Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
“The Indians said they wanted to look at how we could continue to have a strong trading relationship and there was agreement that as we prepare to leave the EU, we should be exploring what that looks like,” the official said.
“Prime Minister Modi said that we had always been an important partner for India and nothing about leaving the European Union would change that.”
The two leaders were meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in the Chinese city of Hangzhou.
The country could create sustainable economic conditions in five ways, such as promoting acceptable living standards, improving the urban infrastructure, and unlocking the potential of women.
Twenty-five years ago, India embarked on a journey of economic liberalization, opening its doors to globalization and market forces. We, and the rest of the world, have watched as the investment and trade regime introduced in 1991 raised economic growth, increased consumer choice, and reduced poverty significantly.
Now, as uncertainties cloud the global economic picture, the International Monetary Fund has projected that India’s GDP will grow by 7.4 percent for 2016–17, making it the world’s fastest-growing large economy. India also compares favorably with other emerging markets in growth potential. (Exhibit 1).
The country offers an attractive long-term future powered largely by a consuming class that’s expected to more than triple, to 89 million households, by 2025.Exhibit 1
Liberalization has created new opportunities. The challenge for policy makers is to manage growth so that it creates the basis for sustainable economic performance. Although much work has been done, India’s transformation into a global economic force has yet to fully benefit all its citizens. There’s a massive unmet need for basic services, such as water and sanitation, energy, and health care, for example, while red tape makes it hard to do business. The government has begun to address many of these challenges, and the pace of change could accelerate in coming years as some initiatives gain scale.
From our vantage point, India has an exciting future. In the new McKinsey Global Institute report India’s ascent: Five opportunities for growth and transformation, we look at game-changing opportunities for the country’s economy and the implications for domestic businesses, multinational companies, and the government. The five areas we focus on by no means provide a comprehensive assessment of India’s prospects, but we believe they are among the most significant trends. Foreign and Indian businesses would do well to recognize these opportunities and reflect on how to exploit them.
1. From poverty to empowerment:
Acceptable living standards for allThe trickle-down effect of economic liberalization has lifted millions of Indians from indigence in the past two decades. The official poverty rate declined from 45 percent of the population in 1994 to 22 percent in 2012, but this statistic defines only the most dismal situations. By our broader measure of minimum acceptable living standards—spanning nutrition, water, sanitation, energy, housing, education, and healthcare—we find that 56 percent of Indians lacked the basics in 2012.
The country will need to address these gaps to achieve its potential. The task is certainly within India’s capacity, but policy makers will have to promote an agenda emphasizing job creation, growth-oriented investment, farm-sector productivity, and innovative social programs that help the people who actually need them. The private sector has a substantial role to play both in creating and providing effective basic services.
2. Sustainable urbanization:
Building India’s growth enginesBy 2025, MGI estimates, India will have 69 cities with a population of more than one million each. Economic growth will center on them, and the biggest infrastructure building will take place there. The output of Indian cities will come to resemble that of cities in middle-income nations (Exhibit 2).
In 2030, for example, Mumbai’s economy, a mammoth market of $245 billion in consumption, will be bigger than Malaysia’s today. The next four cities by market size will each have annual consumption of $80 billion to $175 billion by 2030.Exhibit 2To achieve sustainable growth, these cities will have to become more livable places, offering clean air and water, reliable utilities, and extensive green spaces. India’s urban transformation represents a huge opportunity for domestic and international businesses that can provide capital, technology, and planning know-how, as well as the goods and services urban consumers demand.
3. Manufacturing for India, in India
Although India’s manufacturing sector has lagged behind China’s, there will be substantial opportunities to invest in value-creating businesses and to create jobs. India’s appeal to potential investors will be more than just its low-cost labor: manufacturers there are building competitive businesses to tap into the large and growing local market. Further reforms and public infrastructure investments could make it easier for all types of manufacturing businesses—foreign and Indian alike—to achieve scale and efficiency.
