Visa Inc. has just released its annual global Commercial Consumption Expenditure (CCE) index, which is recognized as an industry benchmark for measuring commercial spending globally.
This year’s index estimates that global commercial spending grew to $90.2 trillion in 2008 – up 11% from 2007’s CCE index.
According to the survey, the fastest-growing area was Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Across these regions, b-to-b expenditure grew by almost a quarter (23.7%) to $7.4 trillion. Latin America/Caribbean also experienced significant growth in business spending of 17.4% (to $5 trillion).
Although ‘only’ seeing a 9.6% rise on 2007 business spending, Western Europe remains the biggest spending region – some $31.9 trillion. B-to-b spending in Asia-Pacific this year, at $23.4 trillion (13.5% growth), exceeded that of the U.S. ($20.3 trillion, or 5.3% year-on-year growth) for the first time. 84% of the Asia-Pacific total was made up of the region’s major economies – China (US$7.2 trillion), Japan (US$6.2 trillion), India (US$2.7 trillion), South Korea (US$2.1 trillion) and Australia (US$1.5 trillion) – although it was many of Asia’s emerging markets which experienced the strongest growth – Myanmar (40.3%), Sri Lanka (33.1%), Papua New Guinea (31.3%), Vietnam (29.4%) and China (28.3%).
The CCE index captures business-to-business purchases to acquire goods and services used in production, wholesale and retail purchases of final goods, business capital expenditures and government spending on goods and services.
