Global business barometer

A bit brighter
Our quarterly survey suggests business is perking up Feb 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

BUSINESS people have turned bullish everywhere except eastern Europe, according to a quarterly survey of over 1,500 executives undertaken for The Economistand the Financial Times. Overall confidence, measured as the balance of respondents who think global business conditions will improve against those who expect them to get worse, rose from a dismal minus 11 percentage points in the last quarter of 2012 to plus seven in the first quarter of 2013. That pushes the barometer into positive territory for the first time since the quarterly survey began in 2011. Executives in the Middle East and Africa are particularly upbeat. More than a third believe business conditions will improve during the next six months; almost two-thirds expect their firm to boost capital spending in 2013. Those in transport and tourism are the most optimistic; those in technology and the public sector, the least. Globally, 43% of those surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit,The

Economists sister company, think their company will boost investment, twice as many as predict a
drop.

Track global business expectations over time with our new interactive barometer The biggest worry remains economic and market risk. This troubles 59% of respondents. One-third fret over political risk; a quarter are concerned about competition from new entrants. Overall, four out of five executives think the euro crisis is not yet over, although western Europeans are a bit more positive than most. More than half of respondents say banking regulation has not gone far enough. Almost half (47%) say uncertainty over Americas fiscal policy is affecting their investment plans. Still, growing optimism should feed through to jobs. Nearly half of firms expect to have more employees by next January compared with only a fifth who expect to have fewer. Employment prospects are brightest in Asia, the Middle East and Africa, worst in Europe and North America.

Indias public finances

A walk on the wild side
Government borrowing generates inflation, widens the external deficit and crowds out much-needed investment. Can India now overcome its debt addiction? Feb 23rd 2013 | MUMBAI |From the print edition

INDIA has grappled with its public finances for long enough. When presenting its first budget after independence in 1947, the finance minister of the day insisted that the country was not living beyond its means. Yet every budget since has failed to produce a surplus. India borrows more heavily than typical big emerging economies and faces more periodic crises. Palaniappan Chidambaram is the latest to try to tame the fiscal beast. He became finance minister, for the third time, last July. On February 28th he will present his budget, possibly the last one before the ruling Congress Party goes to the polls, which must take place by mid-2014. Indias economy is a concern. Growth is running at about 5%, nearly half what it once was. The external deficit is at a record, while inflation remains stubbornly high. Last year India faced the threat of a downgrade of its credit rating to junk status. Thankfully, Mr Chidambaram has shaken Congress from its stupor. The party is to blame for the present budget mess, having launched a preelection spending spree in 2008 that continued. Subsidies, mainly of fuel, almost doubled, to 2.4% of GDP. The central governments deficit has been 5-6.5% of GDP. Add in spending by the states, and Indias overall budget deficit has been running at a wild 8-10% of GDP.

When the economy was zipping along, the borrowing did not matter so much. For a while, the national debt actually fell as a proportion of GDP, despite high budget deficits (the ratio is about 70% today). But now, with slower growth, a debt spiral is a real risk. Borrowing has taken a heavy toll. It has fuelled inflation and a balance-of-payments gap, while crowding out the private investment in factories and infrastructure that India badly needs. Mr Chidambaram says that for the year to March 2013 he will limit the central governments deficit to 5.3% of GDP. His budget is likely to project a modest decline to 4% by 2015. Chetan Ahya, an economist at Morgan Stanley, notes that the minister is squeezing spending, which fell by 9% in December against a year earlier. Subsidies on fuel are being cut. And the state is selling shares in public companies. Raghuram Rajan, the governments economic adviser, insists accounting gimmicks will not be used to meet budget targets. After the budget, however, the outlook is murky. Some still worry that Congress will try to spend its way to re-election. The last three general elections were preceded by splurges. And if a messy coalition comes to office, discipline may slip. India is in a bind because normal checks and balances have been overwhelmed. In 2003 a Fiscal Responsibility Act was passed, designed to bind politicians to fiscal rules. Although it has led the states to behave better, the central government has ignored it. Meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), the central bank, keeps the debt market under its thumb. It forces banks to buy bonds, prevents foreign investors from participating, and has propped up prices by buying bonds itself. It now owns 16% of the public debt, not far off the level in the crisis year of 1991. There is plenty of spending on politicians crazy schemes. One sanitation project claims to have built 84m rural lavatories, about 60% more than the 2011 census says exist. Meanwhile, fuel subsidies benefit the richest tenth of Indians seven times more than the poorest tenth.

