Recordings
Public Lecture by ANZ Group Chief Economist Richard Yetsenga
China and India: Our Journey Ahead
Wednesday, 22 November 2023 (Prest Theatre)
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Over the past two decades, the global (and Australian) economy has been dominated by China’s rise. China achieved the largest poverty reduction in history and became the world’s second-largest economy and the largest trading nation. Despite this, many foreshadowed even greater times ahead. However, in recent years, growth has slowed and foreign capital flows have exited. These developments are not, for the most part, the result of transitory conditions that policy can easily address. China’s economic fundamentals have shifted; irrevocably. The age of China’s economic exceptionalism has ended, and the search for alternative opportunities has commensurately strengthened. China will remain much larger than any other economy in the region, but perspectives are increasingly shifting to the West.
India looms large in that vision. India is already the world’s fifth-largest economy despite having a GDP per capita of less than USD 3,000. India’s rise is not guaranteed, but the shift in conditions is undeniable. The pandemic era shifted global working patterns in ways India is uniquely placed to capture. The Covid period also saw India move on its physical infrastructure, to narrow the gap with what the IMF labelled “world-class public digital infrastructure”. While geopolitics for many economies has deteriorated, India is in something of a geopolitical sweet spot.
Hindsight is a wonderful forecaster. China’s performance over the last two decades is now treated as transparently predictable when it was anything but at the time. There also seems to be implied criticism of India’s development because it is charting its own path. Economic development has no tried-and-tested recipe. India is not China, but the China of two decades ago didn’t much resemble the China of today either.
No doubt India has an unenviable to-do list. But the to-dos are what give the upside.
Press Coverage of the 6th Annual Conference
ASIC marching to the 'fast and furious' beat of harder regulation.
Alex Sampson. Friday 8 November 2019. Australian Banking Daily
'ASIC has spent a bit of time lately myth busting assumptions about its role in a post-Hayne world.
The first myth is that ASIC has become the ethics conduct regulator, deputy chair Karen Chester told a room of bankers and bureaucrats at Melbourne University's Centre for Asian Business and Economics annual conference in Melbourne yesterday.
“It’s important for us to recognise that we are the last line of defence and with that pole position comes an acknowledgement that we cannot singlehandedly deliver ethical behaviour across corporate Australia,” Chester said. “Nor should we try to do so at the end of the day."'
Public Lecture by Professor Dwight H. Perkins (Harvard University)
China's Progress Towards a Market Economy and the Influence of Xi Jinping and Donald Trump
Tuesday 17th July, 2018 (Copland Theatre)
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The transition from a centrally planned command economy to an efficient market economy is a more complex process than was commonly assumed by many of the economists advising this transition in Eastern Europe. China began this transition in an unplanned but effective way and then in the early 1990s made a firm commitment to create an efficient market economy. Creating the institutions required by such an economy was accomplished first by central government actions and then increasingly by reforms often instituted at the enterprise level. The Third Plenum of the 18th Party Congress in 2013 laid out an ambitious plan to complete the process. But in 2017 and 2018 progress toward an efficient market economy was called into question by a combination of US government actions questioning the value of liberal multilateral trade arrangements and a Chinese leadership decision to bring politics and political ideology back into economic decision making at all levels.