The shifting global balance of power
- By Danny Quah
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China.org.cn, April 18, 2011
That global economy activity has moved east in this graphic fashion illustrates the rapid growth in incomes going to the large chunks of humanity who live in China, India, and the rest of East Asia. (Population changes much more gradually; this sharp eastward rise of the rest does not result from population growth alone.)
Together with this growth we have seen the lifting from extreme poverty of over 600 million people – a huge and rapid improvement in the well-being of humanity unprecedented in the history of the planet.
And there is more to come. Today, the income of the average person in this Eastern conglomerate is still lower than that of his counterpart in a dozen countries in Africa; his carbon footprint is less than one quarter that of the average American; and he is intent on making not just refrigerators and running shoes, but solar panels, wind turbines, and nano-cars cheaply enough that yet more of humanity can afford them.
What's not to like, you may ask.
But many policy-makers and observers in the West do not share in the optimism about the shifting global economy. Instead, they ask: Will emerging Asia buy up all the West's assets and use up all the world's raw materials? Will emerging Asia soon command the entire world's jobs and absorb the entire world's investment? This is the Rise of the Rest on a massive scale: What must the West do to respond?
Contrary to this alarmist view, there is always the possibility that the shift towards the East might, in truth, be beneficial to the West.
But, independent of the eventual outcome – even if the East is indeed viewed as challenging the West, the correct question should not be what is good for the West or indeed for the East, but instead what is good for the world as a whole. Compromise is needed: What are the contours that frame that bargain?
In the alarmist scenario, the West is overtaken in the next 10 years: How much would people in the West be willing to pay people in the East to prevent that? How much would the East have to be compensated to keep the West ascendant? How much of a disruption in the East's development trajectory would the West consider justified for the West to remain Best?
The trade-off, unfortunately, seems far from favourable.
China today faces possible trade reprisals, even though its average citizen remains poorer than his counterpart in Belarus, El Salvador, and Jamaica, or for that matter, across 9 countries in Africa. If China kept its current average income, but had the same population as Namibia and were located on the African continent, it would be a candidate for US foreign aid, not a potential rival for global hegemony. In the last 30 years China has lifted over 600 million people from extreme poverty. That is double the population of the US or the EU, and ten times the population of the UK. In the last three global economic downturns, China has provided a growth boost to the world economy many times higher than the US. What good would it do the world if the West were to disrupt such a successful poverty-reducing machine, so effective a stabilizing influence on the global economy?
No one has definitive answers to the difficult questions on what is best for the world. But I suspect that considering them seriously will lead to optimism and hope about the changes illustrated in Figure 1. The shifting global economy has improved the well-being of humanity for the last 30 years: to overturn or even slow these changes now for short-term domestic gain would reveal a tragic failure of global political vision.
Danny Quah is Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science; he is also Co-Director of LSE Global Governance, and Senior Fellow at LSE IDEAS. He currently serves on Malaysia's National Economic Advisory Council. Prof Quah was born in Malaysia and is now a British citizen. He holds a blackbelt in taekwon-do.
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