4. Riding the digital wave:
Harnessing technology for India’s growthTwelve powerful technologies will benefit India, helping to raise productivity, improving efficiency across major sectors of the economy, and radically altering the provision of services such as education and healthcare. These technologies could add $550 billion to $1 trillion a year of economic value in 2025, according to our analysis, potentially creating millions of well-paying, productive jobs (including positions for people with moderate levels of formal education) and helping millions of Indians to enjoy a decent standard of living.
5. Unlocking the potential of Indian women: If not now, when?
Our research suggests that women now contribute only 17 percent of India’s GDP and make up just 24 percent of the workforce, compared with 40 percent globally. In the coming decade, they will represent one of the largest potential economic forces in the country. If it matched the progress toward gender parity of the region’s fastest-improving country, we estimate that it could add $700 billion to its GDP in 2025. Movement toward closing the gender gap in education and in financial and digital inclusion has begun, but there is scope for further progress.
Public-sector efforts to address the five areas are under way. The government is attempting to improve the investment climate and accelerate job creation—India’s ranking on the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report climbed to 55 in 2015–16, from 71 a year earlier. Officials are moving to make the government more efficient, using technology that can leapfrog traditional bottlenecks of a weak infrastructure. One billion Indian citizens, for example, are now registered under Aadhaar, the world’s largest digital-identity program and a potent platform for delivering benefits directly to the poor.
Realizing India’s promise will require national, state, and local leaders to adopt new approaches to governance and the provision of services. To meet the people’s aspirations, these officials will also need new capabilities. The requirements include private sector–style procurement and supply-chain expertise, deep technical skills for planning portfolios of infrastructure investments, and strong project-management capabilities to ensure that large capital projects finish on time and on budget. Training will be needed to help staff members use digital technologies to automate and reengineer processes, manage big data and advanced analytics, and improve interactions among citizens through digitized touchpoints, online-access platforms, portals, and messaging and payment platforms. The government could acquire these capabilities by adopting quality-oriented procurement policies and taking advantage of secondments from the private sector. For businesses, India represents a sizable market but will require a granular strategy and a locally focused operating model.
No single report can capture all the changes taking place in the country, but we have tried here to identify the most significant trends. Foreign and Indian businesses should consider how their strategies will be influenced by them. Policy makers should focus on helping all stakeholders to capitalize on them. By any measure, the challenge is daunting, but success could give a historic boost to India’s economy.
Chronically low oil prices are disrupting a critical financial lifeline across Asia and depriving economies of much-needed hard currency.
The flow of cash, or remittances, from Asian citizens working in the Gulf soared when the price of oil was high, boosting growth across the board. The billions of dollars in annual inflows paid for necessities such as schooling and health care and helped propel families into the middle class for the first time.
Now that money is disappearing, perhaps permanently, as laborers lose work in oil-driven Mideast countries. That’s adding a new threat to growth in some Asian nations and depriving them of currency inflows they need to balance their national accounts and keep their currencies from depreciating too quickly.
A barrel of Nymex crude is now trading at around $41, up from below $30 earlier this year. But prices are a long way from the peak of the boom and aren’t expected to return to previous highs soon. In February 2014, a barrel of crude cost more than $100.
Demonstrating the pressures of sustained low prices, thousands of Indian workers protested in Saudi Arabia on Saturday at being left without jobs, pay and food after they were laid off. The Indian government stepped in over the weekend to hand out food to hungry workers.
A nation-wide bank strike in India hit the public transactions like cheque clearances and cash deposits, but the vital treasury operations including a 150 billion rupee ($2.24 billion) government bond auction are unlikely to be affected, traders said.Staffing in treasuries of banks are likely to be less than normal days but officials will ensure that functions like bidding at the auction will run smoothly, three traders at state-run banks said.
“Treasury people have been allowed to enter the head office of the bank, so there is no problem for us in trading or bidding at the auctions,” said a senior trader at a large state-run bank.
However, there could be some issues in some banks settling the previous day’s trades due to thin staffing.
“Settlement will be a problem at back office,” said a senior official with State Bank of India.The RBI was also not too worried about the impact of the strike on treasury operations and settlements of banks.
“There shouldn’t be any problem. Primary dealers are also there to underwrite if needed. But auctions should go through smoothly,” the official said.
