8/3/08

The new, new coming World Order

You have to hand it to the economics team at Goldman Sachs. It was they who came up with the concept that four countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China –were going to catch up with and then overtake the big economies of the developed world.

More recently, they added the "Next 11": middle-sized developing countries such as Turkey, Indonesia and Mexico that will also grow fast enough to overtake their old-rich counterparts in the next generation.

Back in 2006, Goldman Sachs predicted the Chinese economy would surpass that of the United States in the early 2040s, with the Indian economy not far behind.

But now the Goldman Sachs team have put out a new set of forecasts. The Chinese economy, they predict, will overtake the US economy in about 2025, and will be twice as big by 2050. India's economy by 2050 will still be slightly smaller than that of the US, but the economies of Brazil, Russia, Indonesia and Mexico will all be bigger than that of the next-largest old-rich country, Britain.

The changes in the pecking order are equally dramatic further down. Turkey's economy in 2050 will be bigger than Japan's, France's or Germany's, and both Nigeria and the Philippines will have larger economies than Canada and Italy.

[Excerpt of an article by Gwynne Dyer, The Scotsman]

No comments: