Pedro Nueno warns of the bad image that the altercations of Barcelona offer abroad
Dr. Pedro Nueno
Pedro Nueno, head of the Chair Bertrán Foundation of Business Initiative of the IESE Business School, president of the China-Europe International Business School and full academician of the Royal European Academy of Doctors-Barcelona 1914 (RAED), reflects on of a recent trip to China in the Spanish newspaper “La Vanguardia” about the bad image produced abroad by the conflicts that have been experienced these days in Catalonia and, specifically, in Barcelona. His considerations appear in the article “Comparando” (Comparing), published in the edition of last October 27.
“We are destroying, perhaps we have already destroyed, Barcelona. If it’s one of the best cities in the world, it’s becoming a place that is better not even to go. Not only will companies leave us. Some that would have come won’t come and those that they are here, they won’t invest any more. Let us not expect tourists to come. And if you were the parents of a Chinese boy or girl, you would have taken care that you had a good career and now thought about going to Europe to do a master’s degree… You would let him or her go to Barcelona? Are we thinking about our children or our grandchildren? What jobs will remain here? How will tourism fall? Where will the money for pensions come from? How will we improve medical treatment? When you see how they care some political leaders in the world but here nobody explains how to solve these problems, you see the poor quality of our leaders”, he reflects.
Nueno explains how the Shanghai authorities take advantage of an annual event organized in the city to meet the top executives of major international companies and show their support. And how even the president of China, Xi Jinping, meets regularly with local and foreign businessmen to support his ambitious new Silk Road, which will open the country to new foreign companies and will stimulate Chinese companies to go out into the world. “The result of all these things is that the economy of Shanghai grew last year by almost 10% -he adds-. In this same meeting was where the mayor asked me to present my project of a business management school and, when I finished to present it, he got up and said: ‘I support this project’ and he gave us some fantastic land in what is now one of the best areas of Shanghai for us to build our campus there”.
“It hurts to see how the leaders of countries like China, which I met in a state of deep poverty in the 80s, have projects to develop a digital economy that has already integrated more than 60% of its population -and they continue to create work every time of more quality- while we don’t have any of that and our leaders don’t care”, he concludes.
