I have just finished reading Harvard Business School Professor Tarun Khanna's exhaustively researched book "Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures - and Yours." It presents a comparative analytical study of how entrepreneurship is making a big difference to the economies of both China and India.
First, a surprise -- the book makes no mention of the principal thesis of his previous paper published (jointly with Yasheng Huang of MIT) in 2003 in Foreign Policy Magazine which was titled, "Can India Overtake China?".
That article said:
"What’s the fastest route to economic development? Welcome foreign direct investment (FDI), says China, and most policy experts agree. But a comparison with long-time laggard India suggests that FDI is not the only path to prosperity. Indeed, India’s homegrown entrepreneurs may give it a long-term advantage over a China hamstrung by inefficient banks and capital markets.",
and concludes as follows:
"China and India have pursued radically different development strategies. India is not outperforming China overall, but it is doing better in certain key areas. That success may enable it to catch up with and perhaps even overtake China. Should that prove to be the case, it will not only demonstrate the importance of homegrown entrepreneurship to long-term economic development; it will also show the limits of the FDI-dependent approach China is pursuing."
The present book makes no such assertion, though it does admit that mainland China has "so few world-class indigenous private companies despite the creation of a juggernaut of an economy".
I asked the Professor a straight question by email:
"Will India's dynamic private sector help India beat China as an economic power by mid-21st century?".
The following was his email response:
"Indeed, it is the central theme of some of the chapters. In China, the government is the entrepreneur, in India it is almost exclusively the privatre sector and civil society that innovates. Though the book is really a ‘big tent’ book on entrepreneurship, as I say, not just folks taking companies public and making billions, but also entrepreneurs who circumvent social and political constraints, discover new ways to better lives etc., and do so very differently in both China and India. But I do say at the end that the question’ which is better’ is less interesting than the fact that there is so much good happening in both; each has its own warts, and they are different in different places."
My reply:
"I was NOT really interested in the question "which is better", but whether a dynamic Indian private sector will in the end be able to take India above China as a global economic power house?".
His response:
"Dynamic Indian sector is becoming more dynamic as we speak. It has to compensate for the state’s weaknesses, and hopefully ‘infect’ the state with its own competence, so that collectively it can match other fast growing nations".
A point that puzzled me at the outset was the title of the book, "Billions of Entrepreneurs". How could there be billions of entrepreneurs in China and India when the total population of the two countries is only 2.4 billion.?
Now for some excerpts from the book:
**Whereas harmony through merit-based autocracy is a defining characteristic of the Chinese state, the Indian state is probably best characterized by pluralism. India's diversity is so great that a key to sustaining its democracy has been finding a way to balance the often inconsistent demands of various groups with the needs of the collective. The good news is that the Indian system has worked to devolve power so that influence and prestige are distributed to more than the usual socio-economic elites to include several disparate historically disenfranchised groups. The bad news is that this accommodation has often come at the expense of useful collective action.
**Information accessibility in China and India: The Indian system generates noisy but unbiased information; the Chinese system generates noise-free but biased information. In China, can I believe the financial information in a company's annual report? Not really. Is it easier to find reliable information about a company in India? Yes.
**The continuing power of the Party hierarchy is evident in the black lists of individuals prohibited from visiting China. I know of no such lists for democratic India.
**Despite Chinese opacity and Indian transparency, US media give significantly more coverage to China than to India.
** Why China can build cities overnight and India cannot? Institutional inefficiency -- resulting from well intentioned constraints on the government, like the free press, judicial processes, and civil society -- has checked and balanced India into paralysis.
**Over two decades the world watched in awe as the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) transfomed China economically. China's GDP per capita rose from $673 in 1978 to $5,878 in 2005. Further, the number of people living in absolute poverty dropped from roughly 250 million to an estimated 26 million.
