via The Heritage Foundation
China’s investment overseas is increasingly important to the United States and the international community. The China Global Investment Tracker created by The Heritage Foundation is the only publicly available, comprehensive dataset of large Chinese investments and contracts worldwide beyond Treasury bonds. Details are available on well over 400 attempted transactions — failed and successful — over $100 million in all industries, including energy, mining, transportation and banking.

Download the data set here.



Chinese investment and business contracts now span the globe. There is a clear effort to diversify across countries and regions but the Western Hemisphere has become especially prominent.

China’s investment total could be higher. Over $160 billion in proposed spending has been rejected by foreign or Chinese regulators or has failed due to mistakes by Chinese firms. However, there are also clear signs that Chinese firms are learning to be better investors.

Chinese Outward Investment: More Opportunity Than Danger

Chinese investment is not taking the world by storm financially, nor will it do so in the near future. It does not pose a major threat to the U.S., either in terms of the purchase of American assets or the expansion of Chinese influence around the globe. At home, American policy concerning Chinese investment should be more transparent. Overseas, the best reply to expanding Chinese commercial influence is to expand American commercial influence—for instance, through free trade agreements. These steps will help create more economic opportunities in the U.S., enhance America’s global position, and pose no threat to national security.

Where China Invests, And Why It Matters

The PRC has hundreds of billions of dollars available for investment and a desire to lock up resources; the U.S. has several trillion already invested and a bigger, more multi-dimensional economy. Concerns about increased Chinese investment and business activity should be addressed by expanding American activity, from investment in Ivory Coast to trade with Taiwan.

China’s Investment Overseas in 2010

The dominant feature of Chinese outward investment in 2010 was a rush to South America, particularly Brazil. Overall investment grew only modestly. The energy and power sectors continued to be the most attractive for Chinese enterprises. Troubled or failed investments – a huge problem in 2009 – were much less prominent in 2010. An obvious implication for American policy is to expand trade and investment ties to South America and around the world.

via NPR Planet Money

I went looking for a bubble the other day. I’d heard that prices for American farmland were spiking – up thirty percent over the past year, and double what people were paying five or six years ago. It sounded like irrational exuberance.

I flew to Iowa, drove to the town of Colo, an hour north of Des Moines, and dropped in on a land auction. It was a great scene: A hushed crowd of farmers, an auctioneer with a voice made for opera, and a climactic duel between rival bidders, one of whom raised the price with a wink, the other with a slight nod.

The winking man won, if you can call it a win when you have to hand over $1.5 million for 158 acres of corn stalks. The seller, a sweet middle-aged woman, seemed genuinely conflicted about selling her inheritance. But she needed the money, she said. And she said it: “It just seemed like we had this bubble going on with agricultural properties.”

But the more I learned about the economics of corn farming and farmland, the less bubble-ish it seemed.

Consider what our local expert, the Iowa State economist Bruce Babcock, told me: Farmland in Iowa changes owners, on average, every thirty years. Buyers generally put down 30 percent of the purchase price, and 60 percent is common. This isn’t a no-money-down, buy-and-flip kind of market.

And at today’s corn prices, you can earn a tidy 4 percent return on your investment, just by growing corn. In that light, it all seems terribly rational. (Relevant side note: Babcock was so convinced about his calculations that he bought some farmland for himself a few years back.)

Of course, it all hangs on those corn prices. They’re way up, too. As it turns out, corn farmers are in the energy business. You can convert their corn into ethanol, and put it in your gas tank. This is happening on a massive scale: More corn this year will go to ethanol factories than will feed farm animals. And the higher gas prices go, the more profitable the ethanol business, and the higher the demand for corn.

According to National Geographic:
The map shows population density; the brightest points are the highest densities. Each country is colored according to its average annual gross national income per capita, using categories established by the World Bank (see key below). Some nations— like economic powerhouses China and India—have an especially wide range of incomes. But as the two most populous countries, both are lower middle class when income is averaged per capita.

The feature article, Age of Man, is worth perusing, as well. If you’re a visual learner, you’ll also enjoy The Face of Seven Billion, where you can explore how the global population breaks down in terms of language, nationality, literacy, religion, and so on.

via the Wall Street Journal

Fast-growing emerging market economies are attracting soaring investment flows as growth in the U.S. and Europe remains sluggish. The trend has produced unexpected downsides such as overvalued currencies. Mouse over each emerging market country to see what the effects have been, and what the governments have tried to do about it.
Click on the image to launch the interactive feature.

