Saturday, January 19, 2013

Learning from China

Indian Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions V. Narayanasamy recently met his Chinese counterpart Yin Weimin in Beijing.
According to Ananth Krishnan of The Hindu "Mandarins and Babus to learn from each other".
One can only hope that the babus and the mandarins will exchange good practices. 
Last month, I mentioned on this blog an article of the China Economic Weekly which says that scores of Party's officials were fleeing China with large amounts of money.
The China’s Academy of Social Science released statistics showing that between 16,000 to 18,000 Party officials had fled the country since the mid 1990s, taking away with them 800 billion yuan with them. 
A Report of the People’s Bank of China suggested that dishonest officials had clandestinely taken $124 billion of illegally obtained money out of the country between 1995 and 2008. 
The mandarin's practices were detailed in my posting The Chinese babus invest abroad.
Since then, Radio Free Asia affirmed that "Half of World’s 'Black Dollars' Are from China; Capital Flight Is Accelerating":
The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung said that in the past 10 years, through different means and various channels, the illegal funds fleeing from China reached a staggering US $3 trillion. Out of every two 'black dollars' in the world, one is from China. It was estimated that, after the 18th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, when the authorities considered implementing the exposure of the personal assets of government officials, the capital flight accelerated to US$ 41.2 billion in November alone. Süddeutsche Zeitung reported that the second largest group responsible for the flight of capital was government officials.
Li Xinde, who runs a website that monitors Chinese public opinion, believed that the cause of the problem was the current policies and laws that involve anti-corruption, exposure of personal assets, and supervision of power.
A Beijing economist Zhong Dajun attributed the rampant capital flight to the current social political system, where a person can become rich quickly but develop a strong sense of insecurity after becoming rich. A 2011 report from China’s central bank revealed eight major means that corrupt officials use to transfer their property: cash smuggling, remittance fraud, current account fraud, overseas investment, credit card spending, creating an offshore financial center, foreign direct receipt, and transfer through offshore special relationships.
Indians still have a lot of things to learn from China.  
But one can't put the entire blame on the bureaucrats, business people are also leaving China. 
On January 6, Xinhua mentioned China’s International Migration Report (2012), released in December which indicated that among business owners with personal assets of more than one billion yuan (US $ 160 million), 27 percent have emigrated, and 47 percent are considering emigration.
In the past three years, at least 17 billion yuan ($US2.7 billion) of capital has flown abroad. According to the Blue Book many businessmen transfer their 'gray income' overseas to avoid tax and evade prosecution.

Mandarins and ‘Babus’ to learn from each other
Ananth Krishnan
The Hindu
January 17, 2013 
Indian and Chinese officials plan to train together and exchange best practices on reforms
Two of the world’s biggest bureaucracies — India and China — have begun an effort to share their experiences of carrying out administrative reforms and to jointly train their civil servants, following talks between the two governments here this week. In an effort to share “best practices” — more sensitive issues such as the rampant corruption plaguing both governments have been kept off the table, for now — both countries have decided to come together to learn about each other’s experiences in carrying out administrative reforms within two of the world’s most complicated and vast bureaucratic systems.
Union Minister of State for Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions V. Narayanasamy and Chinese Minister for Human Resources Yin Weimin held day-long talks on Tuesday that covered a range of issues from assessing the performance of officials to social security and the functioning of the public sector in both countries.
China has offered to host Indian civil servants at the Chinese Academy of Personnel Sciences for training, while India will similarly choose an institution to host young Chinese bureaucrats. A delegation from India will visit China in May to kick-start the process, while officials from Beijing will travel to India in November. China’s vast bureaucracy — a source of increasing criticism from some quarters here on account of its opacity — is more than three times the size of India’s, employing 3.7 crore officials in the Centre and provinces. While talks on expanding cooperation are at an early stage, Mr. Narayanasamy said he was particularly struck by the Chinese approach to training civil servants. Here, officers are only trained intensively for five months before taking up their jobs,compared to a two-year period in India.

No comments: