This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University with Talking Management for The Globe and Mail. Today I am sitting down with Chris Marquis, from Cornell.
Chris, the Fortune Global 500 came out recently. 106 Chinese, 120 in America. A huge change over time, but how about the environment? How are the Chinese big multinationals taking onboard the environment.
MARQUIS - I think the environment situation in China is really both an important and interesting thing to look at.
The government through the 5-year plans has really been trying to dedicate effort to resolving the environmental issues, but the performance against that plan has sort of been mixed.
If you go to China, pollution is horrible, particularly Beijing, and it's really not clear that actually there has been a lot of movement on resolving some of the key environmental issues the Chinese have been facing.
That said, I really feel that there is increasing pressure from companies, from individuals, from the international community on China. I think the government knows that the sort of economic loss as a result of much inefficiency that's created as a result of the environment issues, I think that the health issues are things that are really coming to the fore.
The government recently reduced the growth rate target from around 8 per cent to around 7.5 per cent and one of the reasons why was to really begin focusing much more on the environment.
So, I am guardedly optimistic that over the next 5-10 years that China will begin really addressing some of the environmental issues that have been a problem over the last decade.