ABSTRACT
After India experienced a broad economic revival in the 2000s, it became fashionable for globalisation pundits to use China and India as case studies to compare the relative merits of their competing economic development models (Eichengreen, Gupta and Kumar, 2010). This chapter continues that debate by comparing Chinese and Indian strategies for using electronic commerce (e-commerce) as an economic development strategy, with particular reference to the promotion of electronic payment systems. Decades of rapid innovation in payments technology, combined with increased recognition of the role of financial inclusion and transaction costs in development theory, have brought the operation of national payment systems from the margins to the core of national economic development strategies in countries such as China and India.
