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Emerging economies are creating extraordinary shifts in wealth, supply, and demand. Nobel Prizewinning economist Michael Spence explains how the notion of value is changing.
APRIL 2014
From the forging of the ancient Silk Road to the boom of the spice trade in the 1600s, the global
flow of goods and services has never been static. As Michael Spence, the Nobel Prizewinning economist and senior fellow at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution, explains, the rise of emerging economies is again upending global trade flowsand altering the very notion of value. This interview was conducted by McKinseys James Manyika. An edited transcript of Spences remarks follows.
The other thing I would mention is that because the developing countries are becoming bigand China has a particularly important role in this, its economy is evolving very rapidly. It is in the process of not being the low labor cost assembly place anymore, although the movement of that economic activity out is delayed by the massive efficiency of the logistics systems in China. But thats going to go somewhere else in the developing world. The bottom line is southsouth trade, as its sometimes called, is becoming an increasingly important part of the story. And if you ask, for most of the developing world, whats the single most important thing that needs to happen for them to thrive, the answer is China succeeds in the middle-income transition and sustains the high growth. Michael Spence, winner of the 2001 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is a senior fellow at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution. This interview was conducted by James Manyika, a director of the McKinsey Global Institute and a director in McKinseys San Francisco office. Copyright 2014 McKinsey & Company. All rights reserved.