Enclosed is the original article in English:
A GLIMPSE OF A PROSPEROUS 2030 AND WHAT CAN FOSTER IT
Martin Wolf Friday, December 22, 2006
What might the world economy look like in 2030? Nobody knows. But we can consider where present trends are taking us. We can assess, too, some of the dangers and opportunities. That is what the World Bank's latest Global Economic Prospects report does*. This report does more than help organise our thinking. It should also cheer us up and spur us to do better.
The past quarter of a century has been a time of unprecedented integration of the world economy, as technology advanced and the socialist sandcastles crumbled under the tide of economic liberalisation. As the report also notes: “Global income has doubled since 1980, 450m have been lifted out of extreme poverty since 1990 and life expectancy in developing countries is now 65 on average.”
Globalisation has also proceeded apace: between 1970 and 2004, exports as a proportion of world output doubled to more than 25 per cent; new technologies have diffused rapidly across the globe; and total private financing of developing countries reached nearly $1,000bn in 2004. The persistence of these trends is striking. Moreover, among the encouraging recent features is the acceleration in the growth of incomes per head in the developing world (see chart), as south Asian growth rates and east Asian weights in the total both rose.
So what might the world look like in 2030? The report takes a base case with no significant changes in the policy environment. This might then be regarded as “business as usual”.
First, the size of the global economy would double, in real terms, while the developing countries' aggregate output would triple, raising their share in the total from 23 to 33 per cent (at constant market prices). Average incomes per head in east Asia, south Asia and central and eastern Europe would converge on those in high-income countries (at purchasing power parity). China's incomes per head, at PPP, for example, would go from 19 to 42 per cent of the average level in high-income countries. But sub-Saharan Africa would fall still further behind.
Second, globalisation would remain a driving force: exports as a proportion of world output would rise to 34 per cent; financial integration would continue, though developing countries would still remain overwhelmingly dependent on their own savings; and technology would continue to diffuse across the globe.
Third, significant changes would occur in poverty and income distribution. The number of people living on less than a dollar a day, at PPP, would fall to 550m from 1.1bn today, while those on less than $2 would fall below 1.9bn, from 2.7bn. Poverty would also become far more African: by 2030, east and south Asia's share in the poorest tenth of the global population would be 30 per cent, down from 60 per cent in 2000, while sub-Saharan Africa's would go from 30 per cent to 55 per cent (see chart). In addition, a global middle class – people whose incomes are between today's average Brazilian and Italian incomes – of 1.2bn would emerge in the developing world, up from 400m in 2000 (see chart).
So what might go wrong? The obvious threats are a protectionist backlash, environmental limits, pandemic diseases or war.
One source of protectionism is the downward pressure on the relative rewards of unskilled labour. But there are also fears that China and India will come to dominate world exports of high-technology goods and services.
The fact that unskilled labour seems to be doing badly almost everywhere suggests that technology, not trade, is the most powerful force now at work. Again, China and India have low wages because they have low average productivity. One of the reasons, as the report notes, is that they still have poor institutions: for this and other reasons, the world is much less “flat” than Thomas Friedman of TheNew York Times has argued. Moreover, these giants will create new opportunities for exports to their markets. Their wages are also rising: Chinese real wages grew by 110 per cent between 1989 and 2004.
Neither environmental limits nor disease seems likely to halt the global economy over the next quarter of a century, though they may create local or temporary difficulties. War, including asymmetric warfare with nuclear or biological weaponry, seems a bigger threat, as the catastrophic 1914-45 period showed. But war is also a difficult threat to quantify.
Yet it is also important to look at what could go right. The global economy has shown an extraordinary ability to survive financial crises, terrorism, war and geopolitical upheavals over the past quarter of a century. Moreover, slowly and often invisibly, policies have been improving in the developing world, as countries have learnt what is needed to make integration into a global market economy work for them.
Remember that in the early 1980s few imagined that China and India would show the growth we have since seen. Maybe sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and Latin America will join the bandwagon over the next quarter century. The very progress of the Asian giants will open up many new opportunities for these countries.
The report's baseline case is for growth of real incomes per head in the developing world at 3.1 per cent a year over the next quarter of a century. But it also examines a higher case, in which the growth in incomes per head runs at 4.6 per cent a year in these countries. This would generate an additional $10,000bn in annual income for developing countries by 2030 – an increase of 44 per cent over what it would be in the baseline case. The broadly shared improvement in growth performance during the early years of this century suggest that this is conceivable.
What needs to be done to achieve such superior performance? The immediate answer is: generate higher economic growth in currently lagging regions. Efforts must be concentrated on helping these countries acquire the security, human and other resources, institutions and policies they need. Asia is showing the way. The rest of the developing world must follow.
At least as important is a stable and co-operative global economic and political environment. The world economy has shown it can survive much turmoil. It even survived the catastrophes of the 20th century: two world wars, a cold war, huge revolutions and communist tyranny. But we must do everything we can to avoid a repetition, particularly in today's nuclear age. Is humanity capable of managing its affairs sensibly? Yes. Will it do so? That is the big question we need to ask.
*Global Economic Prospects: Managing the Next Wave of Globalization,www.worldbank.org
[此贴子已经被作者于2007-1-7 10:36:48编辑过]