But this claim mistakes the competitive part of the economy for the much larger whole which contains many sheltered sectors.
This suits the insiders, particularly those on sheltered public-sector contracts.
But its recent decision to allow foreign supermarkets to compete with small shops in India's long-sheltered retail sector has not gone down well politically.
While American companies operate in radically different ways than they did 40 years ago, the sheltered, government-dominated sectors of the economy — especially education, health care and the welfare state — operate in astonishingly similar ways.
Today, just 7% of pensioners in the UK live in the sheltered and retirement housing sector, and the average age at which people move into extra care accommodation is in the late 70s.
The main reasons why productivity growth has been so sluggish are a lack of competition in sheltered product markets together with a poorly performing public sector.
Just as Japan and South Korea made it hard for Detroit automakers to compete in those countries - giving their own automakers time to amass economies of scale in sheltered domestic markets - China is shielding its clean energy sector while it grows to a point where it can take on the world".
This will come not through adding new sectors but building on what's left in the sheltered foundational economy of activities such as supermarkets, utilities, schools and hospitals that are distributed according to population.
In addition, the new capacity needed to meet the growing demand of sheltered housing and home help for the older people is mostly purchased from the private sector.
When I started work in local authority social work as a teenager in the late 1960s the vast majority of care given to the elderly was provided by the public sector, with almost every community having their own council care home, often linked to sheltered housing schemes.
