Sunday Posts

'Self-reliance' has come to India. However, in its current avatar, it looks less like a confident country aspiring for a great future but rather like this staged street-corner bonfire of foreign (chinese) products.   In a volte face par excellence, many Indian commentators, who snigger at 'Nehruvian Socialism' and the strategy of 'import substitution' followed by post-Independence India, are suddenly champions of 'Atmanirvar' Bharat. This, of course, doesn't mean that they have belatedly realised Nehru as a genius. They, and various Trump-loving American commentators after them, believe that this time, self-reliance is different. It is not about North Korea style autarky; instead, some kind of magical open closedness (or closed openness as it may be) that would let India have its cake and eat it too. "We can import anything as long as it's made in India", the Prime Minister is reported to have told a group of businessmen recently. This ...

In the middle of the ongoing economic chaos, many in India find solace in the hope that many manufacturing companies would now leave China and shift their factories to India. They enthusiastically share many stories about companies deciding to move out. While the COVID19 pandemic, still in its early stages in India, is stress-testing the Indian economy, India as the next global manufacturing hub is indeed the dream worth dreaming about. This is an old dream, however. This - 'Make in India' - was a campaign slogan in 2014 General Election. In fact, this has been the key economic strategy of the government of India, to elevate India into its next stage of economic development and reach the benefits of economic growth more widely than the service-led economy has achieved so far. It was presumed - then - that China had become too expensive for manufacturers and they would now move to cheaper locations, such as India. And, it was not wishful thinking: Manufacturers were indeed gradu...

After undermining the threat and overdoing the panic, we are starting to discuss, if only very gradually, the possibilities of a post-Pandemic world. After Donald Trump's April 12th came and went, we are pinning our hopes on the ever-so-slight flattening of the slope of the curves in various countries. France's 11th May target to reopen the schools, on the sound logic that digital deprivation is now turning into an educational gap, is being taken more seriously.  However, we know this is not going to be a return to normal as we know it. There is increasing speculation whether this is the end of Capitalism. At least one serious thinker, Slavoj Zizek, believes that this is the moment we will start taking communism seriously (not of the soviet variety, but rather of the war economy type that we are living with now). Though this is rather unlikely - socialism of the temporary kind ends up concentrating ever more resources in fewer hands, as we have seen from the last fina...

'Brain-drain' used to be big: Textbooks had sections on it, conferences bemoaned it and it was seen as a serious problem holding back the 'Third World'.  But, that was then: Suddenly it went out of fashion. As I grew up under its shadow - I studied Development Economics for my first degree - I am always very curious to know when exactly it died. It was already terribly out of fashion in the 1990s, the age of 'liberalization' and 'Globalization' and as the 'Third World' ceased to be the 'Third' and became 'developing' countries instead. But I have a hunch that 'brain-drain' limped on for a while, at least until 2008. As the lights went out in the West and many skilled migrants started returning to their home countries (which somehow withered the storm, at least at that point), 'Brain-drain' became an utterly useless concept. However, what killed 'Brain-drain' is not 'reverse migration' ...

Wrong question, perhaps! Some of the times I asked the question, I got awkward pauses in return. This is a dinosaur question, so dated, reactions indicated: Going global means being on the Cloud, countries are totally irrelevant in this conversation. As I wrote in an earlier post, Global or Multinational , I think this is one of the big mistakes companies make. Their assumption of flat world is totally off the mark. One has to touch the ground as long as they involve people from different nations as customers. This idea of 'global market', borrowed mostly from the playbook of hedge funds who seem to move money from one place to another seamlessly, does not apply to most businesses dealing with customers. One has to be 'national', multi-national if you like, because markets are national. And, that claim of being on the cloud is based on complete innocence of how marketing and product development work in real life. Once I get past the mistaken assumption of ...

