[Jeffery Sachs] India's outsourcing trend changing the world: Sachs

From theEconomic Times, India.

India is teaching the world a crucial lesson about division of labour - where data from the West is crunched and processed in the East through outsourcing - and that is changing the world, says noted economist Jeffery Sachs.

"Who would have guessed 25 years ago that impoverished India would burst upon the world economy in the 1990s through hi-tech information services? Nobody... I saw first hand, repeatedly, how India's ability to take advantage of the new IT possibilities resulted from its longstanding investments in higher education," Sachs writes in his new book, "The End of Poverty".

"India is ... teaching the world a lot about the richness of the international division of labour, and how it changes in response to technological possibilities," Sachs writes in the book published by Penguin.

In it, Sachs charts out the route world governments, especially rich ones, must take to end extreme poverty by 2025.

With erudition and hard-hitting analysis, Sachs shows how woes like strife and terrorism will continue to fester as long as millions struggle for access to food, clothing and shelter.

"Currently, more than eight million people around the world die each year because they are too poor to stay alive," writes Sachs in the 368-page book.

"Every morning our papers would report, 'More than 20,000 people perished yesterday of extreme poverty'. They die namelessly, without public comment. Sadly, such stories rarely get written.

"The $450 billion that the US will spend this year on the military will never buy peace if it continues to spend around one-thirtieth of that, just $15 billion, to address the plight of the world's poorest of the poor, whose societies are destabilised by extreme poverty and thereby become havens of unrest, violence and even global terrorism."