An estimated 1 million bank staff are expected to strike work, opposing the government’s proposal to merge SBI‘s associate banks with itself. In addition, unions are against the government’s proposed move to privatise IDBI Bank.
A city in central China is shutting down a waste incineration project, it said, after thousands of people protested against the plant over fears it will damage the environment and residents’ health.
Photos posted on social media, which could not be verified by Reuters, showed dozens of riot police marching in the city of Xiantao, located in Hubei province in central China.
About 10,000 people protested in Xiantao on Sunday, the state-backed Global Times reported, citing a local resident, even after the local government said it planned to suspend the project on Sunday morning.
Another resident told Reuters by phone on Monday that the protests continued, and several protesters were injured in clashes with riot police.
“There are hundreds of police here because of the demonstrations,” said the resident, who declined to give his name because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The city government called on residents to refrain from taking “extreme actions” and spreading rumors in a statement on its official microblog.
Tens of thousands of “mass incidents” – the usual euphemism for protests – happen in China each year, spurred by grievances over issues such as corruption, pollution and illegal land grabs, unnerving the stability-obsessed ruling Communist Party.
Last June, thousands of people protested in Jinshan, about 60 km (37 miles) from China’s commercial hub of Shanghai, against plans to build a chemical plant in the district.
A Xiantao official said that the planned plant’s emissions of dioxin, a toxic compound, would have been in line with European Union standards, state media reported.
It won’t be easy, but shifting to a productivity-led economy from one focused on investment could add trillions of dollars to the country’s growth by 2030.
After three decades of sizzling growth, China is now regarded by the World Bank as an upper-middle-income nation, and it’s on its way to being one of the world’s advanced economies. The investment-led growth model that underpinned this extraordinary progress has served China well. Yet some strains associated with that approach have become evident.
In 2015, the country’s GDP growth dipped to a 25-year low, corporate debt soared, foreign reserves fell by $500 billion, and the stock market dropped by nearly 50 percent. A long tail of poorly performing companies pulls down the average, although top-performing Chinese companies often have returns comparable with those of top US companies in their industries. More than 80 percent of economic profit comes from financial services—a distorted economy. Speculation that China could be on track for a financial crisis has been on the rise.
The nation faces an important choice: whether to continue with its old model and raise the risk of a hard landing for the economy, or to shift gears. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, China’s choice: Capturing the $5 trillion productivity opportunity, finds that a new approach centered on productivity could generate 36 trillion renminbi ($5.6 trillion) of additional GDP by 2030, compared with continuing the investment-led path. Household income could rise by 33 trillion renminbi ($5.1 trillion).
China has the capacity to manage the decisive shift to a productivity-led model. Its government can pull fiscal and monetary levers, such as raising sovereign debt and securing additional financing on the basis of 123 trillion renminbi in state-owned assets. China has a vibrant private sector, earning three times the returns on assets of state-owned enterprises. There are now 116 million middle-class and affluent households (with annual disposable income of at least $21,000 per year), compared with just 2 million such households in 2000. And the country is ripe for a productivity revolution. Labor productivity is 15 to 30 percent of the average in countries that are part of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
A new productivity-led model would enable China to create more sustainable jobs, reinforcing the rise of the consuming middle class and accelerating progress toward being a full-fledged advanced economy. Such a shift will require China to steer investment away from overbuilt industries to businesses that have the potential to raise productivity and create new jobs. Weak competitors would need to be allowed to fail rather than drag down profitability in major sectors. Consumers would have more access to services and opportunities to participate in the economy.
Making this transition is an urgent imperative. The longer China continues to accumulate debt to support near-term goals for GDP growth, the greater the risks of a hard landing. We estimate that the nonperforming-loan ratio in 2015 was already at about 7 percent, well above the reported 1.7 percent. If no visible progress is made to curb lending to poorly performing companies, and if the performance of Chinese companies overall continues to deteriorate, we estimate that the nonperforming-loan ratio could rise to 15 percent. This would trigger a substantial impairment of banks’ capital and require replenishing equity by as much as 8.2 trillion renminbi ($1.3 trillion) in 2019. In other words, every year of delay could raise the potential cost by more than 2 trillion renminbi ($310 billion). Although such an escalation would not lead to a systemic banking crisis, a liquidity crunch among corporate borrowers and waning confidence of investors and consumers during the recovery phase would have a significant negative impact on growth.
