Regional imbalance under federal structure: a comparison of Canada and India

Abstract

The problem of regional disparity in economic development in geographically large democratic countries gets inseparably linked with macro public policies and the economic philosophies behind them. Two such countries, India and Canada, are considered in this paper. Although the two countries share several common features, they differ considerably in the size of the population, nature of the federation, constitutional provisions defining property rights on minerals and revenue sharing arrangements between the centre and the states, and the economic philosophy behind the macro policies of the governments.