[MimirsWell]

"Actually, Indian English speakers are seriously overestimated and overrated."
Probably true. But have you heard the Chinese speak English? Past the "Hei Louuuuu" that they throw at every foreigner on the street, their English is almost non-existent. Even the educated ones who haven't been abroad speak very very poor English, pronunciation-wise and grammar-wise, and also transliterate Chinese into English. When you combine quality and cost-savings, I am not sure China will beat India in the medium term. Long term might just be too late. Not to forget that inflation is a serious problem in China and the smaller cities have too small a pool of English speakers to make relocating there economically viable.

And considering Indians 60% literacy rate
60% is close to 600 million people. Considering that even if half of these are educated in English medium schools, it makes 300 million people. Lets assume half of these live in the cities with acess to outsourcing jobs. And half of that number have English good enough to qualify for the jobs, thats 75 million people. We'll see when China, inspite of its great literacy rate, can put 75 million fluent English speakers in the job market. The employability rate of Chinese graduates is much lesser than that of Indian graduates. I have also seen the quality of these employable people when I worked in China, so don't get me off on it.

Third, India's service industry will NEVER able to touch the East Asian market which consist of China, Taiwan, Korea and Japan. Here is where China comes into play.
Agreed that this is true and East Asia is a big market. Now lets look at services out-sourcing. India has an umbrell organization that deals with issues faced by the industry, called NASSCOM. They help frame policies, deal wit litigations and assist members to cross hurdles that might appear. China's industry is fragmented where regional political leaders have vested interests and often block take-overs by companies from other provinces. Given this, it is highly unlikely that a home-grown company will actually be able to corner a big piece of the out-sourcing pie. It will be Indian and American companies that have opened up in China that will get a lion's share of this pie. But you're right, it will go to China, figuratively, but not to the Chinese. Second, I am nost sure how many Japanese and Taiwanese, or for that matter even Korean companies would feel safe sending confidential ban data to China where it can be accessed and misused. You might cite instances of this happening in India. But India's enforcement of its IP laws have been much better than China's. All the malpractice cases have resulted in conviction and imprisonment. I am yet to see the same happen with GM-Daewoo Matiz vs QQ. The fines and compensations are a pitiable amount and most of it is tokenism. After the Japanese have become aware of the kind of sentiment that they are faced with from the Chinese, I am not sure they will want to pick up the phone to ask a Chinese man about their bank details. Same for Taiwan..atleast for now. Korea is a different story. But in the eventuality of a Korean integration, China can forget about getting any low-cost outsourcing from there. They would much rather send it up north. So you see, the uncertainties work against China. For low cost English-based services, China will have to compete with Philippines and Vietnam, even South Africa. For E. Asia, there are opportunities but we'll see how that turns out.

I sincerely hope that this time around, I made a logical, fact based argument that would satisfy you. I assumed that the things I explained are common knowledge. Obviously it wasn't so.

[andyahoo]

Only very small percentage of Indians speak good English. I have heard of very few Indians speak good English in fact. Most Indians I know speak Indianized English which is extremely heard to understand. Speaking English itself does not make you competitive. Speaking bilingual or more language is what needed. At this point, Indians in general do no better than the Chinese. In fact, China mostly have the edge here since their people have good base in their onwn language.

And service industry itself will never lift most Indians out of poverty anyways. Traditionally, countries need to develop its manufacturing sector before it develop its service sector. India took the short cut in this aspect which I think will come back to bite them.

"60% is close to 600 million people. Considering that even if half of these are educated in English medium schools, it makes 300 million people."

That's a pretty sweet dream, but the reality is only Indian elites speak English. Most Indians speak their own local languages and need to rely on interpreters to speak with officials or Indians from other provinces.

"The employability rate of Chinese graduates is much lesser than that of Indian graduates. I have also seen the quality of these employable people when I worked in China, so don't get me off on it."

I get you. I have same feeling of my Indian co-workers too. Don't get me started..sign..

[andyahoo]

Here is an article bursted the bubble of India's knowledge economy. Go read it before you even start bragging.

Many people, especially Americans, think that China's only competitive edge is its cheap labor. There is a saying: China is the workshop of the world, while India is the lab of the world. Well, not quite. According to the World Bank, China actually done really well in industrial innovation, entrepreneurship, as well as Research and Development.

The World Bank uses Knowledge Assessment Methodology (KAM) was designed as an interactive tool for benchmarking a country’s position vis-a-vis others in the global knowledge economy.

Overall, the KAM is best suited to providing a preliminary or ‘starter’ knowledge economy assessment of a country. It has the ability to identify quickly and succinctly key strengths and weaknesses, areas for development and even anomalies in the available data for a given country. The KAM results, however, should be treated with some caution. Further data sources and analysis are usually required to confirm issues or trends.

http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/W...1414721,00.html

The 80 variables of the KAM represent the overall performance of the economy and the four pillars of the Knowledge Economy framework. The dataset is divided into seven functional cuts:
1)Overall Performance of the Economy
2)Economic Incentive and Institutional regime
• Economic Regime
• Governance
3)The Innovation System
4) Education and Human resources
• Education
• Gender
5)Information and Communication Technology (ICT)


The [b]KAM Knowledge Index (KI) measures a country's ability to generate, adopt and diffuse knowledge. This is an indication of overall potential of knowledge development in a given country. Methodologically, the KI is the simple average of the normalized performance scores of a country or region on the key variables in three Knowledge Economy pillars – education and human resources, the innovation system and information and communication technology (ICT).

The Knowledge Economy Index (KEI) takes into account whether the environment is conducive for knowledge to be used effectively for economic development. It is an aggregate index that represents the overall level of development of a country or region towards the Knowledge Economy. The KEI is calculated based on the average of the normalized performance scores of a country or region on all four pillars related to the knowledge economy - economic incentive and institutional regime, education and human resources, the innovation system and ICT.

These are the figures from key developed and developing countries in Asia.

KEI, Econ. Incentive Regime, Innovation, Education, ICT
Japan 8.35 7.74 9.27 8.08 8.30
Taiwan 8.10 7.63 8.97 6.94 8.85
Hong Kong 7.68 9.40 7.49 4.82 9.01
Korea 7.48 5.38 8.18 7.62 8.75
China 4.12 3.84 4.74 3.60 4.30
India 2.58 2.47 3.72 2.16 1.96


These are the figures from 1995 for comparison
KEI 1995, Econ. Incen. Regime 1995, Innovation 1995, Education 1995, ICT 1995
Japan 8.61 8.19 9.35 8.43 8.48
Taiwan 8.18 8.35 8.85 7.50 8.03
Hong Kong 7.77 9.43 7.09 5.60 8.95
Korea 7.51 6.55 7.47 8.11 7.93
China 2.85 2.32 3.94 3.48 1.68
India 2.79 2.86 3.51 2.38 2.40



Now here is the interesting part. Taiwan actually do a little bit better than Korea in most areas. China is the only country that has rapid progress in every area from 1995 to 2005. In fact, China is one of the few country that progress rapidly in world bank's Knowledge Assessment Methodology. China actually beat India in every area such as Knowledge Economy Index, innovations, education, and information technology. More importantly, the gap between China and India is widening, instead of narrowing.

It shouldnt be surprising that China is lag behind Korea and Japan in knowledge development. But we have hear so many times from western media that India is a knowledge based eonomy, while China is just a cheap labor bathtub!! The objective research shows the opposite. China is more innovative and more knowledge based than India!! And we are progressing much faster!!!

Go to http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/W...1414721,00.html for more info