The next emerging market: A billion women
You would never dream of not investing in India. You would never dream of not investing in China. So why wouldn’t you invest in women? That question was posed by Beth Brooke of Ernst & Young at the launch on Wednesday of a campaign called The Third Billion that aims to empower women as a means to drive economic growth. The campaign is based on the notion that there are a billion women not participating in the global economy who should be.
“Every country, every company in the world is looking for growth wherever they can find it,” Brooke said at a panel discussion (which I moderated) at Thomson Reuters headquarters in New York. “Where is the growth coming from? It’s coming from the emerging markets … We historically think of those emerging markets as India and China and many others. But it is clear that women are an emerging market.”
DeAnne Aguirre, senior vice-president at Booz & Company, said the concept of the “Third Billion” comes from the notion that if China and India each represent 1 billion emerging participants in the global marketplace, then a third billion is made up of women around the world whose economic lives have been “stunted, underleveraged or suppressed.”
The figure is based on a Booz & Company analysis of International Labor Organization data on women in the global workforce that showed some 860 million women were excluded for one reason or another, a number forecast to rise to 1 billion in the next decade. (Many of those women are in India and China, of course, so there is overlap with the first and second billions.)
La Pietra Coalition, the global alliance behind the campaign, has identified five factors that contribute to keeping women from playing a more productive role: access to finance; legal and social status; barriers to entrepreneurship; lack of education and training; and labor policy and practice.
The group wants to bring together corporations, governments, NGOs and institutions such as the World Bank to address each of those issues.
Among those that have already partnered with La Pietra are Coca Cola, Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs and Standard Chartered Bank. Brooke, who is global vice-chair for public policy at Ernst & Young, said a key goal of the campaign is to enlist more big companies.
The great global rebalancing and its implications
Manoj Pradhan, left, a global EM economist, is an executive director at Morgan Stanley. Alan M. Taylor, right, a senior advisor at Morgan Stanley, is a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis. The opinions expressed are their own.
Policymakers have fretted about global imbalances for nearly a decade, but little consensus or clarity has emerged. Some saw problems created by surplus countries, others deficit countries. Many feared a fiscal-cum-balance of payments crisis in the U.S., but the crisis we got reflected private/financial failures. G20 proposals for collective action remain a work in progress. Uncoordinated policy actions triggered talk of currency wars.
As these debates drone on, there may be less cause for concern about global imbalances. Emerging market-developed market (EM-DM) relationships may revert to a more typical historical pattern. We highlight key areas of global adjustment in this scenario: shifts in capital flows, exchange rates and real interest rates.
The peculiar global macro configuration of the last 15 years was unprecedented. Capital flowed “uphill” from poor to rich countries — EMs saved more than they invested, the excess showing up as current account surpluses (net exports of EM goods) and financial outflows (net acquisition of DM assets). But digging deeper exposed a crucial fact: private capital still flowed “downhill” to EM economies in line with intuition, but offset by even larger “uphill” official flows, the reserves bought by EM central banks and sovereign wealth funds.
Despite allegations of strategic undervaluation, mercantilism, and the like, EMs had good reason to accumulate reserves as a precautionary measure. They had learned painful lessons from past crises. A loss of capital market access or sudden stop, or a bank/currency run or sudden flight, could trigger a vicious risk spiral linking currency crashes, banking panics and default.
In the 1997 Asian crisis, IMF help was seen as slow, limited, expensive and laden with unpleasant policy conditionality; economies, and their political leaders, suffered heavy damage. Reserve war chests were a “self insurance” response, obviating the need to rely on the kindness of strangers.
Shifting wealth: does the developing world hold the key to building a stronger economy?
The following is a guest post by Angel Gurría, Secretary-General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation Development. The opinions expressed are his own.
The world’s economic center of gravity is changing. Global GDP growth over the last decade owes more to the developing world than to high-income economies. If these trends continue, by 2030 developing countries will account for nearly 60% of world GDP on a purchasing-power parity basis, according to OECD calculations.
While high-income countries have been languishing in the worst recession since the 1930s, China and India have continued to power ahead. This is not a single stand-alone event, but a sign of an important structural transformation in the global economy, a process we call “shifting wealth.”
The tangible signs of shifting wealth are widespread. In 2009 China became the leading trading partner of Brazil, India and South Africa. The Indian multinational Tata is now the second most active investor in sub-Saharan Africa. Over 40% of the world’s researchers are now based in Asia. And by 2009, developing countries were holding USD 5.4 trillion in foreign currency reserves, nearly twice as much the amount held by rich countries.
Some commentators talk about these new trends with trepidation. But the “rise of the rest” is not a “threat to the west:” overall, the newfound prosperity in the developing world represents an enormous opportunity for citizens in the developing and developed world alike. Improvements in the range and quality of their exports, greater technological dynamism, better prospects for doing business, a larger consumption base – all these factors can create substantial welfare benefits for the world.
