China, India and Brazil: tiger technologies, dragon multinationals and the building of national systems of economic learning

The biggest business story today is China, along with India and Brazil. These three emerging giants are predicted by Goldman Sachs to account for over half of global business activity by 2050. Competition and strategy as practised by these countries - and by firms and countries of the Asia-Pacific more generally - can no longer be thought of as a peripheral feature of the world economy. Now Asia-Pacific - its firms, industries, countries - is moving to the core of the global economy, whereas strategies and competitive behaviours developed here are proving to be of much more than peripheral interest. In this paper I reflect on the technology leverage strategies developed to enter advanced industries (tiger technologies), on the accelerated internationalization achieved through complementing the global value chains created through globalization (dragon multinationals) and on the national innovative capacities developed in the region, and to what extent the practices of China, India and Brazil in developing national systems of economic learning may be said to replicate the strategies that worked so successfully in East Asia. The paper concludes that the propagation of East Asian strategies to these emerging giants promises much greater success than in countries following the precepts of the Washington Consensus.Asian Business & Management (2009) 8, 5-32. doi:10.1057/abm.2008.28.