Fed Vice Chairman Stanley Fischer spoke on “Emerging Asia in Transition“. After a long period of rapid economic growth, Asia’s emerging economies appear to have entered a transitional phase. For decades, emerging Asian economies have been among the fastest growing and most dynamic in the world. Supported by an export-oriented development model, annual growth averaged 7-1/2 percent in the three decades leading up to the global financial crisis. Will developments in the global economy permit the continuation of the export-centered growth strategy that underlies the Asian miracle or will we later conclude that this period, the period after the Great Recession and the global financial crisis, marked the beginning of a new phase in the economic history of the modern global economy?
Emerging Asia has played an outsized role in commodity markets for some time now. Specifically, China, with its investment-heavy growth model, has accounted for a substantial amount of incremental commodity demand over the past two decades. Since 2000, China has accounted for roughly 40 percent of the increase in global demand for oil and 80 percent of the growth in demand for steel. For copper, all of the incremental rise in global demand has come from China, with demand excluding China falling over the period.
The strength of emerging Asian demand growth pushed commodity prices up sharply over most of the past decade, at least temporarily reversing what seemed to be an inexorable decline in both commodity prices and the terms of trade of commodity producers in the preceding two decades. Higher prices were a tremendous boon to commodity producers and supported a decade of strong growth in a number of emerging market economies, as well as commodity sectors in certain advanced economies, including Australia and the United States.
Since mid-2014, commodity prices have plummeted, with oil prices falling almost 60 percent and a broad index of metals prices losing about one-third of its value, dragging down growth in many commodity producers. Although rapid commodity output growth in recent years, which has reflected in part the response of producers to previous price increases, has certainly contributed to the fall in commodity prices, the slowing of demand growth from China and emerging Asia has also been an important factor.
While the path ahead for commodity prices is, as always, uncertain, declining investment rates in emerging Asia, particularly China, present the prospect of a prolonged decline in the growth rate of commodity demand. And prices could remain low for quite some time, which seems particularly true for metals, such as copper and steel, used heavily in construction and investment. However, for oil, the implications of a shift from investment-led growth to a consumption-led model are less certain. On a per capita basis, China’s consumption of oil remains far below that of advanced economies, in line with China’s lower rate of car ownership. Per capita oil consumption tends to increase with wealth, such that further income growth in China has the potential to provide strong support for the oil market in the coming years.
Indeed, more generally, the world stands to benefit from a transition to more consumption-led growth in emerging Asia. Under a successful transition toward more-balanced growth, emerging Asia can be expected to import a broader array of goods and services both from within the region and globally. Whether a country benefits from or is harmed by emerging Asia’s transition is likely to be determined by the flexibility of that country’s economy in adapting to shifts in Asian demand away from commodities and inputs for assembly into the region’s exports and toward services and goods to meet Asian final demand.
To recap, the transition to slower growth in the emerging Asian economies, as well as a shift toward domestic demand and consumption and away from external demand and investment in the region, is likely to have profound implications for the global economy. For one, trade growth is unlikely to resume its rapid pace of recent decades, and the long climb in commodity prices, which has benefited commodity producers, appears to have come to an end.
Can India Recharge Growth in Emerging Asia?
One source of uncertainty in this outlook, as alluded to earlier, is the prospect for India to provide a new growth engine for Asian development. In principle, India has enormous potential to recharge the Asian growth engine. For one, India is relatively unintegrated into global production-sharing networks. For example, machinery and electrical products, which feature heavily in production-sharing and which make up about half of exports in other emerging Asian economies, account for only 15 percent of India’s exports. Foreign direct investment into India is about half the size of similar flows into China as a percentage of GDP, and GDP per capita, at $1,600 in 2014, remains considerably below emerging Asia’s average.All told, while the export-led growth model that propelled growth in China and other economies in emerging Asia has matured, pushing down growth rates, India remains at a relatively early stage of its development trajectory. Further capital deepening and the potential for further productivity gains suggest that India could maintain rapid economic growth for a number of years. As mentioned previously, India is also a young country, with a relatively low dependency ratio and a growing workforce. By United Nations estimates, India is set to overtake China during the next decade as the world’s most populous nation.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Indian economy grew at around 3 to 4 percent. In subsequent decades the growth rate averaged close to 6 percent, and in the early years of this century it rose further, as can be seen in Table 1. In 2015, growth in India is expected to be 7-1/4 percent, the fastest among large economies, and the IMF expects growth to pick up from this already rapid pace through the end of the decade. Growth has been supported by an improved macroeconomic policy framework, including a strengthening of the framework for conducting monetary policy, as well as legal and regulatory reform. And the authorities have embarked on an ambitious program to improve the business environment.
That said, significant roadblocks need to be overcome for India to reach its full potential. The economy continues to suffer from a number of infrastructure bottlenecks that will be alleviated only through a pronounced increase in investment rates, a process that would likely be helped by a relaxation of restrictions on foreign direct investment. Likewise, efforts at difficult reform will have to be sustained. There is much hard work ahead if India is to come closer to fulfilling the potential that it so manifestly has.
Concluding Remarks
The performance of the Asian economies–notably those of East Asia, particularly China, Japan, and Korea–especially in the past six or seven decades, is an outstanding, if not unique, episode in the history of the global economy.What lies ahead? In the relatively near future probably some major central banks will begin gradually moving away from near-zero interest rates. The question here is whether the emerging market countries of Asia–and, indeed, of the world–are sufficiently prepared for these decisions, to the extent that potential capital flows and market adjustments can take place without major macroeconomic consequences. While we continue to scrutinize incoming data, and no final decisions have been made, we have done everything we can to avoid surprising the markets and governments when we move, to the extent that several emerging market (and other) central bankers have, for some time, been telling the Fed to “just do it.”
Further ahead lies the answer to the question of whether developments in the global economy will permit the continuation of the export-centered growth strategy that underlies the Asian miracle or whether we will later conclude that this period, the period after the Great Recession and the global financial crisis, marked the beginning of a new phase in the economic history of the modern global economy.7 Either way, the question of the economic future of India is of major importance not only to the 18 percent of the world’s population that lives in India, but also to the other 82 percent of the global population.
At a more structural level are three recent developments whose potential importance is currently difficult to assess: the setting up of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank; the likely inclusion of the Chinese yuan in the Special Drawing Rights basket; and the possible establishment of the TPP, a partnership in which China is not expected to be a founding member.
These are interesting and potentially important developments. Underlying the answer to the questions of what they portend, is the answer to the basic question of whether the economic center of gravity of the world will continue its shift of recent decades toward Asia–in particular, to China or, perhaps, to China and India. This shift would represent a return in some key respects to the global order of two centuries ago and earlier, before the economic rise of the West.
A partial answer to that question is that China is for some time likely to continue to grow faster than the rest of the world and thus to produce an increasing share of global output. Its importance in the global economy is likely to increase, and it is probable that, one way or another, its growth will result in its playing a more decisive role in the international economy and in international economic institutions.
Finally, we need to remind ourselves that geopolitical factors will play a critical role in the unfolding of that process.
