Pubblicato su Le Ragioni dell'Occidente (supplemento mensile de La Voce di Romagna), il 4 novembre 2010

di Simone Mariotti

L'interessante (come al solito) articolo di The Economist (che trovate riportato qui accanto) riassume bene le opportunità e i limiti che l'India si troverà ad affrontare nei prossimi decenni. L'articolo mostra il confronto con la Cina, e dopo tutto, a ben vedere, per quanto la crescita indiana potrà fare miracoli, ancora per molto l'inseguimento tra i due colossi è destinato a riservare poche sorprese sulla ledership.
Il confronto con l'Africa è invece da un certo punto di vista più interessante perché con l'India c'è qualcosa in comune che li differenzia dalla Cina: una vastissima disomogeneità interna.
Benché Shanghai e le province dello Xinjiang siano distanti tra loro tanto quanto i centri finanziari di Johannesburg e Bombay dai rispettivi villaggi rurali, la Cina resta un solo, grande paese.
Parlare invece di India in quanto realtà economica a sé stante invece non ha molto senso, perlomeno non più di quando c'è l'abbia l'intendere l'Africa sub equatoriale come un unico stato. Per citare un dato non menzionato dal settimanale inglese, l'India ha qualcosa come 18 lingue ufficiali e in tutta la parte meridionale del continente, l'hindi viene insegnato a scuola come lingua straniera assieme all'inglese. Tra il reddito medio pro capite della tecnologica Bangalore e quello delle città del confinate stato del Tamil Nadu c'è lo stesso scarto che c'è tra il rampante Sudafrica e il povero Mozambico.
E' allora così messa peggio la vituperata Africa rispetto all'Asia? In termini assoluti certamente. Ma se guardiamo la cosa dal punto di vista finanziario, le differenze si affievoliscono. Le borse sono un po' lo specchio della crescita economica di lungo termine di un paese, anche se sono un metro non certo perfetto. Però se guardiamo allo sviluppo finanziario avuto negli ultimi venti anni da India; Cina e Africa, non si può non notare che, partite tutte praticamente da zero, queste borse hanno avuto un destino simile, e che quella sudafricana da sola capitalizza oggi la metà di quella indiana e un terzo di quella cinese, ma con una popolazione che è un ventesimo di quella di ciascuno dei due colossi asiatici. Una borsa, quella di Johannesburg, che ha persino superato quella Italiana. Più dovremmo aggiungere le altre che stanno rapidamente crescendo.
Il discorso è complesso, ma non bisogna dimenticare che se la Cina ha denaro (riserve) e industrie, l'India una popolazione dalle potenzialità esplosive, e la democrazia, l'Africa ha le materie prime e una storia difficile che sta cercando di lasciarsi alle spalle (aiutata in questo anche dai pesanti investimenti in loco di India e Cina), e i suoi casi di successo come Sud Africa, Botswana, Namibia, Ghana, Cameroun, dimostrano che se la situazione politica riuscisse a migliorare nei paesi più instabili, l'economia del continente mostrerebbe gli stessi poderosi muscoli dei suoi atleti.

Despite all the mess and chaos of India, the country's business is booming. This will change the world

