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The new titans

Sep 14th 2006
From The Economist print edition

China, India and other developing countries are set to give the world economy its biggest boost in the whole of history, says Pam Woodall (interviewed here). What will that mean for today's rich countries?

LAST year the combined output of emerging economies reached an important milestone: it accounted for more than half of total world GDP (measured at purchasing-power parity). This means that the rich countries no longer dominate the global economy. The developing countries also have a far greater influence on the performance of the rich economies than is generally realised. Emerging economies are driving global growth and having a big impact on developed countries' inflation, interest rates, wages and profits. As these newcomers become more integrated into the global economy and their incomes catch up with the rich countries, they will provide the biggest boost to the world economy since the industrial revolution.

Indeed, it is likely to be the biggest stimulus in history, because the industrial revolution fully involved only one-third of the world's population. By contrast, this new revolution covers most of the globe, so the economic gains—as well as the adjustment pains—will be far bigger. As developing countries and the former Soviet block have embraced market-friendly economic reforms and opened their borders to trade and investment, more countries are industrialising and participating in the global economy than ever before. This survey will map out the many ways in which these economic newcomers are affecting the developed world. As it happens, their influence helps to explain a whole host of puzzling economic developments, such as the record share of profits in national income, sluggish growth in real wages, high oil prices alongside low inflation, low global interest rates and America's vast current-account deficit.

Emerging countries are looming larger in the world economy by a wide range of measures (see chart 1). Their share of world exports has jumped to 43%, from 20% in 1970. They consume over half of the world's energy and have accounted for four-fifths of the growth in oil demand in the past five years. They also hold 70% of the world's foreign-exchange reserves.

Of course there is more than one respectable way of doing the sums. So although measured at purchasing-power parity (which takes account of lower prices in poorer countries) the emerging economies now make up over half of world GDP, at market exchange rates their share is still less than 30%. But even at market exchange rates, they accounted for well over half of the increase in global output last year. And this is not just about China and India: those two together made up less than one-quarter of the total increase in emerging economies'GDP last year.

There is also more than one definition of emerging countries, depending on who does the defining (see article). Perhaps some of these countries should be called re-emerging economies, because they are regaining their former eminence. Until the late 19th century, China and India were the world's two biggest economies. Before the steam engine and the power loom gave Britain its industrial lead, today's emerging economies dominated world output. Estimates by Angus Maddison, an economic historian, suggest that in the 18 centuries up to 1820 these economies produced, on average, 80% of world GDP (see chart 2). But they were left behind by Europe's technological revolution and the first wave of globalisation. By 1950 their share had fallen to 40%.

Now they are on the rebound. In the past five years, their annual growth has averaged almost 7%, its fastest pace in recorded history and well above the 2.3% growth in rich economies. The International Monetary Fund forecasts that in the next five years emerging economies will grow at an average of 6.8% a year, whereas the developed economies will notch up only 2.7%. If both groups continued in this way, in 20 years' time emerging economies would account for two-thirds of global output (at purchasing-power parity). Extrapolation is always risky, but there seems every chance that the relative weight of the new pretenders will rise.

Faster growth spreading more widely across the globe makes a huge difference to global growth rates. Since 2000, world GDP per head has grown by an average of 3.2% a year, thanks to the acceleration in emerging economies. That would beat the 2.9% annual growth during the golden age of 1950-73, when Europe and Japan were rebuilding their economies after the war; and it would certainly exceed growth during the industrial revolution. That growth, too, was driven by technological change and by an explosion in trade and capital flows, but by today's standards it was a glacial affair. Between 1870 and 1913 world GDP per head increased by an average of only 1.3% a year. This means that the first decade of the 21st century could see the fastest growth in average world income in the whole of history.

Financial wobbles this summer acted as a reminder that emerging economies are more volatile than rich-country ones; yet their long-run prospects look excellent, so long as they continue to move towards free and open markets, sound fiscal and monetary policies and better education. Because they start with much less capital per worker than developed economies, they have huge scope for boosting productivity by importing Western machinery and know-how. Catching up is easier than being a leader. When America and Britain were industrialising in the 19th century, they took 50 years to double their real incomes per head; today China is achieving the same feat in nine years.

What's new

Emerging economies as a group have been growing faster than developed economies for several decades. So why are they now making so much more of a difference to the old rich world? The first reason is that the gap in growth rates between the old and the new world has widened (see chart 3). But more important, emerging economies have become more integrated into the global system of production, with trade and capital flows accelerating relative to GDP in the past ten years.

China joined the World Trade Organisation only in 2001. It is having a bigger global impact than other emerging economies because of its vast size and its unusual openness to trade and investment with the rest of the world. The sum of China's total exports and imports amounts to around 70% of its GDP, against only 25-30% in India or America. By next year, China is likely to account for 10% of world trade, up from 4% in 2000.

What is also new is that the internet has made it possible radically to reorganise production across borders. Thanks to information technology, many once non-tradable services, such as accounting, can be provided from afar, exposing more sectors in the developed world to competition from India and elsewhere.

Faster growth that lifts the living standards of hundreds of millions of people in poor countries should be a cause for celebration. Instead, many bosses, workers and politicians in the rich world are quaking in their boots as output and jobs shift to low-wage economies in Asia or eastern Europe. Yet on balance, rich countries should gain from poorer ones getting richer. The success of the emerging economies will boost both global demand and supply.