CHINESE and INDIAN FINANCIAL FIRMAMENTS and CORPORATE SUCCESS:
**Despite severe government intervention and control of Chinese capital markets, the country grows by leaps and bounds. If China can grow with a non-existent domestic capital market, perhaps that 'necessary' condition for economic growth is not necessary after all. Indian bourses, on the other hand, have achieved significant credibility. Mumbai now boasts of an equity market of very near first world status. The response to financial scams: The Chinese government opted for more regulation, control,, and draconian punishment. While technology, best practices, and corporate governance became the new mantra on the Indian market, in China regulation and centralization of powers triumphed over a structural reform of the markets.
**Unlike India, where capital markets however imperfectly, strive to serve the most efficient firms, the Chinese government chose to list only firms whose objectives aligned with the government's political goals. Favored firms, virtually all state-owned enterprises, had very little to show on their bottom lines and were often "bailed out" either by falsifying financial statements or government-led management, to use a euphemism, of their stock prices. India's capital markets, particularly on the equity side, and on the provision of bad debts, are far ahead of China's.
**In China, where capital is allocated by fiat, domestic savings are channeled through government-owned banks to recapitalize distressed state-owned enterprises. The banks themselves are bankrupt, the stock market is riddled with inefficiencies, and capital does not find its way to where it is most needed. The indigenous private enterprise that does exist in China -- and the numbers of would-be entrepreneurs are large -- is constrained from attaining anything near its full potential. State-owned enterprises, while their numbers have shrunk, continue to account for half of all of China's assets, and virtually all of its massive non-performing loans. Indian equity markets, in contrast, rely on the existence of thousands of publicly traded but privately owned indigenous firms and on an industry of independent purveyors of reasonably reliable information that allow individual savers to choose where to invest. New banks are forcing the old deadwood to pick up the game. Competition is the norm, rather than the top down decision making and intervention seen in China's capital markets.
**One estimate suggests that the better banks in India have reached 55 percent of the efficiency of U S banks, with India's best banks comparable to the best worldwide. On a per transaction basis, the cost structure of the best Indian banks is 10 percent that of a comparable transaction in a global bank. In China, the four largest state-owned banks still dominate the banking landscape, acounting for 75 percent of loans and capital and presiding over non-performing loans worth $230 billion. Several attempts to recapitalize these banks have accomplished little. Their fates are tied up to bankrupt state-owned enterprises virtually impervious to reform.As The Economist asks: "What kind of bank makes loans of which a third will not be repaid? The communist kind."
** Weak financial institutions make corporate governance an oxymoron in China. Ratings of firms across several emerging markets published by investment banking firm, Credit Lyonnais Securities Asia, dramatically highlighted China's failed corporate governence. The criteria used to assess corporate governance were management discipline, transparency, independence, accountability, responsibility, fairness, and social responsibility. India ranked sixth in the study, China ranked 19th.
**Corporate success in China commonly comes at the government's bidding, with the CCP(Chinese Communist Party) deciding how, when and where to project China. Indian companies, especially successful ones, rarely do the government's bidding. Rather it might be only a slight exaggeration to say that the government bows to the suggestions of of successful firms such as Infosys regarding the most expedient course of action to improve the Indian business climate. As a commentary on both the adaptability of indigenous entrepreneurs and the morass of government enterprise, even in the 1960s the private sector contributed as mush as 87 percent of India's GDP and was a key employment generator for the country.
** Much of China's growth seemed to come from plowing in more inputs, rather than from more efficient use of a given quantity of inputs over time.
**China and India could have a stronger impact on each other and the world than either country could alone. What China is good at, India is not, and vice versa. This complementarity creates grounds for an economic cooperation that has already begun, as native entrepreneurs tap into each other's backyards in a reprise of their long-term historical cooperation rather than their recent four decades of hostility. [Khanna does not discuss the point that though China-India business cooperation has zoomed in recent years, the "trust deficit" that persists is unlikely to take that cooperation far, unless China stops coveting populated Indian territories.]
**For the first time since the rise of the West, entrepreneurs in Asia can ignore New York and London almost entirely, and still build companies worth billions. The economic center of gravity is moving toward the east.
**There is rampant corruption in both countries, but the corrupt in China are demanding a piece of something new that is being created - the government is the entrepreneur - whereas India's corrupt are content to help themselves without any real contribution. The good news in India comes not from the government, but from civil society and the private sector, who are increasingly embracing some of the government's tasks....While the government is more efficient in China, the foundations for a market economy are much more robust in India.
**The mirror-image quality image of China and India: one favors multinationals over indigenous private companies, the other advantages its locals and shuns its foreigners.[One might question whether India really "shuns" foreigners, though it's true that China, unlike India, has gone out of the way to favor foreigners over its indigenous entrepreneurs.]
**In India, where entrepreneurship is almost inconsistent with the sclerotic bureaucracy, the government remains chronically incapable of matching China's display of hard power. This is most dramatically seen in how China is out-muscling India in its search for oil. Instead, India oozes soft power. In India's noisy political economy, creativity and the arts thrive. Entrepreneurs run amuck. The expansion of influence -- whether by India's film industry, international expansion by individual companies, or the soaring presence of yoga in the West -- amounts to influencing the world through soft power.
**Although competitioin from the state in China and from local companies in India will always, to a certain extent, constrain multinationals, research shows that both these forms of competition are equally effective. It is unclear that multinationals do unambiguosly better in China than in India, or vice versa. The most successful multinationals, those building long-term positions in either country, invariably pay more attention to contributing to local welfare than to their bottom lines. Landing on foreign soil to make a quick buck virtually never pays.
On greater annual FDI flows into China as compared to India: Multinationals find investing in China attractive. But Yasheng Huang (of MIT) has argued that China is forced to rely on FDI because it does not have the means to effectively channel domestic savings into productive investments. The state-owned and state-directed banks are largely defunct and used primarily to prop up state-owned enterprises that to a large extent continue to burn money. Much investment in the 1990s was from small and medium size enterprises from Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan, not from typically large Western multinationals. Much of the money coming into China is not being used to finance productive investments in ways that most countries use FDI; rather it is being used to repurchase assets previously owned by state-owned enterprises. India, unlike China, has a viable stock market that is more welcoming of foreign investment and provides numerous asset categories in which foreigners can chose to invest part of their portfolios. For example, the foreigner might opt to buy stock in a factory-owning company listed on an Indian stock exchange, but might be forced to use FDI to open a factory in China. Thus a comparison of FDI numbers would disadvantage India inappropriately precisely because India has the better financial infrastructure.
**Perception plays a big role in encouraging foreign investment. Even managers of Asian companies I visited were sure that their Indian operations outperformed their Chinese operations but were convinced that the Chinese operations mattered more to headquarters. Because much of the hype about doing business in China is not grounded in facts and figures, many senior executive meetings will continue to start with the well meaning but uninformed assertion, "We simply MUST be in China".
RURAL CHINA, RURAL INDIA, HEALTH and POPULATION ISSUES:
**Paramount in Westerners' thoughts of China and India are imagesof desperate poverty, malnourished children trudging barefoot on a dusty road, ragged peasants toiling. In India as many as 390 million live in grinding poverty, if poverty is measured by the international standard of those exisitng on less than $1 a day. The situation is a bit better in China. In 2001, the World Bank estimated that 400 million Chinese had been lifted out of poverty over the prior two decades. China's rising incomes among its rural population are a testament to the government's efficiency in planning, leading and executing change. In India, however, political emancipation and empowerment for people at the bottom of society has not translated to economic and social gains. The government has not yet learned from the private sector and civil society, which are currently easing individual pockets of poverty.
**Henan Province is among China's poorest, Gujarat State is among India's richest; yet villagers in Henan seemed better off than those in Gujarat. What struck me most [in Chengguan town of a 100,000 people, in Henan] were the street sweepers, hard at work in the early morning hours, face masks protecting them from the dust. The street was entirely free from garbage. How different was this from India, where the city government hires unionized street sweepers who can fail to show up and not worry about being fired because prolabor legislation and electoral politics prevent any threat of retaliatory government action from being credible. Even if the city government farmed out the city cleaning contract to a private entrepreneur, corruption would likely ensure that the contract was awarded to a crony who would not do the work.Any run in even a major Indian city, let alone a smaller one comparable to Chengguan, would be an exhibition of squalor even at dawn.
**I drove from Chengguan to Qiu Village and was impressed by the paved roads we traveled, as well constructed as the Massachusetts turnpike I know at home. Good roads mean that the trip from the Village to the county hospital is less than a half hour, and summoned ambulances arrive as reliably as they do in the US. Again I was struck by the contrast with Indian villages, where only the most rudimentary medication is available, and ambulances are non-existent. Qiu Village displayed not exactly prosperity but at least the absence of the desperation of many Indian villages.
**In 2002, 91 percent of the Chinese populace aged 15 and older could read and write; 87 percent of females and 95 percent of males in that age group were lierate. In contrast, the Indian adult literacy rate was just 60 percent in 2002, with only 48 percent of females and 70 percent of males literate.
**The drive from Ahmedabad to the village where I was to meet SEWA (Self-Employed Women's Association) members was in some ways similar to the one I took in Henan, but in other was it was quite different. Although Henan is one of China's poorer provinces, its countryside seemed far more prosperous than that of Gujarat, one of India's richest states. The road from Ahmedabad, like most roads in India, were bumpy, with slow-moving traffic interrupted by wayward trucks, animals of all sorts, and penurious figures trudging precariously alongside.
**In a sense, civil society [NGOs like SEWA] and the private sector [companies like ITC], rather than the government, have provided health, education and sanitation to rural India. SEWA's and ITC's innovations are based on a simple but powerful idea, borrowed from the world of technology: the more participants a network has, the more powerful the netwotk becomes.
**By Indian standards, public hospitals in China are reasonably well functioning. They are clean, free of crowds, and well run. But as of 2003 some 80 perecent of China's rural population -- roughly 640 million people -- still lack health insurance. In a ranking of 191 member nations on the overall health of their populations, the WHO's 2000 report ranked China 81st and India 134th. In terms of equitable distribution of health, the same report ranked China 101st and India 153rd. Although India has a number of charismatic individuals whose work in private sector entrepreneurship is heartening, India's public sector health failure, which is far more prevalent, is absolutely heart-wrenching.
** To complicate the picture, India [the private sector] has begun to offer world-class health care to those who can afford it, including foreigners in the West. When Europeans and Americans fly to India for complicated, highly skilled surgeries that cost a fraction of what the procedure would cost at home, they receive not only a mended heart or hip, but also a revised image of India. No longer can these Westerners hold onto the stereotype of India as a poverty-sticken cow-populated country. Medical tourism is changing Westerners' ideas about the meaning of what Kipling termed the "white man's burden."
**China's working-age population grew by only 2.1 percent annually from 1975 to 2000, and that growth rate dropped to 0.5 percent in the next quarter century. Meanwhile, steady growth in the nation's dependent population means that China will not be rich when hundreds of millions have grown old and are afflicted with poor health. India's demographic projections appear more optimistic. Growth in its working-age population has shrunk from 2.3 percent to 1.6 percent anuually, but more importantly the annual growth in its dependents has fallen from 1.5 percent to 0.5 percent. India now expects to benefit from a demographic dividend of the sort that China did at the onset of the latter's reforms. However, complacency in India is unwarranted. An unhealthy working-age population, no matter how young, cannot spur economic growth.
CHINA'S HARD POWER :
**In recent times China's hard-power global expansion has been the result of premeditated and orchestrated state policy, while India's influence in the world has largely been achieved through soft power.
**Despite criticisms of its human rights violations, over the last five decades China's presence has gradually and convincingly eclipsed India's in South-east Asia, the region comprising modern Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Burma(Myanmar), the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. The ascent to economic dominance is especially dramatic because India's influence in the region was at one time unrivalled. [I am not certain that Khanna's assessment is entirely valid so far as Singapore and Vietnam are concerned. In Singapore, the Indian economic presence is growing fast.]
**[Both China and India are short of oil.] But the Chinese trio of CNPC, CNOOC, and SinoPec outmaneuvers India. For example, Angola's state-owned oil company Sonangoal blocked India's state-owned ONGC from buying Shell's 50 percent stake in Sonangoal. The deal would have yielded about 5 million tons of crude oil daily for India from 2008.Angolan authorities did not appreciate Shell's direct deals with the Indian company. India, after all, offered only $200 million for developing railways, whereas the Chinese were willing to ante up ten times as much for several projects in Angola. Not surprisingly China won the deal. "Aid for oil" has emerged as part of a multidimensional Chinese approach toward energy-rich states. Chinese leaders have been all over Africa in recent times. In Zimbabwe, dealing with Robert Mugabe's unsavory regime, China has invested in minerals, roads and farming and supplied the dictator with jets and other weaponry. No conditionality is attached to these deals, especially in terms of political reforms.
**Virtually every Chinese energy company is active in Burma.China's ability to use its wealth and its willingness to deploy it in places where the Western world's oil companies are constrained, has made it the leading influence in Burma. Meanwhile, India's oil policy, from condemning the "generals" to accommodating them, thereby taking a page out of China's book, continues to lack the sure-footedness that the Chinese have perfected.
**Whether by engaging in diplomaic niceties, exchanging Chinese weapons for oil and gas from pariah states, or investing in cobalt and copper in civil-war torn Central Africa, China leads with its wallet, unrestrained by politically correct norms of international relations. Chinese rhetoric today, which privileges its "peaceful rise" and "harmonius society" while continuing to operate with abandon in war-torn Africa, echoes China's behavior in 1955 when it took aggressive action in Tibet and Korea while charming delegates at the Bandung conference with its talk of peaceful engagement.
INDIA'S SOFT POWER:
**According to the political scientist Joseph Nye, "Much of American soft power has been produced by Holywood, Harvard, Microsoft and Michael Jordan." What are India's channels of exporting soft power? India's film industry -- Bollywood -- is the principal means by which India exports its soft power. The scale of Bollywood has eclipsed that of Hollywood, in 2003, 3.6 billion people attended 1100 Bollywood movies compared with the 2.6 billion moveigoers who attended 600 Hollywood films. Film star Amitabh Bachchan outpolled Chaplin, Olivier, and Brando in a BBC online vote as the "greatest star of stage or screen." The most obvious other candidate is the software industry -- the major reason India has reemerged on the world economic map. Another viable contender among India's primary soft-power exports is the nation's intellectual tradition. The last 200 years have witnessed many examples of what the 19th century diplomat Sir Charles Eliot called "the spread of Indian thought." One of the most significant was Swami Vivekananda, the orange robed monk who took the Chicago Conference on World Religions by storm in 1893. His influence survives in the dozens of missions that continue his teachings in the US over a 100 years later. A more modern cultural ambassador is Deepak Chopra, the Indian immigrant and doctor who is America's resident self-healer. Over the past two decades Chopra has emerged from the mainstream of American medicine to propagate inner healing and to spread the gospel of yoga.
**China has no comparable cultural ambassadors. Why the discrepancy? One reason lies in the role of the government in culture of the two countries. As one scholar put it, during four decades under the communists, Chinese cinema "often seemed one long reel of propaganda." Even after the 1978 opening up of China, the "Growth first, freedom later" slogan was applied most cruelly to the film industry. Content had to reflect the values of the "social spiritualist society," values that dominated artistic or commercial considerations. Film makers and artists in China are on the government payrolls, serving as mouthpieces of official propaganda rather than as ambassadors of culture. Indian artists are nothing if not loudly critical.; indeed, that is the source of their legitimacy. The messages these ambassadors send are not always cohesive and reveal no overarching national algorithm to reach superpower status. India's soft power cannot follow a disciplined plan because its decentralized message emanates from its diversity, its entrepreneurial spirit, and more recently its international ambition. On China's side the baton is passed from premiers to generals to party cadres. Team India passes it from internationally acclaimed film director Mira Nair to spiritual strongman Deepak Chopra to academic conscience Amartya Sen to software czar Azim Premji.
