Surprise! The balance of economic power in the world is changing. Good
IF ECONOMISTS have a tendency to trust their figures too much, politicians often pay numbers too little attention; and they do so at their peril. Napoleon dismissed Britain as a nation of shopkeepers, but its emerging might as a trading power helped fight him off. In the cold war Western strategists probably spent too much time worrying about the Soviet Union's military clout, and not enough analysing its commercial frailties. Economics does not determine history, but it does provide the backbeat. And something dramatic has been happening to the numbers recently.
As our survey this week points out, the emerging world now accounts for over half of global economic output, measured in purchasing-power parity (which allows for lower prices in poorer countries). Many economists prefer to measure GDP using current exchange rates (which put the emerging world's proportion closer to 30%). But even on this basis the newcomers accounted for well over half of the growth in global output last year. And a barrage of statistics shows economic power shifting away from the "developed" economies (basically North America, western Europe, Japan and Australasia) towards emerging ones, especially in Asia. Developing countries chew up over half of the world's energy and hold most of its foreign-exchange reserves. Their share of exports has jumped from 20% in 1970 to 43% today. And, although Africa still lags behind, the growth is fairly broadly spread: they may be the most talked about, yet Brazil, Russia, India and China account for only two-fifths of emerging-world output.
No social or economic change this big takes place without friction. The most obvious sign is the uproarabout jobs being "outsourced" to India and China. The howls will get louder as globalisation affects ever-richer voters. But there are widerramifications too. In Asia China's rise has helped push japan and India closer to the United States, and South Korea further away from it. The once-poor world is scouring the carth for mineral rights, trying to buy Californian oil firms, accounting for ever more carbon emissions and making its weight felt in international negotiations on everything from trade to proliferation to the secretary-generalship of the United Nations.
An idea whose time has come, again
There are weaknesses in some of the growth stories. China's population is ageing and India's schools are rotten. Perhaps the emerging world won't continue to motor along at nearly three times the rich world's pace. Maybe it will take a little longer than 2040 to fulfil Goldman Sachs's prediction that the world's ten biggest economies, using market exchange rates, will include Brazil, Russia, Mexico, India and China. But these are arguments about when, not whether, change will happen. And things could speed up: even the rosiest predictions underestimated Asia's ability to recover from its 1997 financial crisis.
This shift is not as extraordinary as it first seems. A historical perspective shows it to be the restoration of the old order. After all, China and India were the world's biggest economies until the mid-19th century, when technology and a spirit of freedom enabled the West to leap ahead. Nor should it be regarded as frightening. The West, as well as hundreds of millions of people in developing countries, has benefited from emerging-world growth. Globalisation is not a zero-sum game: Mexicans, Koreans and Poles are not growing at the expense of Americans, Japanese and Germans. Developing countries already buy half the combined exports of America, Japan and the euro area. As they get richer they will buy more. The world is on course for its fastest-ever decade of growth in GDP per head, which has been powering ahead at an annual rate of 3.2% since 2000 far faster than during the great period of globalisation that ended with the first world war.
If that comparison raises spectres, so it should. A century ago Edwardian globalists were predicting ever more peace and prosperity-only to see those dreams blown apart on the fields of Flanders. The momentum behind globalisation is considerable; but pushing trade barriers lower depends on political will. It is doubtful that any American president would follow the example of the Chinese emperor Qianlong, who announced in 1793 that the then economic superpower had no interest in "foreign manufactures", setting his country on the road to two centuries of impoverishment. But there are a few worrying omens in the air, notably the collapse of the Doha round of trade talks.
Protectionism and xenophobia should be fought wherever they spring up. But it is also worth acknowledging that these bumptious new economic powers have made the world more complicated for Western policymakers. For instance, although they have helped keep inflation and interest rates down, they have also encouraged asset prices to bubble up. They have allowed America to finance its massive current-account deficit with apparent impunity. Righting these imbalances will be tricky, even if the strength of emerging economies makes the world less dependent on America.
But the two main challenges for the West are long-term political ones. One has to do with accepting that there will be some Western victims of globalisation. Adding 1.5 billion people to the global labour force has boosted the return to capital and richly rewarded rich Westerners; but in Germany, Japan and the United States, real wages for the median worker have barely budged. None of this is an excuse for protectionism-unless you want to make everybody poorer. But there may be fiercer debates, even in America, about using the tax and benefits system to redistribute more of the winnings.
The other challenge has to do with geopolitics. As the balance of economic power in the world changes, mustn't the balance of political power change too?
In time, perhaps. But economic power is not the same as political power. Most developing countries are still military pipsqueaks: China does not yet owna single aircraft-carrier, and its defence budget is less than the annual increase in America's. Nor in political terms is there such a thing as an "emerging block": no alliance of interests brings all these very different countries together in the way that history and culture have united America and Europe. In Asia, for example, the rise of China is balanced by the rise of India, which America is striving to turn into a strategic partner. But there is also plainly a need to fiddle with some of the global political architecture. The IMF will tinker with the power structure of the fund at its annual meeting next week. Others should follow. The UN Security Council-whose permanent members include Britain and France but exclude Japan, India and Brazil-has long looked outdated and will soon look absurd. Similarly, it does not make much sense for the G7, supposedly the world's main economic club, to discuss currencies when China, which holds the largest official reserves, is not a member.
Making such adjustments will no doubt be awkward. But these are the problems of success. A world in which most people enjoy prosperity and opportunity is surely better than one in which 80% are mired in economic stagnation. Celebrate the riches that globalisation has brought-and be prepared to defend the economic liberalisation that underpins it.