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Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar

Research Fellow, Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity

Swaminathan S. Anklesaria Aiyar is a research fellow at the Cato Institute with a special focus on India and Asia. His research interests include economic change in developing countries, human rights and civil strife, political economy, energy, trade, and industry.

He is a prolific columnist and TV commentator in India, well known for his popular weekly Swaminomics column in The Times of India. He is the author of Escape from the Benevolent Zookeepers: The Best of Swaminomics (Times Group Books, 2007) and was called “India’s leading economic journalist” by the late Stephen Cohen of the Brookings Institution. He has been the editor of India’s two biggest financial dailies, The Economic Times and Financial Express, and was the India correspondent of The Economist for two decades. A frequent consultant to the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank, Aiyar spends part of each year in India and part in the United States. He holds a master’s degree in economics from the University of Oxford.
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The Cato Institute is pleased to co-publish the present report on India with Indicus Analytics and the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in New Delhi, and thus add to our knowledge about the effects of policies on outcomes. At a time when India has benefited from sustained high growth as a result of liberal reforms, we considered it important to measure economic freedom within this vast country and to highlight the diverse levels of freedom from state to state. The uneven spread of economic freedom in India is a reminder to state-level policymakers that there is much they too can do to improve the welfare of their citizens. In that sense, we hope that this report can help as an empirical guide to better policies.