Our report identifies five major opportunities to raise productivity by 2030:
unleashing more than 39 trillion renminbi ($6 trillion) in consumption by serving middle-class consumers better
enabling new business processes through digitization
moving up the value chain through innovation, especially in R&D-intensive sectors, where profits are only about one-third of those of global leaders
improving business operations through lean techniques and higher energy efficiency, for instance, which could deliver a 15 to 30 percent productivity boost
strengthening competitiveness by deepening global connections, potentially raising productivity by 10 to 15 percent
Capturing these opportunities requires sweeping change to institutions. China needs to open up more sectors to competition, enable corporate restructuring, and further develop its capital markets. It needs to raise the skills of the labor force to fill its talent gap and to sustain labor mobility. The government will need to manage conflicts among many stakeholders, as well as shift governance and incentives that rewarded a single-minded focus on rising GDP, even as it modernizes its own processes.
India’s fast-growing economy attracted $44 billion in foreign direct investment in 2015, making it the 10th largest destination globally for such investment last year, according to United Nations figures released this week.
That represents a 26% increase in foreign investment in India over the year before, according to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development, which published the data in its latest World Investment Report. Prime Minister Narendra Modi has touted the growing stream of overseas money entering India as a signal accomplishment of his two years in office.
The latest U.N. figures suggest in particular that the Modi government’s efforts to encourage more global companies to “Make in India” are reaping some success. Foreign investments worth $28.7 billion in so-called “greenfield” manufacturing projects, or those that start from scratch, were announced in India last year—more than double the $11 billion in investments that were announced in 2014. Electronics manufacturing saw an especially big boost, with $13.5 billion invested in such projects in 2015, compared with $1.1 billion the year before.
The Modi administration has made changes to keep the money coming. Last year it began allowing foreigners to own larger stakes in Indian companies in insurance, construction, mining, manufacturing and others. This week the government announced increases in foreign-investment limits in defense, retail, civil aviation, pharmaceuticals and grocery businesses. The changes, the official press release declared, make India “the most open economy in the world” for foreign direct investment.
Some experts doubt the latest rule changes will cause more money to flood in right away, though, given the degree to which Indian regulations remain vague and regulatory decision-making remains opaque.
India has risen steadily as a host of overseas investment since 2000, when the entirety of foreigners’ stakes in the economy was valued at $16 billion. The same figure last year was $282 billion.
In terms of yearly inflows, the country still ranks far behind mainland China, which lured $136 billion in foreign direct investment in 2015; Hong Kong, which attracted $175 billion; and Singapore, $65 billion. The U.S. was 2015’s top host of investment from abroad: $380 billion of it flowed into the world’s largest economy last year.
Among executives surveyed by the UNCTAD, 19% picked India as the most promising host country for investment over the next few years. Nearly half picked the U.S.; 21% chose China. But world-wide, the U.N. body expects foreign investment flows to dip by 10% to 15% this year. Its surveys indicate that multinational companies are skittish about volatile exchange rates, geopolitical uncertainty and mounting debt in developing countries.
Liberalization has created new opportunities. The challenge for policy makers is to manage growth so that it creates the basis for sustainable economic performance. Although much work has been done, India’s transformation into a global economic force has yet to fully benefit all its citizens. There’s a massive unmet need for basic services, such as water and sanitation, energy, and health care, for example, while red tape makes it hard to do business. The government has begun to address many of these challenges, and the pace of change could accelerate in coming years as some initiatives gain scale.
In 2030, for example, Mumbai’s economy, a mammoth market of $245 billion in consumption, will be bigger than Malaysia’s today. The next four cities by market size will each have annual consumption of $80 billion to $175 billion by 2030.Exhibit 2To achieve sustainable growth, these cities will have to become more livable places, offering clean air and water, reliable utilities, and extensive green spaces. India’s urban transformation represents a huge opportunity for domestic and international businesses that can provide capital, technology, and planning know-how, as well as the goods and services urban consumers demand.
CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 