Deloitte just recently opened a new office in Russia’s Far Eastern city of Vladivostok – its seventh office in Russia – in response to investment coming in from Asia, according to the company’s global chairman, David Cruickshank. He spoke to Sputnik on the sidelines of the Eastern Economic Forum that took place in Vladivostok last week.
Sputnik: There’s been a lot of volatility in the markets recently because of trade wars, tariffs; because of because of political uncertainty. If you look at the world map, what are the areas in which we now see most changes occurring? What can we expect in the coming years.
David Cruickshank: I think it’s fair to say that if you look at the world on a macro-level, world GDP is still growing, it’s still at a good rate and our forecasts at Deloitte show that it will continue to grow at a good rate next year as well. Clearly, trade wars are bad for world growth because they restrict supplies, they limit opportunities. But at the moment, the growth engine in all parts of the world, so the Americas, Europe, Russia and, of course, Asia, they’re all growing at a rate that compensates for trade wars so far.
Russian Direct Investment Fund to Strike First Non-Dollar Deals With China in 2019. I think the existing countries that have got good growth rates will continue. So I think the US will continue to grow well, I think that the various countries in Asia will continue to grow well and probably at a faster rate than in Europe, so I don’t think they’ll be a major shift in the balance in the short-term.
Longer-term, it’s true, countries like China and India, where per capita incomes are still a lot lower than in other parts of the world, their growth has got a long way to go, as more people enter middle class, there’s more consumption and so on, and so as a proportion of the whole, their countries will take up a bigger proportion of the world economy in times to come. It’s not in the near future but in the medium term.
