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Only people it's gonna kill are the ones breathing air there.
The developing worlds rapid growth has sharply cut extreme poverty, created a new middle class and put the economies of Brazil, China and India on a path to overtake the globes wealthiest nations, the UN said on Thursday. Although developing nations are now driving economic growth, a lack of action on climate change and persistent inequalities could threaten those gains, the UN Development Programme said in a study. The report sees a dramatic rebalancing of global economic power and forecasts that the combined economic output of Brazil, China and India will surpass that of the US, Canada, Britain, France, Germany and Italy by 2020.
The most striking changes have occurred in the southern hemisphere, a region which had seen unprecedented rises in living standards, said the study, titled The Rise of the South: Human Progress in a Diverse World. Never in history have the living conditions and prospects of so many people changed so dramatically and so fast, the report presented in Mexico City said. China and India doubled their per capita economic output in less than 20 years, a rate twice as fast as Europe and North America experienced during the Industrial Revolution. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty worldwide fell from 43 percent in 1990 to 22 percent in 2008, with more than 500,000 million people rising above the poverty line in China alone.
The share of people living on less than US$1.25 per day has been cut in half, meeting one of the main targets of the Millennium Development Goals. The southern hemispheres share of the global middle class grew from 26 percent to 58 percent between 1990 and 2010. By 2030, more than 80 percent of the worlds middle class will live south of the Equator, the report said. The Industrial Revolution was a story of perhaps a hundred million people, but this is a story about billions of people, said Khalid Malik, the reports lead author. However, the developing world faces similar long-term challenges as the leading industrialized nations, from an aging population to environmental pressures and social inequalities.
Lack of action against climate change could even halt or reverse human development progress in the worlds poorest countries, pushing up to 3 billion people into extreme poverty by 2050 unless environmental disasters are prevented, the report said. The challenge now is to carry that progress forward, share the experiences, and enlist the growing influence of the South to move our world onto a sustainable and inclusive development path for all, said UN Development Programme administrator Helen Clark, who released the report alongside Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto. The balance of influence in our world is visibly changing, former New Zealand prime minister Clark said. The contribution of the south intellectual, economic, social, environmental and political will play a significant part in building a better future for us all.
Developing world?s rise heralds global shift: UN - Taipei Times
Only people it's gonna kill are the ones breathing air there.
China burns a lot of coal to produce energy. Coal use has had not only a high environmental cost, but also a high human cost for China in terms of accidental deaths.Only people it's gonna kill are the ones breathing air there.
Wish that were true.
Sadly we all live downwind or downsteam and we are ALL now competing for the world's resources, and since China now competes right along with us, the REAL cost of resources IS rising in real terms.
Paul Krugman: 'Chinese Growth Is A Wonderful Human Success Story That Could Kill Us All'
If we wanted to find our own middle class, we should look in China. No, that's not, strictly speaking, the subject of the article but it certainly ties in to it.
The economic recovery stumbled in the first three months of 2013 due to slowing factory output and investment spending forcing analysts to start slashing full-year forecasts though the government said the outlook was favorable. Markets across Asia slumped Monday after China's growth unexpectedly slowed in the first quarter, adding to concerns that Asia's biggest economy may be losing steam after an earlier recovery in the year. The National Bureau of Statistics reported Monday that GDP grew 7.7 per cent over the previous year during the first quarter, which is slightly faster than the government's target of 7.5 per cent. However, it is well below the 8 per cent expected by economists. "Industrial production is unexpectedly weak and that's the source of weakness in GDP. Based on this, the consensus forecasts for GDP are going to be headed lower and we'll certainly be looking at ours," Tim Condon, head of Asian economic research at ING in Singapore, told Reuters.
RBS duly obliged, cutting its full year forecast to 7.8 per cent from 8.4 per cent before the data. "This is both due to the impact of the weaker start of 2013 and because the Q1 data shows slower quarter-on-quarter growth momentum than expected," Louis Kuijs, chief China economist at RBS in Hong Kong, wrote in a note to clients. His observation on quarterly growth was shared by others equally concerned about quarter-on-quarter expansion easing to 1.6 per cent in Q4 from 2.0 per cent in Q4.
Sheng Laiyun, spokesman at the National Bureau of Statistics which released GDP in a flurry of other data on Monday, told a news conference that such worries were unfounded. "China's economic fundamentals haven't changed. We are confident about future growth and optimistic about achieving this year's growth target," Sheng said, according to Reuters. China has set a 7.5 per cent GDP growth target for 2013, a level Beijing believes will create sufficient jobs while providing room to deliver structural reforms the government -- and international policy advisers -- believe are necessary to put growth on a more sustainable long term footing "Employment is very stable," Sheng said. "Stable employment is a basic indicator of China's economic stability," he added, quoting Ministry of Labour and Social Securities data showing that China created over 3 million new jobs in the first quarter.
China's lower than expected economic performance hit Asian markets. Chinese stocks in Hong Kong were the big losers, with the Hang Seng China Enterprises Index falling 2 per cent to 10440.76, outpacing a 1.4 per cent decline on Hong Kong's Hang Seng Index to 21772.67. In mainland China, the Shanghai Composite Index lost 1.1 per cent to 2181.94. The moves were larger in the commodities market, with gold dropping 3.6 per cent to $1447.20 an ounce, while spot silver slid 7.1 per cent to $24.26 an ounce. Further afield, the Australian dollar fell to US$1.0427. "It's a terrible combination for the (Australian dollar). First you had gold tumbling and on top of that you had the China GDP," said Sean Callow, senior currency strategist at Westpac Institutional Bank in Sydney, according to the WSJ.
In a sign that weakening economic recovery is affecting Chinese companies, Zoomlion Heavy Industry Science and Technology Co. fell 8.3 per cent in Hong Kong after the construction machinery manufacturer issued a profit warning for the first quarter. The company predicted a 60 per cent to 80 per cent on-year profit decline, citing a slow economic recovery. Other markets across the region were lower: Australia's SP/ASX 200 fell 0.9 per cent to 4967.90 and South Korea's Kospi Composite lost 0.2 per cent to 1920.45. The Nikkei Stock Average lost 1.6 per cent to 13275.66 in response to a yen that firmed after the Japanese market closed on Friday, when the greenback fell 1.3 per cent against the yen.
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