Globalisation impacting sustainability of super returns
The challenge for Australian superannuation funds will be generating adequate returns for their members in the face of the changes being generated by globalisation, according to Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economist, Adrian Blundell-Wignell.
Addressing the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia (ASFA) conference in Sydney, Blundell-Wignall pointed to the reality of globalisation and the increasing economic significance of China as factoring into the Australian outlook.
He said the problem for Australia was that it had very few companies which bore the hallmarks of being truly global.
It was in these circumstances that Australia needed to reflect upon the fact that it needed to find alternatives to being a resources-based economy – something which had helped carry it through the global financial crisis (GFC).
What is more, he said Australia was not alone in dealing with such matters, in circumstances where the big global companies were not US companies but, rather, companies which while domiciles in the US derived their incomes globally.
Where the United Kingdom and Brexit was concerned, Blundell-Wignell said the outlook for UK might not be as grim as some people believed, in circumstances where the data suggested that the real trade benefits of being a part of the European Union had mostly been derived in the 1970s.
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