Cambridge, UK

via Harvard Business Review
By: Navi Radjou, Jaideep Prabhu, Prasad Kaipa, Simone Ahuja

We recently visited the brand-new R&D lab of Dr Reddy’s, one of India’s leading pharmaceutical firms. This lab isn’t located in Bangalore or Hyderabad (where Dr Reddy’s is headquartered) but in … Cambridge, U.K.

In 2008, Dr Reddy’s acquired Chirotech, Dow Chemical’s R&D unit, for $32 million, and in April 2011 relocated it to a new 33,000 sq. ft. facility in Cambridge Science Park. Chirotech specializes in biocatalysis and chemocatalysis, two important subspecialties of biotechnology and chemistry that help develop key biological and chemical intermediates needed for the efficient production of medicines. Dr Reddy’s plan is to leverage Chirotech’s scientific capabilities to optimize drug development processes, thus lowering manufacturing costs and speeding time-to-market. In doing so, Dr Reddy’s strengthens its core generic drugs business and boosts the custom manufacturing services it provides to Big Pharma and nimble biotech startups.

In prior blog posts, we have described how Western multinationals such as Xerox and GE are embracing polycentric innovation by sourcing more R&D capabilities from emerging markets such as India and China and integrating them into a synergistic global innovation network. In recent years, Indian firms such as Dr Reddy’s have also started globalizing their R&D footprint by moving into Western markets. They have been tapping into the sophisticated technical and scientific talent available in Western economies as part of their strategy to access international markets and build global brands.

Besides Dr Reddy’s, several leading Indian firms are pioneering polycentric innovation:

Tata Motors. While the $2000 Nano car was mostly developed in India, Tata Motor’s Indica Vista Electric Vehicle and the Pixel city car were primarily designed and built by the Tata Motors European Technical Centre (TMETC) in Coventry, U.K., in close partnership with the University of Warwick. TMETC, which was established in 2005, got a big talent boost when Tata Motors acquired Jaguar and Land Rover in 2008.

Suzlon. The world’s eighth-largest wind turbine manufacturer may be headquartered in Pune, India, but its main R&D centers are located in the Netherlands, Germany, and Denmark, nations that actively promote wind energy and boast a huge talent pool. Suzlon recently completed its acquisition of Germany-based REpower Systems, gaining access to cutting-edge expertise in aerodynamics and electronics.

Reliance MediaWorks. This media powerhouse offers creative and production services as well as cutting-edge post-production services to such films as Avatar and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. To best leverage worldwide creative talent, Reliance MediaWorks operates a global network of creative centers located in Burbank, San Francisco, London, Tokyo, and across India.

TCS. Asia’s largest IT service provider has built what it calls a global Co-Innovation Network (COIN), which includes technology partnerships with startups and VC firms in Silicon Valley as well as academic tie-ups with leading American universities such as MIT, Georgia Tech, and Stanford.

Having extensively interacted with the leaders of these organizations, we find that Indian firms have developed several best practices around how to implement polycentric innovation effectively:

Cultivate a polycentric mindset to make global innovation work. Polycentric innovation won’t work in organizations that promote groupthink. The Indian firms we studied promote diversity in their R&D management by hiring external talent to build and oversee their global innovation network. Tata Motors appointed Tim Leverthon, who previously led R&D at BMW, as head of its global R&D. Suzlon’s head of technology is John O’Halloran, a former Cummins Engine executive who now leads Suzlon’s 500-strong global R&D team out of Hamburg.

Decentralize and empower global R&D units. You can’t run your global R&D operations from headquarters in Mumbai. The Indian firms we worked with strive to empower their regional R&D units. TMETC has full operational autonomy even though it collaborates closely with Tata Motors’ Indian R&D unit. Reliance MediaWorks’ global creative network is highly decentralized, allowing each design studio head in the U.S. and the U.K. to make independent decisions that best serve local customer needs.

Communicate constantly to break down cultural barriers. Cultural differences can severely hamper cooperation between Western and Eastern engineers. Constant communication across geographically dispersed teams is vital to keep creative synergies flowing in a global R&D network. The senior leaders of the Indian firms we examined regularly meet with their global R&D units to ensure they feel part of a ‘global family,’ as Ravi Kant, Vice Chairman of Tata Motors, puts it.