Da The Economist, Londra, 2 ottobre 2010

IN INDIA vast ambitions are no longer unusual. Firms now worth $5 billion expect soon to be worth $30 billion, observes Vijay Govindarajan, of the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College.
India's GDP is expected to grow by 8.5% this year, and could grow even faster. Chetan Ahya and Tanvee Gupta of Morgan Stanley, an investment bank, predict that India's growth will start to outpace China's within three to five years. China will rumble along at 8% rather than double digits; India will rack up successive years of 9-10%. For the next 20-25 years, India will grow faster than any other large country, they expect. Other long-range forecasters paint a similar picture.
Several factors weigh in India's favour. The first is demography. Indians are young. "An ageing world needs workers; a young country has workers," says Mr Nilekani. Previous Asian booms have been powered by a surge in the working-age population. Now it is India's turn. The proportion of Indians aged under 15 or over 64 has declined from 69% in 1995 to 56% this year, says the UN. India's working-age population will increase by 136m by 2020; China's will grow by a mere 23m, says Morgan Stanley.
To be sure, many Indians are poorly educated. There will certainly not be jobs in business-process outsourcing for all. India, unusually for Asia, has not yet made much of a fist of labour-intensive manufacturing for export. But its workforce will stay young and keep growing, and it includes millions of English-speakers.
India's second advantage is that the economic reforms of the early 1990s have unleashed an explosion of pent-up commercial energy. Tariff ramparts have been torn down. The "licence raj"- a system under which it seemed that a businessman could not pick his teeth without a permit - has been swept aside. Private firms have been forced to compete with the world's best. Many have discovered that they can. Exports have shot up.
Indian firms are increasingly global and sometimes world-class. Arcelor Mittal, based in Luxembourg, is the world's largest steel firm. Tata Motors, best known for making cars that cost only $2,000, also owns Jaguar and Land Rover, two luxury brands. Bharti Airtel, a mobile-phone firm with 140m subscribers in India, is rapidly expanding into Africa, too.
China's growth has been largely state-directed. India's, by contrast, is driven by 45m entrepreneurs, says Amit Mitra, the secretary-general of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry, a business lobby.
In Dharavi, a Mumbai slum with perhaps 1m inhabitants, many alleys are too narrow to turn a wheelbarrow around. Yet every other doorway seems to lead to a small business. Bhaskar Chaudhary's tiny factory works day and night turning out back pockets, which are whisked to a bigger factory, sewn onto jeans and exported to the Gulf. Business is good. Four years ago Mr Chaudhary had only one (Chinese-made) embroidering machine. Now he has three. He is still only 21 years old.
Indian firms export a lot of services, but their primary focus is on the needs of domestic consumers. Indian shoppers demand goods that are cheap, rather than fancy. Indian "frugal innovators" oblige. Tata Chemicals makes a filter that requires no power and can give a family of five safe drinking water for a month for 30 rupees ($0.65). Researchers at the Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Science produced a prototype for a $35 laptop in July. A firm called Ayas Shilpa makes suspension bridges for a tenth of the price of conventional ones. In a country where countless villages are connected to the outside world only by perilous rope bridges across raging rivers, this is a colossal boon.
India is the last frontier, says Moon B. Shin, the Korean boss of LG Electronics' Indian subsidiary. By which he means: India has the largest number of people who have not yet bought many electronic goods. LG's annual sales in India are about $3 billion. But what really excites Mr Shin is that they rose by 30% just in the first seven months of this year.
If India keeps growing as fast as it is now, it will change the world. Optimists predict that it will be the next China, only friendlier and more democratic. Pessimists retort that such forecasts are over-spiced. They point out that India has a lot of catching up to do. China's economy is four times bigger, so that even if India starts to grow faster, it will not overtake China for a long, long time. And they add that Indian businesses face several bottlenecks on the uneven road to growth.
The most obvious of these bottlenecks is lousy infrastructure. Indian roads are awful. Potholes gape; traffic lights don't work. Rural roads are largely unpaved; in cities traffic often snarls to a halt. Cyrus Guzder, who runs a distribution business, complains that long-distance trucks average only about 20kph (12mph). Crossing the border between two Indian states can be more troublesome than crossing an international boundary. Between Kolkata and Mumbai (a distance of 2,000km), a truck must negotiate a couple of dozen checkpoints. Delays and shakedowns by grasping officials add 30% to the cost of road freight, estimates Mr Guzder.
India's economy will grow fivefold in the next 20 years, predicts McKinsey, a consultancy. The urban population will double from the 2001 census figure of 290m to perhaps 590m by 2030. McKinsey reckons that merely to keep pace, the country must spend $1.2 trillion on urban infrastructure, or at eight times today's rate. Per person, China's capital spending on cities is roughly seven times greater than India's.
The other worrying bottleneck is a shortage of skills. The workforce may be young and growing, but 40% are illiterate and another 40% failed to complete school. Meanwhile, there are 62m surplus workers in agriculture, most of them barely skilled.
Instability is another huge worry. About 200 of India's 588 districts are affected by a Maoist insurgency called the Naxalite movement. The rebels hide in India's great forests, which are also where much of the country's mineral wealth is buried.
Populism is already a big problem. Some politicians woo voters by demonising business. Corruption is another concern. Many businesspeople think it is getting worse. In the old days ministers asked for bribes. Now they demand shares in firms to which they are about to award contracts, Indian bosses complain. Pratyush Sinha, who retired as head of India's anti-corruption watchdog in September, reckons 30% of his compatriots are "utterly corrupt".
Both China and India have taken off since their governments allowed people and companies more economic freedom. China went first, so it has a big head start. But as Morgan Stanley's economists point out, India's growth since the reforms of the early 1990s bears a striking resemblance to China's since its grand opening in the late 1970s.
And India's democracy may confer long-term benefits. It is not just that Indians can say what they please without having tanks rolled over them. It is also that India can change governments without a revolution. In the long run, that may offer a better guarantee of the stability that businesses crave.