Three building blocks of the world order we are accustomed to are Global Financial System, Nation States and Democracy.  This is what we have built over the last 150 years. The Global Financial System, in its earlier forms such as the Gold Standard, came about in late Nineteenth century. Nation States emerged around the same time, first in Europe and then they were everywhere as European empires disappeared after the Second World War. And, Democracy became the rallying cry, and standard of political systems, since the end of Cold War. In the post-war world, when the global financial institutions were designed in Bretton Woods, a few key policy-makers knew that the Global Financial System and Nation States may not be perfectly compatible. They, Lord Keynes among them, decided on a system of priorities - they put the Nation States first - and built an 'inter-national' economic system. This worked for some time, but the system was being dismantled, ever since the d...

It is common to hear - Globalization is not working for everyone! The Right says it, and believes that closed societies with open economies is the answer; the Left says it too, though they believe that the solution lies in closed economies with an open society. The Left says that the Right is xenophobic, and the Right says that the Left is living in cuckooland! And, the Right-of-the-Right and the Left-of-the-Left steal the wind from the sails of their clueless moderates, claiming, in consensus, that globalization is the problem, erasing the right-left divide into a new politics of For and Against Globalization. At least in theory, global trade is good: It should keep the wars away. Stopping trade is the first rumbling of the war, the moment when the possible booty of extraction seems bigger than benefits of exchange. And, this is not just about flows of goods and money: Flow of people too, since when people started to matter in politics, is important in reducing conflicts. Once y...

For being global, this is the worst of the time and the best of the time.  The worst part is obvious: Various countries now want to put themselves 'First' and that is not an ideal scenario to start thinking globally. Multinationals are in retreat. Trade Wars seem imminent. Currency disputes are heating up and cross-border immigration is becoming more difficult. Even UK, which proclaims its ambition to be 'Global' and has always benefited from being open, has started pulling up the drawbridges and succumbing to Little Englanders.   However, in this, there is a new promise, and that is the best part. The globalisation that we saw from the breaking of the Berlin Wall to the breaking of the Wall Street Banks was about building global value chains, of moving capital and commodities across the boundaries. We may be approaching an end of this phase. But this marks the start of a new phase - when the problems are global, from migration to climate change to terrorism t...

2017 has brought out all those Nostradamus and other doomsday predictions out of closet yet again, and this is because, rather ironically, 2016 has proved most predictions wrong and doomed the experts. This was a year of losing faith in expertise, as Britain's Michael Gove claimed on television, and sure enough, we got a Twitter-wielding American President before the end of the year. But if one expert has escaped 2016 unscathed, and indeed, vindicated, this would be Dani Rodrik of Harvard's Kennedy School. Dr Rodrik came up with 'Globalisation Trillemma' in 2012: The prediction that Democracies, Nation States and Global Markets can not coexist! One can get two out of the three, any two, but not all three. For all the shock at the events of 2016, this is one model has just been proved right. With all the hindsight of 2016, Dr Rodrik's model now makes abundant sense. At the heart of the 'Globalisation Trilemma' is the argument that Globalisation, by ...

If Marx missed the mark with the Proletariat achieving a deep political consciousness, he was prescient about how history happens: First as a tragedy, then as a farce! So, the recent history of Britain, recent as in the space of an week, is this spectacle in fast forward. Since an overall, though slender, majority voted to force the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, the political news has become sexy again. It would have been comical if the consequences were not so far reaching: Declaration of UK's independence (as John Oliver rightly puts it - the United Kingdom was an independent country before last week, and in fact lots of countries celebrate their independence from IT!), sudden volte face about taking the real legal step to start the process of leaving EU on both sides of the divide, the abnadoned promises as soon as the vote count is over and all the accompanying political fatricide, we have now seen it all.  But, apart from all the fast-developing stories...

To paraphrase Dickens, this is the best and the worst of the times for Global Higher Education. There has never been a time of greater demand and greater desire for it. As millions join the ranks of middle classes in Asia and Africa, the West, its lifestyle, income levels and culture define the shape of the dream - and global higher education represents the pathway to it. On the other hand, these students were never less welcome in the metropolitan centres of Europe, Australia and the United States. For all its high-minded rhetoric of borderless knowledge, the West feels overcome with migration, the modern-era exodus through the heart of Europe being its most visible manifestation. It is under an intellectual seizure, with extremist rhetoric and isolationist tendencies on the ascendance across the continent. Global education, in the form we came to know it, has never been more difficult to attain or costlier. One crucial factor that widens this chasm is the nature of the ...

