The big leap back of emerging countries, forced to readjust their "strategy of integration into the world economy"

For Ford, the Indian market was only a mirage.The American car manufacturer announced on September 9 that it retired from the country after having accumulated more than $ 2 billion in losses (almost 1.7 billion euros) over the past ten years.A painful and unexpected end of the road for a company which, a few years ago, saw in the Asian giant and its 1.3 billion inhabitants one of the most promising car markets on the planet.

In 2020, it was Harley-Davidson who left the country, preceded by General Motors in 2017. "That large companies like Ford, who invest in the long term, withdraw from an emerging country like India is worrying, explains Rebecca Ray, researcher to the Global Development Policy Center at the American University of Boston.Even if their slowdown had already started ten years ago, the COVVI-19 crisis aggravates this trend.»»

The crisis shattered the concept of "emerging" popularized in the 2000s by business banks and consulting firms to designate developing countries with rapid growth, and in full integration into the global economy.However since 2020, all, except China, fell from their peaks with sometimes violent dropouts, like India and Mexico, which experienced respective recessions of 8.7 % and 9.1 % L'last year.

Drawing deviations

Judging by their growth rate, the emerging people no longer form a homogeneous group as the gaps have widened in 2020, both in the same region, for example between the Philippines (where the gross domestic product fell by 9,5 %) and Vietnam (with GDP up 2.9 %), or between continents.The recession was contained in Asia (the economy fell 1.5 %), but marked in South America ( - 6.6 %).While growth in Africa was greater than the rest of the world before the pandemic (3.6 % against 2.7 % in 2019), it has returned behind the world average since the start of the pandemic.

On the occasion of the crisis, other faults opened."While the use of telemedicine explodes in China and Indonesia, Laos and Cambodia suffer from electricity shortages," notes Federico Bonaglia, deputy director of the Center for the Development of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

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