Why can China build cities overnight while India has trouble building roads? Why does China ban free elections while Indians vote in officials with criminal records?
These are just some of the questions the Harvard Business School professor Tarun Khanna takes up in his book, Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India Are Reshaping Their Futures and Yours.
Listen to Mark Tran's interview with Tarun Khanna
The soft-spoken Khanna, who talked to hundreds of business people and policymakers for his book, has offered an optimistic take on the rise of India and China with their combined population of 2.4 billion. Not for him the scaremongering found among commentators such as the CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, who warns about the loss of American jobs to China, as well as defective Chinese products.
In a sense the growing economic might of these two Asian giants - although some would say with feet of clay - is a case of back to the future. In the 1800s as much as 50% of world GDP was accounted for by China and India. Khanna is pragmatic about both countries: they have achieved economic success through very different methods and he lays out the strengths and weaknesses of the two "petri dishes" of economic development.
As befitting a Harvard business professor, Khanna is a market liberal. But he acknowledges the effectiveness of China's top-down approach, a capitalism (of sorts) imposed from above that has lifted millions out of poverty, while creating new cities that rival New York and London. Yet he takes note of the downside; the lack of clear property rights and democratic freedoms that could hinder further economic progress.
India's economic model is a messier affair. In a sometimes raucous democracy, where the voters regularly vote in MPs with criminal records, the task of central government, more often than not, is to get out of the way and let the private sector drive growth and create jobs. India can't build gleaming cities overnight because the government is too weak to bulldoze slums to make room for skyscrapers.
China's approach to economic development - centred on manufacturing and big infrastructure projects, from dams to rail - and to foreign policy typifies "hard power". India, with its software industry and Bollywood films, represents "soft power".
Khanna coins the term "mutualism" to describe the synthesis of these two economic approaches that will benefit not just China and India but the rest of the world. He cites the case of GE Healthcare, the health arm of the US corporate giant General Electric. GE was unique because it succeeded both in China and India and its operations are more than a sum of its parts.
GE Healthcare took the best from both countries to develop its medical equipment and has opened research and development centres in Shanghai and Bangalore. Since writing the book, Khanna says he has discovered hundreds more examples of cross-fertilisation.
"The ability to set up parallel groups of highly skilled engineering talent in both countries is invaluable," a GE executive told Khanna. "It raises the efficiency of product development and fits in with a competitive culture within GE."
Not all commentators buy this "rosy scenario". In his book, Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, Bill Emmott, the former editor-in-chief of the Economist, offers ableaker vision of the rise of Asia.
"An array of disputes, historical bitternesses and regional flashpoints weigh down on all three countries. Conflict is not inevitable but nor is it inconceivable. If it were to occur - over Taiwan, say, or the Korean peninsula or Tibet or Pakistan - it would not simply be an intra-Asian affair. The outside world would be drawn in."
Khanna acknowledges the existence of such security concerns, but thinks it bad social science to extrapolate from the past 40 years of tension between India and China.
"It is equally plausible to see the rise of economic development between two friendly countries," says Khanna, a self-avowed optimist who thinks increased human contact between India and China can only be positive. "There is nothing to suggest hostility between India and China beyond the occasional sabre-rattling over border disputes."