The international backlash came even as the country was reaching an impasse in its economy. Growth, for decades, had depended on debt, which had risen slowly from a very low level between 1980 and 2010. Between 2010 and 2020, however, growth doubled while debt trebled, standing at 280 per cent of output. The country’s dependence on debt should have been reduced by shifting demand from investment in infrastructure projects towards more domestic consumption. Yet household consumption could not be increased much further, for one very simple reason: most of the wealth flowed to the state, not to
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