The Economist (January 20)
“China still lags far behind America in its space accomplishments, but it does not appear bent on a cold-war-style race. It spends far less on its civil space programme than the $19.7bn that NASA was allocated last year.” Still, “China is doggedly pursuing its goals” and is attuned to the progress being made by India, which “is planning its first soft-landing on the moon in March,” just four years after China’s moon landing. With India set to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation in the next four years, China is keenly aware that its still smaller neighbor is in hot pursuit.
The Economist (January 13)
“To many, India feels like the heir apparent. Its population will soon overtake its Asian rival’s. It occasionally grows at the kind of pace that propelled China to the status of economic superpower.” But there is one big snag in many marketers’ dreams: India’s middle class “scarcely exists.” Only 8 million Indian adults make $20,000 annually and “the chances of India developing a middle class to match the Middle Kingdom’s are being throttled by growing inequality.”
Tags: China, Economic superpower, Growth, India, Inequality, Middle class, Population
WARC (December 11)
“While China’s slowdown will continue to influence the economic landscape for other Asian markets – many marketers have seen budgets cut – bright spots are emerging, particular as India’s ‘mainstream’ consumer demographic continues to grow at pace.” Now expected to outpace China, India looks poised to add more mainstream consumers than China over the coming decade.
Fortune (November 27)
“Mumbai International Airport handled a combined 969 flights on Friday. That’s more than any other airport that operates a single runway has ever handled over a 24-hour period.” With 1,000 flights a day in sight, Mumbai is experiencing rising demand and India is soon “set to be world’s third largest aviation market after China and the United States.”
USA Today (August 30)
“Climate change didn’t cause Harvey, but it almost surely made the storm worse.” And extreme weather “isn’t just happening in North America. Even as Harvey riveted the nation’s attention this week, the death toll topped 1,000 from unusually severe monsoonal rains half a world away in Bangladesh, India and Nepal.” With such destruction creating “a torrent of human misery, the question isn’t whether the nation can afford to get serious about global warming. We can’t afford not to.”
Tags: Bangladesh, Climate change, Death toll, Destruction, Extreme weather, Global warming, Harvey, India, Misery, Monsoons, Nepal, Rain, U.S.
The Economist (June 24)
“Mr Modi’s admirers paint him as the man who at last unleashed India’s potential. In fact, he may go down in history for fluffing India’s best shot at rapid, sustained development. And the worries about a still darker outcome are growing.”
Tags: Admirers, Best shot, Fluffing, India, Modi, Outcome, Potential, Sustained development, Worries
Institutional Investor (June 4)
Due to Brexit, “sovereign investors now consider the U.K. less attractive than they did a year ago and are instead favoring investments in Germany and India as part of a broader move to so-called safe haven markets.” The change in sentiment was identified through a survey of “sovereign wealth funds, state-owned pensions, and central banks polled by Invesco.”
Tags: Brexit, Central banks, Germany, India, Invesco, Investors, Pensions, Safe havens, Sentiment, Sovereign, U.K.
Washington Post (April 7)
The United States, France, the EU, China, India and 136 other parties have ratified the Paris agreement, which went into force in November. “Now is the time to implement it—to actually reduce our greenhouse-gas emissions, to ensure that policies match national commitments. It is time to develop and market clean technologies, and to seize new national and international economic opportunities.” But the “global fight cannot succeed if all parties are not fully on board and if they don’t assume their share of the burden or seek to capitalize on the opportunities.”
Tags: China, Clean technologies, EU, France, GHG, India, Opportunities, Paris Agreement, U.S.
Euromoney (March 3)
“At what point does a boom become a bubble? The question needs to be asked in Asian high yield, where year-to-date issuance volumes are fast approaching the figure for the whole of 2016 in China and have already long exceeded it in India and Indonesia – after just eight weeks of the year, one of which was a write-off for Chinese New Year.”
The Economist (January 2)
“India is taking the idea of a universal basic income seriously.” Few expect the current proposal, which “would cut absolute poverty from 22% to less than 0.5%” with a proposed annual income of slightly over $110 income, to be adopted soon, but “the idea will not go away. It may seem folly in a country home to over a quarter of the world’s truly poor to give people money for nothing. But it would be a swift, efficient way to make it home to far fewer of them.”
