2017.9.20
富士比:印度将取代中国成为金砖龙头!
文中指称:
中国正面临巨额债务, 市场紧缩, 房市泡沫, 工资高涨等一系列问题,
以及越来越极权腐败的政治环境, 政府滥用公权力干预市场.
相比印度有更低廉的人力, 多元化的民主社会, 拥有很大的投资潜力,
未来将取代中国成为金砖龙头.
The recent BRICS meeting in Xiamen formed the setting for what appeared to be
a rapprochement between its two key members, India and China. It was preceded
by a rather sudden diplomatic resolution to the recent Doklam (Donglang)
crisis which saw Indian and Chinese troops step back from possible
confrontation. This was widely viewed to have been agreed at the initiative
of the Chinese, eager to secure the attendance of Narendra Modi at the
immediately following BRICS meeting.
Although the BRICS concept is long past its pomp, it is clear that China
still values it as a diplomatic forum, either for what is discussed and
agreed while it takes place, or for the appearance that emerges of the
Chinese engaged in a multilateral forum in which they take centre stage.
Indeed, China has long been the real engine behind the BRICS, given that both
Brazil and Russia (B and R respectively) were dependent on the China driven
commodity boom and South Africa (the S) is there to make up numbers. The real
quandary, however, was always India.
Without India, the "BRCS" would be harder to pronounce but perhaps a little
easier to understand. Conceived by Goldman Sachs as a Powerpoint acronym to
describe high growth emerging markets, there was always something slightly ad
hoc about the arrangement, a useful thumb sketch perhaps, shorthand for
time-poor, knowledge-light bankers and investment managers to add a patina of
granularity to their boom dependent punts. In reality an almost endless, debt
fuelled Chinese investment cascade fuelled what many mistook for a commodity
super-cycle that flattered Russia and Brazil, and made India seem like the
tortoise to China's hare.
All about the growth
The key problem with the BRICS was always that there is little that unites
them all aside from a once shared propensity for high rates of growth. This
is fine if all you seek are outlets for investment capital, but rather begs
an assessment of–in each case–what that growth implies. A recent explainer
by Michael Pettis makes the obvious, but seemingly not widely understood,
point that 'GDP does not distinguish between activity that increases a
country's wealth and activity that doesn't'. And in making this point he
obliges readers to move beyond simplistic "GDPism" towards making judgements
about the quality of investments in each case. Rising GDP, in other words,
needn't always been good news. It might in fact be disguising some very bad
news indeed.
Here also is where China and India diverge. For all the fanfare laid on for
the BRICS in Xiamen, the association has always been fundamentally driven by
the development trajectories of those two Asian supergiants; China and India.
Brazil and Russia, being primarily commodity suppliers, ride the
international consequences of growth in those other two giants, but aside
from that have little to contribute. In recent years China has driven the
global economy with its rapid investment and export focussed growth while
India has grown more slowly and organically.
The upshot is that China has huge amounts of infrastructure and an economy
that must now service enormous amounts of debt. The staggering GDP growth
figures they have achieved over many years have yet to register the
consequences of all that investment and if much of it generates little or no
return, the consequent write-downs will weigh down on China's GDP figures for
years to come. Some estimate coming write-downs in excess of 35% of GDP,
which according to Pettis' formula would mean China's economy is actually
much smaller than its reported GDP.
India, on the other hand, registered a growth rate higher than China last
year, and while India's economy is much smaller than China's right now, in
contrast to China it has a great deal of catch up growth ahead of it, and–
again unlike China–has a government with an appetite for structural reform
as a key driver for future growth, rather than debt-fuelled investment and
exports.
What would Goldman Sachs say now?
Setting aside China's effort to build the BRICS into a cooperative forum, the
same formula that generated the BRICS concept would produce a wildly
different set of results today. China, with its enormous debts, closed
capital markets, asset bubbles and increasing communist party interference in
the economy would look like an entirely different kind of investment prospect
than India, with its greater growth potential, favorable demographics, open
and pluralist society and reform minded government. Indeed, apart from both
being large economies it's hard to imagine anyone putting the two economies
in the same category anymore.
All of which provides a useful contrast between the original concept of the
BRICS as a meaningful investment destination premised largely on impressive
growth rates, and its more recent emergence as a forum for the projection of
influence. Because if the BRICS were originally premised on GDP growth, then
as long China's GDP growth becomes increasingly dependent on self-defeating
credit expansion, India looks the better bet. Furthermore, given the emphasis
China placed on securing the attendance of Narendra Modi at Xiamen, it
appears China might already understand this quite well.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbulloch/2017/09/20/india-not-china-is-now-central-to-the-future-of-the-brics/#7806af525d1e