Global competitiveness key to economic growth, says Suresh Prabhu

BENGALURU: Citing China as an example of beneficiary of economic globalisation, Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu today said India also needs to focus on "global competitiveness" for the growth of its economy.

"Looking at globally, has the globalisation helped or not helped?, of course jury is still not out on it, there are countries which will say they have been benefited, others who say they have not been benefited and both are true," he said.

"But if you see global economy as a whole, it has significantly expanded in the last twenty to twenty-five years and the expansion has been phenomenally different than any other period in the economic history of the world," he said.

Speaking at the ICAI International Conference on "Accountancy profession: Building Global Competitiveness: Accelerating Growth" organised by The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, he said it also happened largely because of huge expansion that was done by it.

"China has strongly expanded....it has become USD 9 trillion economy which was smaller than India in 1978 and that has now changed..." he said.

Prabhu said, "One country which has immensely benefited from globalisation is China. In fact if you go to any country including Europe, US, Asia, Africa you will find always skeptics about globalisation, but this is one country in the world where you go they will say globalisation is good. How did they do it? How did they benefit from it?"

Stating that China became member of WTO very late of which India was a founding member, he said "....they started taking steps towards the fleet of economy in 1978 and then they realised they must join the world economy and therefore they applied for the membership of WTO."

He said China prepared a strategy to be a member of WTO and then realised that if it joined WTO, there were two possibilities- our market will be flooded with foreign goods, "but why not we flood our goods in foreign countries- that is what happened."

"China expanded their global trade significantly. It has a huge trade surplus with United states. China has created four trillion worth of foreign exchange and it has really benefited in a way that they could remove poverty more or less completely," he said, adding, that "how did it happen is through a very important process - that is building competitiveness."