Global Economy

[Guest]

<!--emo&:ind--><img src='style_emoticons/<#EMO_DIR#>/india.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='india.gif' /><!--endemo--> Soon, Indians may do the thinking for the West

AGENCIES[ FRIDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2006 02:03:31 AM]

<< Previous|1|2|

That shift has been driven by cost. The average ’05 Wall Street salary was almost $290,000. That’s about 6.6 times more than the nation’s average per-capita income of $43,740. Apply that multiple to India’s average income of $720, and you get to an annual salary of a bit more than $4,700.

Even at three or four times that level for qualified banking staff in India, the cost attractions are clear. Once you have a research team in India, it might make sense to open a trading floor. Deutsche Bank, Germany’s biggest bank, is hiring staff in Mumbai for its Global Markets Centre.

India has a couple of key advantages over China in the race to become the West’s offshore intellectual workforce. Language barriers are lower, and there’s a diaspora of Indian managers already running business units all around the world.

Most of the US and European literature on the growth of financial services in Asia focuses on whether the locals will lock up their domestic markets before Western firms can establish a beach-head to market insurance and banking and credit cards to the 2.4bn inhabitants of China and India.

“A threat may come from the use of local expertise to establish a separate rival indigenous financial services industry that shifts the balance of global services toward Asia,” said the City of London Corp in a report on how India and China might affect London’s financial district. Maybe that emphasis is wrong. Instead of focusing on what we might or might not be able to do to ‘them,’ we should be worrying about what ‘they’ might do to us.

While I’m not quite in the camp that says we should all be teaching our children Mandarin, the words of former Chinese Vice Premier Qian Qichen resonate with me. In the official China Daily newspaper’s November ’04 online edition, he said the US “is dreaming if it thought the 21st century was the American century.”

In Kessler’s ’04 article, he takes comfort from how US companies are “moving low margin, low paying jobs overseas, but, fortunately, are left with high margin, high paying intellectual property jobs.” Anyone who believes the US and Europe have some kind of monopoly on intellect is cruising for a bruising.


<< Previous|1|2