Illuminatus Primus wrote:Sikon wrote:While the U.S. and the European Union (coincidentally) both had about 3% real GDP growth in 2006, China's was the exceptional figure of 11%. Though not always quite that high, China has sustained similarly exceptional growth rates during the past couple of decades, managing such so far despite social and environmental troubles.
You mean by causing and increasing the severity of those troubles. When your whole country zilch for industrialization and modernity, its easy to grow; its called playing catch up. But those environmental troubles will check it. Where exactly will they get the requisite energy over the next two decades to grow at this rate, sustained?
We will see. Just keep in mind that if this topic had been discussed five or ten years ago, you or someone like you would have said exactly the same thing. People disliking China's disregard for the environment have been predicting China's imminent fall for a while. The collapse of China's economic growth has been predicted as few years away throughout the past couple of decades. Although there's a first time for everything, it is so far not quantitatively shown that this particular year or even this particular decade happens to be exactly when China's historical rapid growth stops.
China's percentage rate of economic growth will naturally tend to slow eventually. For example, part of the reason China is able to have several times the growth percentage rate of the U.S. is due to Chinese average income (
PPP) being $8000 rather than $40000 per person annually. However, with quadruple the population, they obtain a high national GDP for a given average income per capita, and the preceding doesn't necessarily prevent rapid growth during the next ten years, much like it didn't prevent rapid growth during the past ten years. China has the potential of becoming a superpower long before actually matching the U.S. standard of living.
In some cases, a nation may indeed cause environmental problems, like the effect of China's coal-dominated economy on global warming, and still have much economic growth, even though the pollution is undesirable. Often environmental harm occurs because it can be economically affordable, at least to some in the short-term. Not only companies but countries frequently can financially profit even while harming the environment, as undesirable as the environmental harm may be from more than a mere financial perspective.
As an example, consider the earlier figures for spread of deserts in China: a few thousand square kilometers more annually in a country of a billion square kilometers.
Is the desertification undesirable? Absolutely.
Will it tend to cause trouble in the long-term? Of course.
However, for example, one can't just assume without quantitative investigation that such will necessarily lead to net overall food supply decrease this decade.
Indeed, what actual figures show is an overall net increase in the Chinese food supply so far. Multiple illustrations of this are possible, but perhaps the following example will suffice to show the general idea:
The future is hard to predict, so, naturally, it can't be proven that China's economic standing relative to the U.S. or E.U. will increase a large amount between 2007 and 2017 like it did between 1987 and 1997 or like it did between 1997 and 2007, but the current trends described in my previous post are definitely of note.
