Mumbai: Prime minister Gordon Brown has called on British industries to be "aggressive advocates" of free trade and inclusive globalisation, and not be apprehensive of  the rise of Asia and Indian and Chinese corporate acquisitions of global companies.
 
Protectionist sentiments are growing "not only because of the current credit crunch and rises in fuel and food prices, but also due to the longer term challenge posed by the rise of Asia, particularly India and China," Brown said in a speech to the Institute of Directors, a London-based group of business heads.

"Some of our biggest corporations - IBM, Corus, Jaguar and Land Rover - are now partially Asian or Arab owned, with Indian and Chinese sovereign wealth funds also buying into global companies," he said.

"And increasingly China and India are not competing simply on low pay as if it were a race to the bottom. With five million graduates a year, far more engineers being produced, far more computer scientists, they are competing on high skills too, in a race to the top."

"Up to one million manufacturing jobs moving from Europe and America to Asia each year, one quarter of a million service jobs. With more to come," he said.

Asia, he said, also presented "huge opportunities" to the world economy, which was projected to double in size in just over 20 years.

With over a billion new professional or skilled jobs and the global middle class growing twice as fast as the rest of the population, "China and India will become countries that don't just sell to us but buy from us - as the 3rd and 5th largest consumer markets in the world," he pointed out.