I’m reading Chindia at the moment. Chindia is a portmanteau of China and India, like BRIC is used to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China. The book is a real eye-opener. Some of the numbers are staggering. Also interesting is the fact that many of the essays in the book were first published a while ago, well outside of the shadow of the current credit crisis infecting Western economies. This adds an extra dimension to the messages of this book.
Tata has this week acquired Land Rover and Jaguar from Ford. There is a general expectation that the 3 UK plants and thousands of jobs are safe. Perhaps if you say it enough or you hear it from an authoritative enough source that sounds convincing. But I, not for a moment, believe it to be true. Sooner or later both these marques will be Made in India.
One of the more memorable ideas in Chindia is the notion that the USA is a developing country in terms of its pattern of trade with China. The USA exports raw materials and gets manufactured goods in return. The UK isn’t large enough to trade in raw material. The strategy propagated by successive governments that the UK has to become a knowledge economy and compete by being cleverer, particularly in service industries, is also vacuous. Our leading service business, finance, is quite happily unravelling before our eyes, based as it is, on foundations of sand.
Interesting times, as they say.