Rising exports give developing countries more money to spend on imports from richer ones. And although their average incomes are still low, their middle classes are expanding fast, creating a vast new market. Over the next decade, almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace as household incomes rise above the threshold at which people generally begin to spend on non-essential goods. Emerging economies have already become important markets for rich-world firms: over half of the combined exports of America, the euro area and Japan go to these poorer economies. The rich economies' trade with developing countries is growing twice as fast as their trade with one another.

The future boost to demand will be large. But more important in the long term will be the stimulus to the world economy from what economists call a “positive supply shock”. As China, India and the former Soviet Union have embraced market capitalism, the global labour force has, in effect, doubled. The world's potential output is also being lifted by rapid productivity gains in developing countries as they try to catch up with the West.

This increased vitality in emerging economies is raising global growth, not substituting for output elsewhere. The newcomers boost real incomes in the rich world by supplying cheaper goods, such as microwave ovens and computers, by allowing multinational firms to reap bigger economies of scale, and by spurring productivity growth through increased competition. They will thus help to lift growth in world GDP just when the rich world's greying populations would otherwise cause it to slow. Developed countries will do better from being part of this fast-growing world than from trying to cling on to a bigger share of a slow-growing one.

Stronger growth in emerging economies will make developed countries as a whole better off, but not everybody will be a winner. The integration of China and other developing countries into the world trading system is causing the biggest shift in relative prices and incomes (of labour, capital, commodities, goods and assets) for at least a century, and this, in turn, is leading to a big redistribution of income. For example, whereas prices of the labour-intensive goods that China and others export are falling, prices of the goods they import, notably oil, are rising.

In particular, the new ascendancy of the emerging economies has changed the relative returns to labour and capital. Because these economies' global integration has made labour more abundant, workers in developed countries have lost some of their bargaining power, which has put downward pressure on real wages. Workers' share of national income in those countries has fallen to its lowest level for decades, whereas the share of profits has surged. It seems that Western workers are not getting their full share of the fruits of globalisation. This is true not just for the lowest-skilled ones but increasingly also for more highly qualified ones in, say, accountancy and computer programming.

If wages continue to disappoint, there could be a backlash from workers and demands for protection from low-cost competition. But countries that try to protect jobs and wages through import barriers or restrictions on offshoring will only hasten their relative decline. The challenge for governments in advanced economies is to find ways to spread the benefits of globalisation more fairly without reducing the size of those gains.

The high share of profits and low share of wages in national income are not the only numbers that have strayed a long way from their historical average. An alarming number of economic variables are currently way out of line with what conventional economic models would predict. America's current-account deficit is at a record high, yet the dollar has remained relatively strong. Global interest rates are still historically low, despite strong growth and heavy government borrowing. Oil prices have tripled since 2002, yet global growth remains robust and inflation, though rising, is still relatively low. House prices, however, have been soaring in many countries.

Puzzling it out

This survey will argue that all of these puzzles can be explained by the growing impact of emerging economies. For instance, low bond yields and the dollar's refusal to plunge are partly due to the way these countries have been piling up foreign reserves. Likewise, higher oil prices have mostly been caused by strong demand from developing countries rather than by an interruption of supply, so they have done less harm to global growth than in the past. And their impact on inflation has been offset by falling prices of goods exported by emerging economies. This has also made it easier for central banks to achieve their inflation goals with much lower interest rates than in the past.

All this will require some radical new thinking about economic policy. Governments may need to harness the tax and benefit system to compensate some workers who lose from globalisation.

Monetary policy also needs to be revamped. Central bankers like to take the credit for the defeat of inflation, but emerging economies have given them a big helping hand, both by pushing down the prices of many goods and by restraining wages in developed countries. This has allowed central banks to hold interest rates at historically low levels. But they have misunderstood the monetary-policy implications of a positive supply shock. By keeping interest rates too low, they have allowed a build-up of excess liquidity which has flowed into the prices of assets such as homes, rather than into traditional inflation. They have encouraged too much borrowing and too little saving. In America the overall result has been to widen the current-account deficit.

The central banks' mistake has been compounded by the emerging economies' refusal to allow their exchange rates to rise, piling up foreign-exchange reserves instead. Bizarrely, by financing America's deficit, poor countries are subsidising the world's richest consumers. The opening up of emerging economies has thus not only provided a supply of cheap labour to the world, it has also offered an increased supply of cheap capital. But this survey will argue that the developing countries will not be prepared to go on financing America's massive current-account deficit for much longer.

At some point, therefore, America's cost of capital could rise sharply. There is a risk that the American economy will face a sharp financial shock and a recession, or an extended period of sluggish growth. This will slow growth in the rest of the world economy. But America is less important as a locomotive for global growth than it used to be, thanks to the greater vigour of emerging economies. America's total imports from the rest of the world last year amounted to only 4% of world GDP. The greater risk to the world economy is that a recession and falling house prices would add to Americans' existing concerns about stagnant real wages, creating more support for protectionism. That would be bad both for the old rich countries and the new emerging stars.

But regardless of how the developed world responds to the emerging giants, their economic power will go on growing. The rich world has yet to feel the full heat from this new revolution.

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