The Great Post War Showdown

While there can never be any true controlled experiments in economics, you do on a rare occasion get an example that is close. I refer you here to the way that the country of India and the jurisdiction of Hong Kong structured their respective economies in the years and decades after WW2. While the former example relied disproportionately upon social planning/interventionism, protectionism, a large public sector, and business regulation, the latter went almost immediately to a free market capitalistic approach. Gee, guess which one did better. Two guesses and the first one doesn't count...................................................................................Yeah, that's right, folks, India remained impoverished for over 40 years and Hong Kong quickly became one of the fastest growing economies in the history of human civilization (it's GNP growing by close 18,000% from 1961 to 1997). Now, to be fair here, India eventually did engage in its own form of economic liberalization in the early '90s and they, too, are finally doing well. But from 1947 to 1991 a better comparison/contrast you will never find and it underscores YET AGAIN the fact that the freer economies do significantly better than those that are structured by bureaucrats and philosopher kings................................................................................P.S. And what makes the Hong Kong situation even more remarkable is the fact that the island has almost zero natural resources and even less in terms of farmland.