Moreover, imagine the consequences if the Asian Giants had followed the industrialised countries into recession? These large developing countries have helped soften the impact of the most serious global recession since the 1930s. Through their trade and investment links they have also mitigated the impact of the crisis on the rest of the developing world. Africa, for instance, is forecast to post growth of 4.5 percent this year – a figure below its pre-crisis level, but far in excess of that of the OECD average.
As world leaders work on the recovery and strengthening of the global economy and financial system, more attention deserves to be paid to South-South linkages, which promise to be one of the main engines of growth over the coming decade. Take trade, for example. Between 1990 and 2008, South-South trade multiplied more than twenty times over, while world trade expanded only four-fold. Yet trade barriers between developing countries are still high.
If the 19th and 20th century models for building an industrial society are followed by the developing world, their success will be even more short lived than that of Europe and the U.S..
from The Great Debate UK:
Pranab Bardhan on the economic rise of China and India
In its May economic outlook, the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development projected upward growth outlooks for BRIC countries Brazil, Russia, India and China -- the world's four largest emerging economies.
Strong growth in those economies is helping to pull other countries out of recession, the OECD said. The Paris-based organisation projects that China’s GDP growth will exceed 11 percent for 2010, and anticipates that India's real GDP growth will be 8.3 percent. Russia's GDP growth is expected to be 5.5 percent, and Brazil's is projected at 6.5 percent. By comparison, the OECD projects that the Euro area will see 1.5 percent real GDP growth, while the UK will see a 2.2 percent growth.
The "BRIC" acronym was created by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O'Neill in 2001 to mark a shift of economic power from the West. In June 2009, the BRIC leaders met in Yekaterinburg, Russia, for a summit, which was seen as the beginning of a geopolitical alliance, although their economies are very different: Brazil's economy is based on agriculture; Russia's on energy exports; India's on services and China's on manufacturing. At that time, the BRIC countries accounted for 40 percent of the world's population and about 15 percent of its economy.
In a new book titled "Awakening Giants, Feet of Clay: Assessing the Economic rise of China and India", Pranab Bardhan, a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, dissects some generally accepted beliefs about the economies of China and India -- arguing that they are oversimplified -- to provide a new perspective on what to expect from the two countries in the future.
He examines the impact of economic growth on politics, people and the environment within China and India.
Bardhan spoke to Reuters about his book at his office at the London School of Economics where he is serving as BP Centennial Professor for 2010 and 2011. Watch the video here:
G20: Vows to act but few specifics
– Kenichi Kawasaki is managing director and senior analyst at Nomura Securities’ Financial and Economic Research Center. The views expressed are his own –
The G20 leaders failed to come up with any concrete policy steps to pull the global economy out of recession at the London summit. The leaders vowed to restore growth and jobs, but lacked specifics about fiscal measures by each country and there were no binding promises.
There were expectations that the summit would tackle the issue of rising protectionism, but the summit is not an appropriate place to discuss international trade and investment. We saw a measure of results in expanding assistance to emerging economies, but it made the summit look as if it were a mere international conference on aid to emerging economies.
Since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last September, G20 countries have been trying to stabilize the financial markets with central banks taking exceptional action and cutting interest rates aggressively. The governments’ focus now appears to have shifted to restoring growth and protecting jobs from reacting to contingencies arising from the financial crisis.
The G20 leaders vowed fiscal stimulus totalling $5 trillion and to raise output by 4 percent by the end of next year. However, it failed to break down how much spending each country would bear. There is no indication that there are any binding targets. Since the financial crisis erupted, it has become increasingly difficult to coordinate policy given differences in the economic, fiscal and financial situations of the member countries.
Japan fleshed out its own $150 billion economic stimulus package on April 10, but the impact on boosting gross domestic product remains to be seen. The Japanese government had previously dished out economic packages with spending totalling 12 trillion yen ($120 billion). Government spending in the last fiscal year ended in March, however, only increased by 2.6 trillion yen (equivalent to about 0.5 percent of GDP). The “real water” spending will likely be limited even with the new stimulus package.
On the concern that world trade is falling for the first time in 25 years, the G20 leaders promised to extend the pledge made last year to “refrain from raising new barriers to investment or to trade” by one year to the end of 2010. Certainly, protectionist measures in any country will not protect jobs, but rather hinder economic growth. Moreover, economic model analysis on the economic effects of liberalizing trade and investment shows that “free-rider” gains from other countries’ free-trade policy would be limited. The analysis also indicates that it is important to liberalize the domestic market to maximize the benefits of global trade and investment.
Yes.