Changing China

from Global Investing:

A shoe, a song and the promise of the West

I found myself at Selfridges this week, specifically in what the London retailer says is the world's largest shoe department.

Slightly dazed by cornucopia of women's shoes on slick display, I was roused only when the haze of muzak wafting over the PA system was suddenly dispersed by the jaunty strains of the Chinese New Year ditty 'Gongxi Gongxi'.

A 1946 composition from Shanghai, the song has gone from classic to kitsch, evolving to become the most popular festive song in the Chinese-speaking world. Its ubiquity rests on the many -- for me at least -- teeth-grindingly cloying versions played all over shops and markets in Asia. (Click here for example and don't say I didn't warn you)

I was somewhat surprised by the song's appearance in the British retail icon -- not least because it's still some ways off the Year of the Dragon. But then looking at the shoppers around me it all made sense.

Mainland Chinese travellers spent some £200 million on Bond Street last year. That's a 155 percent surge from 2009, according to an association of luxury retailers in the London thoroughfare.

Never mind that these products are largely assembled back in their home country, Chinese tourists buy their designer bags on Bond Street and elsewhere in Europe to avoid China's luxury sales tax. More importantly, these status-conscious buyers have the assurance that they are not being sold knock-offs -- a risk rampant in a country notorious for its lack of regard for intellectual property.

Those reasons are similar to those that drive the wealthy elite in many emerging economies to London, a city that Goldman Sach's Jim O'Neil has dubbed the "BRIC capital of the world".

from MacroScope:

The iPod – the iCon of Chinese capitalism

Walking past Apple's sleek shop along London's Regent Street on Sunday, my wife asked me what I wanted for Father's Day.

"An iPad?" I ventured, half-jokingly.

"Are you sure you want one? Don't you care how they're made?" came her disapproving reply.

She was, of course, referring to the rash of suicides among Chinese workers at Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturer of Apple's much desired iPads and iPhones.

The deaths prompted the company to raise salaries and cut working hours but lingering concerns over conditions for its over 1 million workers in China were underscored by a plant explosion last month that killed at least 3 people.

Workers like those who live and work in Foxconn's sprawling Chinese facilities have long been the backbone of the country's vast manufacturing sector which churns out a torrent of consumer goods for export.

But the recent labour unrest that has erupted in parts of China suggests that this low-cost export-fuelled growth model may be wheezing towards its expiry date.

from Global Investing:

Time to kick Russia out of the BRICs?

It may end up sounding like a famous ball-point pen maker, but an argument is being made that Goldman Sach's famous marketing device, the BRICs, should really be the BICs. Does Russia really deserve to be a BRIC, asks Anders Åslund, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, in an article for Foreign Policy.

Åslund, who is also co-author with Andrew Kuchins of "The Russian Balance Sheet", reckons the Russia of Putin and Medvedev is just not worthy of inclusion alongside Brazil, India and China  in the list of blue-chip economic powerhouses. He writes:

The country's economic performance has plummeted to such a dismal level that one must ask whether it is entitled to have any say at all on the global economy, compared with the other, more functional members of its cohort.

I have just returned from Moscow, which is always dreary around this season. But this year, the mood among the capital's eloquent liberal economists has hit a new low. For the last seven years, Russia has undertaken no significant economic reforms. Instead, the state has been living off oil and gas, like a lucky but undeserving rentier."

Economically, Åslund has the numbers on his side. The International Monetary Fund estimates that the Russian economic will contract by 6.7 percent this year, while China will grow 8.5 percent and India 5.4 percent. There is less of a case for Brazil, with a contraction of 0.7 percent projected, but it is still doing far better than Russia.

But the BRICs concept is not just about economics. As mentioned, it is a marketing device to urge investors to focus on the big emerging players. From an investment standpoint, it could be argued that Russia is leading the BRICs. Its stock market is up 128 percent this year versus around 80 percent for the other three.

At very least, however, Russia's economic underperformance and stock market outperformance does suggest it is the outlier of the group.

Supply Push?

This is almost certainly not what Chinese policy makers had in mind when they started encouraging exporters to explore the domestic market to help make up for a drop in Western demand: sex toy makers opening flagship stores in Beijing.

But as an article and a video by my colleagues Ben Blanchard and Kitty Bu explore, that is just one of the side-effects the global slowdown is having on the world’s most populous country.

With factory owners looking to tap the local market to soak up excess capacity now that the export market is less reliable, many are setting up their own local brand names and retail outlets.

In the case of many products, like clothing and electronics, that does not necessarily portend any significant change in habits or lifestyle.

But in other areas, companies’ efforts to build up demand for their goods in the home market will themselves increasingly serve to shape tastes and lifestyles.

It’s not just firms like Sweet Secrets, which says it holds the country’s first registered trademark for a sex toy company.

An array of products previously sent straight overseas has been popping up on shelves in many of Beijing’s markets over the past several months, exposing especially young shoppers to a new set of possibilities.

from MacroScope:

Victory for emerging BRICs?

Emerging market ministers, particularly those from the BRIC economies -- Brazil, Russia, India and China -- are painting this weekend's G20 meeting as a victory in dragging them out of the shadows of global policy-making.

The finance ministers' statement included the promise of more money for the International Monetary Fund and regional development banks, on whom struggling emerging economies rely for support.

It accelerated a review of IMF quotas by two years to 2011, which should give emerging economies more say in the running of the multilateral lender. It also suggested that the headship of IFIs -- international financial institutions -- would no longer be guaranteed to Americans or Europeans. 

BRIC countries even issued their own communique, ahead of the final statement. "There is a conclusion that has been reached in recent years, which is that the resolution to today's global problems is only possible with the participation of emerging countries," Brazil's central bank governor Henrique Meirelles told MacroScope.

 "There is a natural evolution of the decision-making process, which many important countries agree on, that decisions move from the G7 to the G20."

But were there actually any major concessions?  Tim Ash,  head of emerging Europe, Middle East and Africa research at RBS thinks not.

"Clearly they would like things to change, but I'm not sure that much has actually changed," he says.