**While traditional Chinese medicine and martial arts have plenty of followers in the West, no single ambassador has achieved the fame and influence of Vivekananda in his time, or Chopra today. The paucity of such Chinese ambassadors surely has something to do with the attitude of the CCP to cultural activity over the past decades. Censors' intervention in the world of film is just one example. Remember that this stifling attitude was superimposed on a society where creativity, freedom of thought, and intellectual activity had been comprehensively wiped out during the Cultural Revolution.
ARE THE CHINESE MORE WILLING TO LEARN FROM INDIA THAN INDIA FROM THE CHINESE?
**The Chinese are attempting to learn. Are the Indians doing nearly as much? In sharp contrast to China's state-led and state-executed plan to invest in creating an environment that fosters learning from the best in the software business, and in contrast to Indian entrepreneurs' eagerness to become part of that environment, stands the inability of the Indian state to plan or execute similar investments in areas where India lags behind the Chinese. India could, for example, learn from China's success in the hardware sector, among the most efficient in the world today. Over the last 20 years the world's technology giants have taken advantage of the low labor costs and incentives offered by the Chinese to set up factories on the mainland. By 2003 a fifth of total exports - and more than a third of the growth in China's exports - came from such factories.
**Kiran Karnik (head of India's NASSCOM, the software industry lobby group) told me that the Chinese sent delegation after delegation to Bangalore and Hyderabad to study and learn about India's software success. The Indian government has failed to create even the semblance of a framework within which Indian firms can learn from Chinese prowess. Although Indian firms like Infosys, TCS, and NIIT are all invited to educate Chinese graduates in the best practices of India's software industry, India does not attempt to learn from China.
[The obvious answer: In India this role MUST be filled NOT by the government, but by CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) and FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) jointly. Will they take up the challenge?]
CORPORATE BRIDGES: LINKING CHINA, INDIA AND THE WEST:
**My favorite example of a company that has changed both China and India for the better is GE. GE has figured out how to profit from being in China and India and to contribute substantially to both countries. Its operations in China and India have learned to work together, making the proverbial whole greater than the sum of its parts.Said William Castelli (of GE): "India will plug into our global research and development engine. We have large laboratories in Shanghai and Bangalore. [GE's Jack Welch Technology Center in Bangalore is larger than similar centers in Munich and Shanghai.] What we are finding is that the research coming out of Bangalore is more affecting GE's global operations in plastics, medical devices, aeronautics, and complex statistical algorithms. GE Healthcare in particular has over 2000 algorithm writers in Bangalore.....The Indians are very hungry for success. They will stop at nothing."
**GE adapted to India, just as it did to China.But the results of the adaptation were different in the two countries, reflecting different local circumstances. For example, in China GE's strategy accounts for the presence of several of the company's major Fortune 500 customers - Dell. Nokia, Samsung, Hewlett-Packard - and for the dependability of manufacturing facilities in China. This is not the case in India. Not only has GE not acquired a critical mass of clients that are multinational companies, but also GE India has yet to achieve excellence in manufacturing. In India GE taps into what Indians do best - software and intellectual capital.
[I hope CII/FICCI has made or will do a study in depth as to why GE, in spite of being in India for so long, has not been able to achieve excellence in manufacturing, as compared to its China manufacturing operations. It's important that India's manufacturing capability takes off over a wide spectrum of consumer, intermediate and capital goods, because it's manufacturing that will create the much needed jobs for the masses of India, while research and software will help only a comparatively small minority of Indian elites to secure jobs.]
Khanna offers many interesting insights throughout the book such as on 'China's art of Diaspora Management' versus 'India's Art of Diaspora Mismanagement.'
A point that I noticed at the outset: of the five advance comments on the book published on the back cover, three were from Westerners including at least two Americans, while the remaining two were from Indians; there was not a single comment from a Chinese person. While reading the book, a quesion that came uppermost to my mind: would a Chinese translation of the book be allowed to circulate freely in China?
Overall, Khanna's book is a major contribution to the literature on the comparative aspects of Asia's two emerging economic powerhouses and their impact on the US and the world.
It's a 'must read' book .
