26 February -   04 March 2016

One of the areas of discussion with my team in India recently has been the extent to which Prime Minister Modi’s “Make in India” campaign will change the attitude of foreign investors and allow it to challenge China as a manufacturing powerhouse in Asia.

For a long time, it has been the services sector that has dominated India’s economic profile, accounting for more than half of the country’s GDP. Foreign companies have taken advantage of the country’s significant pool of well-educated and relatively cheap English-speaking workers to outsource IT and business processes. Manufacturing investment has been less forthcoming, due mainly to the complexity of India’s regulatory and business environment. The “Make in India” campaign can already claim some success with companies like Oracle, Foxconn and Vedanta pledging major investment in plants and operation centres. But questions still remain about how successful Mr Modi will be in pushing through the structural reforms that are required to change the attitude of foreign investors and create the jobs required for an ever-growing workforce.

Progress on this front is likely to be slow and rocky for Mr Modi but at least it is being made. In the long-term India cannot simply rely on the services sector if it is to reach its full economic potential.

Best wishes,

Guy Dunn
Chief Executive Officer

P.S. You may be interested in an article I published on LinkedIn this week on the increasing prominence of emerging markets in the world.

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EMIS operates in and reports on countries where high reward goes hand-in-hand with high risk. We bring you time-sensitive, hard-to-get, relevant news, research and analytical data, peer comparisons and more for over 120 emerging markets.

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