NATIONAL > East meets West
Published: Wednesday, 28 Jul, 2010
The visit this week to India by David Cameron with a number of ministers and sundry UK business luminaries is a good thing. The reality is that the global economy is, quite literally, weighted more towards the east than the West for the simple reason that the East has
The visit this week to India by David Cameron with a number of ministers and sundry UK business luminaries is a good thing. The reality is that the global economy is, quite literally, weighted more towards the east than the West for the simple reason that the East has larger and faster growing populations with faster growing businesses. But that doesn't mean that the developed economies do not have a key role in the economy of the future; it does mean that theirs will be a different role.
In particular, there is an appetite among businesses from the new order for the established skills and capabilities that are derived from the long experience and successful track records of economies such as the UK's. This appetite manifests in a number of ways; sending students to UK universities, recruiting UK nationals and buying or establishing UK operations. It is this latter that matters for us. While firms such as Indian conglomerate Tata now own UK businesses such as Corus and Jaguar Land Rover, others are setting up, from scratch, UK design and engineering bases.
We, of course, can no longer adopt the imperial airs and graces that might once have been our hallmark in the world, but neither need we reverse that attitude for one of subservience. The established west and the emergent east need each other and that is really what a global economy should mean, shared interest for the good all, not the replacement of one hegemony for another. We will no doubt hear a great deal more about Indian and Chinese plus other nationals' businesses buying into UK design, engineering and manufacturing while we, in the other direction, should be looking to establish or buy eastern services such as financial services where our expertise has long earned us a place at the apex of global financial activity.
The next few years will be a test of just how global the global economy can be: get it right and we'll all prosper; get it wrong and, within 10 years we'll see a return to talk of damaging protectionist policies.
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