Normatively, some believe that democracy is a luxury good, which a poor country like China cannot afford. Positively, democracy is viewed as a constraint on economic growth. It slows down decision making when decisiveness is most needed to jump-start economic development.5 Increasingly, this view that poor countries are faced with a Faustian political and economic choice is being contradicted by the very country that supposedly supplied the clearest evidence in favor of this hypothesis – India. India has begun its own economic takeoff as its GDP has grown above 8 percent for a number of years.
