The Interview: The Economist
Issue 37 -Dec/Jan 08

Dr Yuwa Hedrick-Wong speaks to Ashford Pritchard about demographics, the global talent crunch and other issues affecting the real estate universe in Asia.

A business strategist and economist with 20 years of experience gained in over thirty countries in Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia Pacific, Dr. Yuwa Hedrick-Wong has served as strategy advisor to over thirty leading multinational companies in the region and has been economic advisor to MasterCard Worldwide in Asia Pacific since 1999. He led the research that developed the Worldwide Centers of Commerce project for MasterCard, which in 2007 ranked the world's top 50 global cities based on their roles in connecting the global economy and their respective contributions to global commerce. He will be a keynote speaker at the CoreNet Global Conference in Mumbai from 3 - 5 March 2008.

The talent crunch, how will affect growth in Asia?
In the short of term to mid term it is not going to affect growth, simply because there is a mobile pool of both regional and local talent. A lot of people miss that in Asia, we forget that the brightest and the youngest are foreign talents from other countries in the region. The challenge for Asian countries is not only to tap into this increasingly mobile pool of talent but to keep their own and attract from within the region. This intra-regional flow is important. An interesting example of this is some figures from researchers at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, suggesting that in the greater metropolitan Shanghai region there are 25,000 Korean students. This leads to the question: how many international students are being attracted to China, just to study there? this in turn gives a good indication of just how mobile talent is today.

Growth is clearly one of the variables, but increasingly the better educated, more creative and talented professionals are talking about the quality of life in the location being a factor – not just financial return. Young urban professionals in Asia have to juggle the triangle of lifestyle imperatives, work, leisure, and relationship. People are not compromising in terms of postponing personal gratification, so the kind of location, the kind of culture that allows optimal manifestation of that creative lifestyle will attract the mobile talent. In Asia, the competition between aspiring global cities will increase. The challenge will be not
just be between having the infrastructure and the hardware, but how to foster a truly creative, vibrant environment to attract and retain talent

What effect will demographics have in the long and short term?
For China, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, in the short term what we're seeing a quantity quality trade off. You do have lower numbers of young people, but my projection is that they are increasingly better and better educated, and increasingly with the right skills and in the right areas. Ten, fifteen years in the future, it's a big question mark. It all depends on the nature of economic growth, the labour pool could run into serious shortages.

In Japan, the big issue is the lack of participation of women in the workforce. It’s a tremendous resource being underutilised for entrenched cultural reasons, which is a bit of a concern. The problem is that even though much debate has happened in policy-making and business institutes and think tanks over the past few years, not much has changed on the ground in terms of business practices. The labour force will shrink, by about 0.8 percent per year in the coming decade, and it’s shrinking at the younger end and they’re still not attracting well educated
younger women.

How are these issues going to affect the real estate universe?
The quantity and the quality of real estate developments in the coming decades will be one of the few decisive factors affecting locational advantage in Asia. The quality of the local infrastructure, in turn affects logistics efficiency therefore there’s better productivity which means more investment and business locating there. The support to sustain that development involves attracting and keeping talent, that’s where the decisive aspect comes on. Are we going to see the type of
development we’ve seen in the past, just throwing more concrete into the market or a new kind of real estate development that is encouraging more vibrant, creative communities.

What role do the industries of the built environment have?
Industry has to engage government beyond the traditional approach, to talk about social, community and environmental issues. That’s the way of the future. Instead of just a luxury development that younger singles can’t afford, can we create affordable but interesting housing conducive to encouraging young talent?

We need to think in terms of different workplaces, we know corporate workplaces and commercial buildings. But look how governments are focusing on entrepreneurial talent, people are talking about creating an environment for these people. But what do these people want? For example, take on older run down district, don’t just knock it down and put up a bunch of high-rise buildings. Instead, why not renovate it, put in smaller affordable offices. Create a local business community, encourage the type of interesting retail services that the young urban
professionals want. There’s a few of these types of communities appearing in Singapore and for example, in the neighbourhood near Fudan University in Shanghai.

These types of places are outside of the traditional parameters, they’re a new kind of hybrid, combining commercial areas with living quarters, situated within communities of innovative and creative services; catering to the younger crowd and relatively more affordable. New categories have to come up, new segmentation, we have to move beyond the crude distinction of commercial, residential. These types of hybrids will become increasingly important. RFP

NOMINATE NOW

Subscribe Now

Sign Up for Ezine

Past Issues