In all the celebrations about the arrival of the flat world, we somewhat forgot, that Globalisation has a reverse gear. This was indeed the point made by Joshua Cooper Ramo in his 2012 Fortune article ( see here ). If that sounded alarmist then, some events recently would reconfirm the death of the flat world that we thought we were living in. So, at this particular time, the frontier of globalism really messy right now. Consider these few things 1. There are refugee boats floating on the sea in Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, caught in storm and running out of food and water. Countries like Indonesia are refusing to take them, letting women and children die. Britain is doing even better, with Murdoch Press proposing to send gun-boats to meet them, as immigrants are like cockroaches, they say. 2. Russia has more or less exited the Power system established after the Second World War and is trying to re-establish the old empire. It has dismembered a neighbouring nation ...

Having worked in International Setting most of career, and having lived in four different countries and engaging in business in at least half a dozen others, one of most attractive conversation topic for me is - what makes an organisation effective globally? In my work, I come across educational institutions which want to recruit students from all over the world, or businesses which want to trade, and indeed do, globally. I hear conference speeches and business presentations proclaiming global ambitions. I meet people dreaming of scale, globally. Yet, at the same time, I see the track record of global engagement to be one full of failures and disappointments, over-expectations and under-achievements.  I believe the essential problem of constructing a really global organisation comes from the essential tension between trust versus difference. Any organisation wants to impose an uniform culture - and indeed, doing so is essential. Only by promoting an uniform culture can an...

I recently wrote about the 'Global Workforce Crisis' ( see here ). This issue, from my perspective, is both self-evident, because there is no denying of the age curve, and limited, because there are so many other issues, political, social, environmental and even emotional, that need to be dealt with before we can even start talking about 'workforce crisis'. The world is more than one giant factory, and pursuing problems such as these make us overlook that. However, it is also equally important, before we indulge into any of those 'soft' aspects of the Workforce crisis, to appreciate how important 'economic growth' really is in the system we live in. Small is beautiful may be a great motto, but in the wider economy, with constant growth, there will be no 'credit'; and without credit, there will be no economy. The economic debate is not about how we can keep things the way they are, but how we can keep moving forward - because the modern econ...

In an interesting TED talk (see below), Rainer Strack underscores the urgency of thinking about global workforce crisis. The numbers, as projected in the work of BCG (to which he was a contributor), are indeed telling: The workforce crisis may cost $10 trillion worth of GDP between 2020 and 2030 ( see the BCG work here ). This is not any doomsday talk urging people into action, because the facts are in plain sight anyway: The population in developed nations are aging and there are not enough new births to take the place of retirees. The solutions are common sense but politically impossible: Import workers from countries which may have surplus labour or worse working conditions. Indeed, Messers Strack and others see the limitations in this formula and suggest a mix of measures, not just geographical migration but also non-geographical ones (such as offshoring) and bringing more women and retirees into workforce (Child labour is indeed a taboo subject). This conversation is im...

One of the persistent dream of the flat world thinkers is the making of a great global university. In fact, it is not just an ambition, but it is an essential part of the flat world thinking, for globalisation to succeed, the universality of a certain kind of aspiration, arguably a consumer aspiration, must be established first. Geography may have proved unassailable to the military experts and business planners, but educators, it was hoped, would become the flat world pioneers. But, so far, it has failed to happen. The blame was squarely heaped on the various regulatory agencies that intend to maintain their own fiefdoms. However, the big reason really is that geography still matters. The global university may one day bring the flat world, but so far, the starting point of the university makers was the flat world, which is indeed a Western rhetoric than a global reality. The globalisation we have so far achieved is the globalisation of money, but not of people. Or, put in anothe...