India is more than a little behind China. Which is depressing, considering that the two countries were equal in GDP per capita as recently as 1990: https://m.thewire.in/article/economy/from-1960-to-1990-india...
Most of China development is sui generis and not replicable elsewhere.
I lived there, Mister Confidently-Incorrect!
It sounds like you're saw Singapore Fun Facts once, and in your mind it permanently excluded any other place from having similar features.
* Like I said, Hong Kong does have a significant sovereign wealth fund that ranks in the top 10. [0]. It doesn't stop mattering just because Singapore runs a bigger one.
* Here's a article from 2021 with a nice stacked-graph showing 45% public housing [1], close to the half I mentioned.
It's too easy to get tied up in political labels, when any hybrid of public and private support for those helps growth. None of political ideas has an exclusive lock on providing the factors. At this point, I really don't think any political system guarantees the development outcomes, there are examples of all labels which fail one to all of those progress factors.
That is actually something of a natural phenomenon (see [0] it is a large topic). Historically when a centre of excellence forms it tends to be a tight geographical region learning how to do work well.
Government policy should be cluster-friendly but as long as policy doesn't get in the way it happens naturally. The incentives on businesses are to form a cluster independently because the cluster in-group outcompetes businesses outside the cluster.
If the government plans to try free-market capitalism then I'm in favour of the plan.
"One example we use is the No.3 Memory of Lenin Tractor Repair Factory in Zhuhai, which already in 1973 had started repairing tractors outside the plan. It would take tractors that needed to be repaired from other units, repair them on the side of the plan, and then get payment in kind. That payment in kind was then either bartered further within Guangdong, or smuggled downriver to Hong Kong. By 1973 this unit had a Hong Kong bank account. If this had been discovered at the central level, these people would have been shot."
Turning Shenzhen from an off-limits border area into a special economic zone made it easy for those businesses to go legit and grow, but they were already waiting in the shadows to seize that opportunity.
There are a few more SEZs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_economic_zones_of_Chin... but none did as well as Shenzhen, probably because of location factors.
The iPhones that are “made in india” contain sub-assemblies that are made in china, that contain chips that are made in taiwan, made of metals that were mined in africa, wrapped in plastics derived from middle east oil.
A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product; for most Indian phone production, it's less than 1%. This is also a big reason why Indian export headlines are a bit silly; they never account for the increased import associated with the high value components.
Unclear if this will change going forward; there are some companies doing a higher proportion of the value chain in India, and some big incentives... But to me it's unlikely.
I don’t think that’s the whole story. Apple started making phones in india in 2017, back when the tariff situation was merely a twinkle in epstein’s best friend’s eye. I think back then it was about general supply chain diversity, more than tariffs specifically. Useful in cases of natural disasters, or trade embargo, and leverage in business negotiations.
By 2024 they were making 36 million iPhones in India, you don’t get to that capacity if you start in november, after the election. Way I see it india was the backup system, and tariffs are the reason they are using the backup system - not the reason they built the backup system in the first place.
> A good metric is the difference in value between the precursor and the final product;
I agree, that’s a useful metric, especially in this case. But it’s also not perfect. E.g. it’s easy to have a >50% “made in USA” product if all the parts are made in china but the last assembly step takes time. Labour in the US is more expensive, so 5-10min of clicking parts together can easily cost more than the parts themselves. You could increase the capacity of that type of manufacturing indefinitely without ever gaining any real independence.