Will the East slow before it counts? Is the East only big enough to be culpable but not mature enough to be responsible?
[TEDxLSE – Danny Quah – Global Tensions from a Rising East, 17 March 2012]
Today I want to talk to you about the rise of the East, the shifting global economy. Most of us, at different levels, are aware of such changes going on around us. We might have heard about how all iPhones, while lovingly designed in California, are actually manufactured in Shenzhen China. We might have heard about how the Eurozone looked East for rescue on its sovereign-debt problems. We might have read newspaper editorials reflect on how the decade since 9/11 has been one where the three most important words for the US have emerged to be, no, not “major terrorist attack” but “Made in China”.
The questions I want to explore with you are two: Will the East slow down before the East can matter for the world? In the current economic crises that have haunted the world since the mid-2000s, that some have blamed on Asian Thrift and the resulting global imbalances, is the East only large enough to be culpable but not mature enough to be responsible?
The fact is undisputed that the developed economies continue to hold the world’s primary spheres of political influence: Thus, the reasoning goes, if the rise of the emerging economies — the Great Shift East — challenges anything in the global order, that challenge can be only apparent and its perception only transient. The emerging economies’ fast growth is nothing more than their picking low-hanging fruit, i.e., doing the easy things that allow economic development. Emerging economies will slow long before they count. After all, with the export-oriented development strategies that so many emerging economies have undertaken, if the developed countries were to stop consuming and importing, surely growth in the emerging economies would grind to a halt.
In this presentation, I will address two broad sets of issues. First, what are the already-extant contours of the Great Shift East, and what is the likelihood of their reversal? I will conclude that those changes are more pronounced and more entrenched — and thus less reversible — than might at first appear and certainly so when compared to other recent historical episodes. This holds enormous promise for improving the lot of humanity: the Great Shift East will continue to lift out of deep absolute poverty hundreds of millions of the world’s very poorest people.
These changes, however, take nothing away from how it is the developed countries that will remain the centre of global political influence. As a result the Great Shift East will produce massive global economic and political misalignment: the world’s economic and political centres of gravity will separate and drift further apart. And that, in turn, will raise staggering challenges: these latter comprise the other focus of my presentation. How will the global political system adjust to these ongoing economic changes on the scale that have already occurred and will almost surely continue?