EQ Saturday Sapience #45

Female labour force participation is critical for sustained socio-economic progress, the game of mass FMCG products is fast becoming a stronghold of regional companies, a flood of cheap Chinese imports is upsetting the global industrial order and IMF’s Gita Gopinath reflects on economic cooperation amid growing geo-economic fragmentation.

• Claudia Goldin will be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on women’s progress in the workforce. In this piece, Farzana Afridi reflects on the significance of Goldin’s win and the contribution of her research to understanding the gender dynamics of labour markets and also delves into the implications of this research for developing countries like India, where female labour force participation has remained low despite economic growth, and why this matters for economic growth… Read more
• Regional Brands Storm FMCG Fortress. Agile and proactive regional brands are giving large FMCG companies stiff competition. Most large FMCG players have seen growth on the back of premiumisation and that’s what they need to do aggressively. The game of masses is steadily becoming a stronghold of regional companies… Read more
• China is flooding Europe with electric cars. Over the past two years, China has gone from an also-ran in the auto industry to the world’s biggest car exporter. EVs are a huge chunk of those exports, and most of China’s EV sales go to Europe… Read more
• Cold War II? Preserving Economic Cooperation Amid Geo-economic Fragmentation. Plenary Speech by IMF First Managing Deputy Director Gita Gopinath at the 20th World Congress of the International Economic Association in Colombia… Read more
• “The strategy we’ve adopted precludes our following standard diversification dogma. Many pundits would therefore say the strategy must be riskier than that employed by more conventional investors. We disagree. We believe that a policy of portfolio concentration may well decrease risk if it raises, as it should, both the intensity with which an investor thinks about a business and the comfort level he must feel with its economic characteristics before buying into it.” —Warren Buffett