Godfrey Parkin has an excellent post on what is really happening in the global economy; namely that multinationals will follow the money. The next century is looking like it will be the Chinese century.
In Canada, we continue to focus almost exclusively on exporting to the US. As Godfrey puts it, Wal*Mart does more business with China than all of Canada does. The business development strategies that I see presented at every “innovation” forum in the region have the same old story presented by analysts, bureaucrats and government. That story is about exporting our products and services to the US. The talk about diversified global markets is negligible. Given the warning signals on the state of the US economy, it would make sense not to put all of our economic eggs in one basket, n’est-ce pas?
People have been trained for
People have been trained for decades to thinking about their immediate neighbors first when talking about new markets. Physical distance does not equate economical distance. That is obvious for many services (like IT), but also for many products. I face this perception problem all the time in my work.
I like to propose a test for proving this point. Just get a quote for shipping a good to Boston (FedEx for example) and another one for shipping the same good to Beijing. The cost difference is an indication of how much "economically farther" China is. Over-simplification I know, but the difference is usually not huge. That is also pretty much the cost that applies to a Chinese company producing the same good and that wants to ship it here…
Yan