins and dedicating ourselves to fostering the values of the Indians who selflessly assisted their new neighbors.

Stephen L. Pevar is the author of The Rights of Indians and Tribes, Fourth Edition. He is a senior staff counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union. Mr. Pevar worked for Legal Services on the Rosebud Sioux Reservation from 1971-1974, and taught Federal Indian Law at the University of Denver School of Law from 1983-1999. He has litigated numerous Indian rights cases and has lectured extensively on the subject.

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The gamelan and Indonesian music in America

By Andrew Clay McGraw

Earlier this month I collaborated with the Indonesian Embassy and the Smithsonian Institute to organize a four-day festival of Indonesian performing arts in Washington, DC. Hundreds of performers of gamelan, traditional Indonesian percussion orchestras made up of bronze gongs, chimes, metallophones and drums performed in ensembles ranging from 4-40 musicians, descended on the Smithsonian’s Freer and Sackler galleries. In addition to professional ensembles flown in from Java, Bali and Sumatra, American ensembles came from as far away as California and up-state New York. The festival included groups performing both traditional and contemporary repertoire as well as experimental ensembles whose link to Indonesian arts is only by way of inspiration. Performances of American Broadway tunes, arranged for gamelan by migrant Javanese living in Northern Virginia would be followed by, for instance, experimental compositions for robotic gamelan created by installation artists from Brooklyn. While esoteric, gamelan is now a firmly established aspect of American culture. Today thousands of Americans are deeply engaged in the performance of Indonesian traditional music in roughly 170 gamelan ensembles found in 41 states.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gamelan, found principally on the islands of Bali and Java, developed at around the same time as the European symphonic orchestra. Following the 16th century both societies, representing the geographic extremes of Indo-European culture, expanded their musical ensembles to unprecedented scales, added and invented new instruments, extended their tuning systems, and began to create instrumental works that stood on their own as detachable, coherent works of art independent of ceremonial contexts. Both musics emerged with global modernity and new regimes of art. Both are iconic of the massive psychic, social, technological, and economic transformations of a post-Enlightenment world.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Gamelan was first performed in America in Chicago at the East Indies pavilion in the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. The music would not be performed again in America until the mid-1950s when the scholar Mantle Hood brought gamelan ensembles and teachers to UCLA’s Institute for Ethnomusicology. During the subsequent two decades gamelan ensembles flourished at colleges and universities across the nation. This was partly a result of governmental research investment in Southeast Asian studies. The production of new knowledge about the region was encouraged by intense cold-war era competition for military and political control in Asia generally. Intense American investment in academic, military and aesthetic interactions between the two nations played out in the violent replacement of Sukarno’s left-leaning “Old Order” (1947-1965) by Suharto’s stridently pro-Western “New Order” (1966-1998). The decades of the New Order were the salad days of American gamelan, and ensembles were founded on many liberal arts campuses. The large ensembles fit well into the structure of American academia; the formulaic structuring of parts, most with a gentle learning curve, allowed departments to move up to 30 students at a time through introductory courses and to present end-of-semester concerts on spectacular sets of exotic instruments which became an elite status marker for many American campuses.

Traditional Indonesian drums at the Indonesian Embassy in Australia. Photo by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos. CC BY-NC via Wikimedia Commons.

But while such a top-down historical account helps to explain how Americans came to encounter gamelan in the first place, it does little to tell us why it means so much to so many contemporary American performers—why it is felt as a musical home, even if it is borrowed. Indeed, many of the American performers that participated in the recent festival at the Smithsonian dug deep to cover their air travel or loaded up their instruments and musicians in caravans of cars, heading to the nation’s capital for a kind of percussive Woodstock.

In America gamelan may function as an apparatus of aesthetic transgression. Generations of American composers have been drawn to gamelan partly because its unique tuning is radically divergent from Western models. The spread of Western tuning systems via global capitalism has overwritten vernacular intonations, and many American composers have heard in gamelan tunings a form of symbolic resistance against the rationalizing logics of imperial modernity. To ears trained in the Western tradition gamelan can represent a pseudo-disorder, a potentially subversive noise that allegorically betokens difference and marginality, representing a statement against repressive control.

To many of its American performers, gamelan appears organized by principles of non-hierarchical interaction and complex interlocking requiring close interpersonal cooperation and listening. For some Western performers it has become an incarnation of an idealized humanity, a harmonious, non-conflictual form valuing group over individual. Gamelan may represent performers’ principal contexts for face-to-face sociality in an era in which nearly total social atomization is made possible by both the anonymizing welfare state and the digital workplace. It may become a site in which both middle-class white-ness and, to a lesser extent, Asian-American-ness are worked out. Many Anglo participants come to gamelan seeking, as one musician once put it to me, “culture, where we had none.” For those without access to the performance of “ethnic whiteness” (e.g. bluegrass), gamelan becomes an alternative form of cultural expression, albeit one marked by anxieties of inauthenticity and appropriation.

