'India, China will decide course of globalisation'

If India and China maintained their growth rates and fiscal reforms, the character and rules of globalisation were likely to shift dramatically over the next 20 years, said Henrietta Moore, deputy director of the London School of Economics.

"Major changes will depend on what happens in Asia. An Asian centric cultural identity will come to dominate globalisation," she said while delivering a lecture on "Globalisation in the 21st century" at the British High Commission here.

These two Asian economies had the fastest growing consumer markets and domestic companies were expanding to become multinational corporations.

As the needs of Asian consumers were met increasingly by Asian companies, it would affect the ways in which businesses were run, the terms on which intellectual property agreements were made and patents given, she said.

Economic growth was not enough to address the issues of inequality, especially when the worse off were suffering from poverty, illiteracy, disease and lack of political participant.

"The markets are not enough to guarantee social wellbeing and development. We need social institutions, especially the state to ensure that," Moore said.

What was required was governments committed to health and education and not just interested in expanding the tax net and improving the fiscal situation, she added.

How someone benefited from globalisation depended on where they started from, Moore said. In the initial stages, the rich benefited most and in the later stages, the less rich benefited, she added.

While the major questions being raised in the current context of globalisation ranged around issues of maintaining growth rate, the next phase would centre around how "happy" people were.

Social wellbeing and decreasing inequality between countries would be the important issues and not seeking ever expanding economic growth, she said.