Page 266 - The Drucker Lectures

The Future of the Corporation IV [ 247

monetary authorities of all other developed countries. At pres-
ent, the United States is a team leader, but it is part of a team.
Meanwhile, it is the economics of goods and service where
the changes have been greatest.
India and China are very rapidly becoming counterforces to
American economic dominance. These are two very different
countries. They are both emerging into the world economy as
great economic powers but quite differently. China is manufac-
turing center. India is a knowledge center.
I don’t know how many of you realize this, but India is the sec-
ond-largest English-speaking country in the world. There are 150
million people there for whom English is not a second language
but the main language. They’re bilingual, and in many cases, while
they speak the local language to the servants and their employees,
they speak English to their spouse. This is because the wife comes
from one part of India and speaks Hindi and her husband speaks
Gujarati, and they speak English to one another. And so English is
not a foreign language in India for 150 million people. India also has
probably the world’s best technical universities and wonderful medi-
cal schools. And so India, which was 99 percent rural and is now
only 50 percent rural, is rapidly becoming the knowledge center.
We are also moving into a world economy where constituent
units are not nation states but economic blocs: NAFTA in North
America, Mercosur in South America, the European Union.
So far, very few businesses in Europe have become truly Eu-
ropean; they’re still German or French or Italian. This is because
the European Union is still having severe digestive problems,
with 15 new countries joining. But, in five or six years, when it
gets over its acute case of bellyaches, you will see the emergence
of real European businesses based more on alliances than on
ownership. And they will become very real competitors.
Indeed, it is reasonably clear that the economic bloc is rapidly
coming in as a new superstructure and as the main agent in the