In America gamelan appear not only in showcases of exotic authenticity but in hybrid spectacles that recall America’s interwar politics of representation: white neo-burlesque dancers performing Balinese moves at raves, DJs manipulating robotic gamelan at Burning Man, etc. By presenting images of “tradition” free of the signs of modernity and hybridization, “authentic” performances freeze the other in a past that appears to deny potential transformation. Contemporary spectacles of hybridity suggest that it may be the assumption of authenticity that is the truly distorting exotification. In this context performers seek the freedom to unselfconsciously enjoy and transform as “ours” what was once felt to be exclusively “theirs.” In 2007 the renowned Indonesian composer I Wayan Sadra argued that, like Western modernist music, gamelan had achieved the status of a “global culture” owned by no one in particular and open to transformation by anyone.

Andrew Clay McGraw is Assistant professor of music at the University of Richmond and author of Radical Traditions: Reimagining Culture in Balinese Contemporary Music. His writings combine ethnographic, music-theoretical, semiotic and critical analyses to consider the fields of traditional and contemporary music in Southeast Asia. As a composer and performer he has collaborated with Bali’s leading composers and ensembles. He has founded and directed several gamelan ensembles in the United States. A video of Andrew McGraw of the group Gamelan Dharma Swara offering a brief introduction to Balinese music can be found on the Asia Society website.

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Five important facts about the Indian economy

By Chetan Ghate

India’s remarkable economic growth in the last three decades has made it one of the fastest growing economies in the world. While India’s economic growth has been impressive, rapid growth has been accompanied by a slow decline in poverty, persistently high inflation, jobless growth, widening regional disparities, continuing socio-political instability, and vulnerability to balance of payment crises.

(1) India’s growth is unbalanced.

India’s growth has been unbalanced — both across states and between urban and rural areas. The fruits of growth have also not reached the bottom 20 % (roughly 250 million). Regionally, the variance of incomes within and between states have both been increasing. As of 2008, there was a 9.8 fold difference between the richest state Goa and the poorest state Bihar. This is larger than the real income gap between the GDP per capita of the USA and Angola, and only slightly smaller than the real income gap between the USA and India. At the district level, however, the gap is much larger. The fact that differences within India are comparable to cross-country differences is remarkable given that there are no political barriers to migration, approximately free trade, and a common set of federal institutions, policies, and governance. The growing regional disparities have dampened political resolve for further economic reforms that might further amplify regional inequalities.

No entry to Indian Economy. No entry to the street where the famous Bombay Stock Exchange stands. Photo by Prem Anandh. Creative Commons License via Prem Anandh P Flickr.

(2) The service sector is the largest sector in a country at a low level of development.

During the course of development, most economies undergo substantial changes with large shifts in resources across the agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors. In the context of the developing process, India stands out because India’s service sector currently is close to 60% of the economy. In spite of a large increase in services (and trade) and a rapid growth in the service sector, there has not been a corresponding rise in the share of services in total employment. The large size of the service sector is comparable to the size of the service sector in developed economies where services provide around 60% of output and an even larger share of employment. Further, the entire decline in the share of agriculture in GDP has been picked up by the service sector, with manufacturing sector’s share over the last 25 years staying roughly the same. In general, such a trend is experienced by high income countries and not developing countries. The service sector is also yet to significantly contribute to tax revenues. The agriculture sector in India continues to employ half the population (roughly 600 million) in low productivity jobs.

(3) India’s pro-poor growth strategy presents long-term macroeconomic challenges.

The first challenge is inflation. Rising rural per-capita incomes need to be matched with increases in rural productivity in order for redistributive schemes to be non-inflationary. In other words, high wages in agriculture with low productivity can be inflationary. The second challenge is the fiscal deficit, which is an additional source of inflation and has spilled over into the current account leading to a lot of exchange rate volatility. India’s exchange rate volatility may constrain the realisation of our growth objectives. The third challenge is raising productivity. A bulk of India’s labor force is engaged in low-productivity cottage type industries with little physical human or physical capital. This hinders productivity. The formal sector has also not expanded at the expense of the informal sector to absorb a greater part of the labor force. Finally, there is a raging debate on minerals versus forests, even though a bulk of minerals lie underneath agricultural land.

(4) Corruption is associated with lower economic growth.

Corruption is associated with lower growth and lower tax revenues. For instance, some estimates suggest that only 10% of the public distribution system (PDS) money in India reach the targeted population with the rest being all leakages. Not only do such leakages drastically reduce the effectiveness of anti-poverty schemes, the lack of tax revenues is compounded by huge transfer payments on social welfare programs leading to a large fiscal deficit.

(5) The Indian economy has grown greatly since the 1991 reforms.

Notwithstanding these challenges, the Indian economy has almost quadrupled in size since 1991, growing at close to an average of 7%. Savings and investment rates are higher at around 32% of GDP. Nominal per capita incomes in 2013 are in the 1500 USD range. The demographics of a young population offer a distinct growth advantage. Service sector productivity — the biggest sector in the economy — has also increased since the reforms. In terms of factor accumulation, sustaining growth is feasible. The current rupee crisis and global downturn notwithstanding, trade will continue to serve as an engine of growth in the years to come. Our share of the world’s merchandise exports has risen from 0.5% in 1993 to 1.5% in 2010.

Chetan Ghate is Associate Professor in the Planning Unit at the Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi. He is the editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Indian Economy. Oxford Handbooks in economics are available online as part of Oxford Handbooks Online.

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