India, April 10 -- As another round of assembly elections in West Bengal approaches, discussions around the state of its economy have inevitably resurfaced. Whatever one's political views, the dominant narrative about the state's economy is laced with nostalgia - a glorious past followed by a steady decline relative to the rest of the country since the 1960s.

Yet, there is a puzzle: Our research with Boston University economist Dilip Mookherjee shows that in terms of the growth rate of real net state domestic product (NSDP) per capita - a standard measure of a state's economic prosperity - over the entire period for which we have comparable data (1960 to 2024), West Bengal has had very similar performance to that of the rest of India.

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