Integrate with local innovation ecosystems. Building a global innovation network doesn’t just mean opening R&D labs all over the world. It also means integrating yourself into local innovation ecosystems. That’s why Tata Motors collaborates extensively with the University of Warwick in the U.K. while Suzlon has forged partnerships with Delft University in the Netherlands and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and the University of Kiel in Germany.

Leverage global talent to move up the value chain while defending core business for now. It is commonly believed that emerging market companies tap Western R&D talent in order to ‘move up the value chain.’ That is certainly true in the case of Tata Motors, which is using TMETC to develop its electric car, and Reliance MediaWorks, which is leveraging its studios in California and London for high-end work. At the same time, these companies are using foreign expertise to bolster their core business as well. Some TCS academic alliances in the U.S. are aimed at finding ways to lower the cost of its core activities like software testing. And Dr Reddy’s is using Chirotech’s talent to make its generic drug business more cost-competitive rather than develop new branded drugs.

In an increasingly polycentric world, the battle between incumbent Western multinationals and up-and-coming Eastern multinationals will be fought around who is best at integrating and driving synergies across globally-distributed R&D networks. Moreover, Western and Eastern firms come to this battle with different assets and backgrounds. Western firms are masters of structured approaches to innovation that deliver scale and efficiency. Eastern firms excel at more frugal and flexible forms of innovation. In a global market that includes both affluent and mass market consumers, and in a world of polycentric innovation, firms will need to master and integrate both structured and flexible approaches to innovation. It will be interesting to see which firms turn out to be best at seamlessly integrating both approaches into a new paradigm for a polycentric world.

Is your company globalizing R&D? How are you preparing for the world of polycentric innovation? Do you have examples of companies that are innovating wisely across geographies? Please share with us your stories, challenges and best practices.

by: Jon Roberts, Principal, TIP Strategies, Inc.

We have been following manufacturing trends closely for the last decade. The decline in manufacturing employment – which we predicted would continue – is as apparent as ever. In fact, we argued that manufacturing employment would follow the same downward trend that agricultural employment followed at the end of the previous century. For both sectors, increased automation has steadily replaced labor and helped drive tremendous productivity gains. The primary difference is that we are far removed from the transition which took agriculture from farm laborers to combines. In the case of manufacturing, we are square in the middle of it.

The August 15th Cheap Robots vs. Cheap Labor editorial from the New York Times regarding Foxconn is revealing. Foxconn is the world’s largest manufacturer and assembler of electronic components. Despite the fact that Chinese employees typically earn only a fraction of what U.S. workers earn ($1.36/hour), the founder and chairman of Foxconn is aggressively seeking to reduce his workforce through industrial automation. Productivity gains within the workforce have natural limits. Employees get sick, need personal time off, and are subject to spells of low productivity in ways that “robots” never are. Or, to put it differently, investment in new equipment heightens productivity in a cost-efficient manner. Even a very low-cost labor force is not as efficient (or as affordable) when industrial equipment is an option.

We know that productivity and employment growth are not necessarily linked. As a business we become more productive when we do more with less. And that “less” is first and foremost represented by labor costs. Which is why Foxconn will replace thousands upon thousands of workers with machines. This is a trend that has been occurring for decades and it will only accelerate. While we know this, and accept it as a business reality, it is deeply disturbing to say the obvious in a political context. We cannot simultaneously praise productivity gains while bemoaning the loss of manufacturing employment. Productivity can – in many cases – be achieved precisely by cutting workers. Reduced employment rolls often follow in tandem with significant productivity improvements.

If we assumed that our competitive advantage, as a nation, was being compromised by the off-shoring of our manufacturing we would be missing the larger point. Whether we manufacture in the U.S. or in China (or anywhere else), the pressure to reduce labor costs is the same. And the more that other countries achieve greater productivity, the greater is the incentive for our businesses to make the capital investments that reduce labor costs. There is, after all, no better way to reduce labor costs than to reduce the total number of workers.


Not only is the total number of people employed in manufacturing declining, so is manufacturing’s share of total employment. Of course, it is worth repeating that a decline in the share of manufacturing employment does not indicate a decline in the productivity (or output) of the manufacturing sector. In fact quite the contrary has been true in recent decades. While the actual number of manufacturing jobs has dropped steadily since 2000, the value of manufacturing output (as measured in shipments per worker) has increased dramatically.

These trends in no way imply that manufacturing (or agriculture, for that matter) is not important to the economy. It is as important as it has ever been. What we have been arguing is that manufacturing employment is a problematic economic development indicator. In other words, measuring local economic development success by the number of new manufacturing jobs created can take you down the wrong path.