The solution, some hope, is direct transfer schemes that give welfare payments directly to the poor, lowering waste and graft. Yet vital though such reforms are, they will not yield enough cash to come close to balancing the books. Pressures to spend will always exist, says Subir Gokarn, an economist and former bigwig at the RBI. In areas such as education and infrastructure, that is only right. So revenues need to rise. A new report by the IMF compares India with other countries, adjusting for their wealth. It implies that Indias government revenues should be 25% of GDP. At present they are just 18%. How to raise revenues? Selling off more badly run state firms would help. Lots of state land lies idle and could also be sold. A recent mapping exercise in Ahmedabad, a modest-sized city, concluded that $4 billion could be raised there. But the tax system needs changing, too. Before India launched market-friendly reforms in 1991, taxation meant clobbering manufacturers with customs and excise duties. Since then the mix has shifted to direct taxes on individuals and firms and indirect taxes on services, which make up threefifths of GDP. (Farming, which employs half of all Indians, contributes only one-seventh of all GDP and is largely exempt from tax.)

Compare contrasting GDP and population levels across Indias states with our interactive map
and guide

Much of the economy remains out of sight of the taxman. A lot of the services sector is informal and cash-based. The property market is notorious for black money. Big firms in the formal economy pay a decent rate of tax, but many smaller businesses fall under the regime for personal tax, where compliance is poor. Surjit Bhalla, of Oxus Investments, reckons income-tax receipts are two-thirds below what they should be. Just 32m people, or 2.5% of Indians, pay income tax. Complexity discourages people from joining the formal economy and makes cheating easier. Each state has its own taxes, from the value-added sort and levies on luxury goods to duties on entry to specific areas. To deal with this, the central government has a Goods and Services Tax (GST) in the works. Its aim is to unify the rates of indirect tax across India and replace a tangle of local taxes. It should cut red tape and encourage more activity, such as construction, to enter the formal economy,

says Vijay Kelkar, of the India Development Foundation. Encouragingly, rationalisation of the code for direct taxes is also on the governments to-do list. The fine print of these measures is still being debated. They have been in the works for years. Some worry that to win over the states, the government will dilute the impact of the GST. Yet these reforms have the potential to bring more of the economy into the tax net, raising revenues by several percentage points of GDP. When Mr Chidambaram speaks on February 28th it will be promises about progress on tax reform, rather than about the deficit two years hence, that will signal whether India is ready to cast off its fiscal chains.

Chinas cyber-hacking
Getting Ugly
If China wants respect abroad, it must rein in its hackers Feb 23rd 2013 |From the print edition

FOREIGN governments and companies have long suspected that the Chinese hackers besieging their networks have links to the countrys armed forces. On February 19th Mandiant, an American security company, offered evidence that this is indeed so. A report, the fruit of six years of investigations, tracks individual members of one Chinese hacker group, with aliases such as Ugly Gorilla and SuperHard, to a nondescript district in residential Shanghai that is home to Unit 61398 of the Peoples Liberation Army. China has condemned the Mandiant report. On February 20th America announced plans to combat the theft of trade secrets. Mandiant claims that hackers at Unit 61398 have stolen technology blueprints, negotiating strategies and manufacturing processes from more than 100, mainly American, companies in a score of industries (see article). Its report does not name the victims, but a related New York

Times investigation has found evidence that hackers targeted a company providing internet security
for American spooks. The hackers also gained access to the systems of an American defence contractor. Perhaps most worrying, they broke into networks of a company that helps utilities to run North American pipelines and power grids. Nobody knows how many billions of dollars cybercrime costs businesses. But pretty much everyone has come to believe that China is the most egregious offender.

America is not an innocent in the world of cyber-spying. It does plenty itself, and acknowledges that these operations are a legitimate part of national security. At the same time, however, it should do more to promote the idea that everyone would gain from cyberarms control to set the rules of engagement. The Mandiant report shows Chinas definition of national security includes outright theft. One lesson is that all companies need urgently to upgrade their defences. President Barack Obama has announced measures for greater co-operation between American firms and government agencies to share information. Many companies have been too scared to admit they have been hacked, for fear of alarming clients and investors. In their own interests, they need to open up. America also needs to make it clear to China that state-sponsored crime is unacceptable. Until now the United States has tended to complain about Chinas cyberthieves behind closed doors in discussions with Chinese officials. But with more evidence emerging of Chinas flagrant abuses, more naming and shaming should be considered. Control, Alt, Delete There are lessons for Chinas new leader, too. Xi Jinping has come to power suggesting that China must embrace reform and show more respect for the rule of law. Now he has the chance to demonstrate that he really means this. China claims the Mandiant report is flawed and lacks technical proof. That is a missed opportunity. Though it goes against every instinct of the secretive Communist Party, Mr Xi could acknowledge that cybercrime emanates from state-sponsored entities and that his government will now rein them in. If he does not, China will be taken less seriously when it decries the Wests talk of a China threat. And Chinese companies will continue to be treated with suspicion when they seek to buy or work with businesses abroad. China should bring its army of thieves to order.