Can China influence the next generation of responsible business standards, and help to reshape global markets? Simon Zadek says it just might. From China Dialogue:
China’s competitiveness strategy is changing gear. Exporting “cheap and dirty” has underpinned several decades of successful, super-charged economic growth. But this development pathway is now reaching its limits for China and the rest of the world.
China’s strategic shift is timely. Three Chinese companies are now in the top 30 of the Fortune Global 500. Altogether the 24 Chinese companies in the ranking have joint revenues of US $838 billion. In four years, China has gone from having the eleventh largest GDP to standing at number four. Still, China’s current practice of “responsible competitiveness” remains weak by international standards.
At a country-level, the RCI 2007 headline results are that:
* China is placed 87th in the RCI, the lowest of the BRICS (South Africa leads in 28th with India in 70th), and above many ‘less developed’ African nations and a number of South Asian countries (Pakistan in 103rd, Bangladesh in 106th) [Full Text]
Simon Zadek is AccountAbility‘s Chief Executive, Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s John F Kennedy School for Government, and co-author of ‘The State of Responsible Competitiveness 2007’, which can be downloaded or hard copies ordered at www.accountability21.net