Society (Growth and Development)

The data available for assessing the current status and trends of global poverty has significantly improved. And yet serious contentions remain. At the same time, a set of recent papers has sought to use these datasets to make poverty projections. Such projections have significant policy implications because they are used to inform debates on the future scale, nature, and objectives of international aid. Unfortunately, those papers have not yielded a consistent picture of future (and even current) global poverty even though their estimates are all derived from the same basic (PPP and distribution) datasets. In this paper we introduce a new model of growth, inequality and poverty. This new model allows for systematic, methodologically transparent, comparative analyses of estimates of poverty in the future based on a range of different methods. We use the model to explore how estimates of the scale and location of future poverty varies by approach.

Widening economic and social gaps among EU member states, as well as among different groups and categories of citizens within society, are not only placing in jeopardy the future of Social Europe but threatening to undermine also the whole project of European integration. The post-2008 recession and debt crisis, helped along by EU leaders’ obstinate clinging to the failing remedies of fiscal austerity, have accelerated the disenchantment of millions of European citizens with the half-century-old project to build and consolidate a European Union. This is one of the most striking conclusions of the ETUI’s Benchmarking Working Europe report for 2013.
Benchmarking Working Europe is one of the ETUI’s regularly appearing flagship publications. Issued annually since 2002, the report offers an alternative perspective on EU developments. Using publicly accessible data, it reveals what is actually going on behind the EU social and economic affairs headlines. After last year’s issue focused on growing inequality in Europe, this year’s Benchmarking Working Europe report will demonstrate by means of hard-hitting graphs and cogent arguments that Europe is, rather than converging, actually drifting apart in numerous respects.

International cooperation has been a recurrent theme in each of the thirteen Geneva Reports on the World Economy published by CEPR and ICMB since 1999. The 2004 report, International Economic and Financial Cooperation: New Issues, New Actors, New Responses, analysed this issue in some depth. This report, the fourteenth in the series, picks up this issue once again, but this time the approach is different, the recommendations more cautious and incremental, and the prognosis bleaker. This is not surprising: the authors demonstrate very clearly why international cooperation is difficult at the best of times, and very difficult indeed in the midst of a severe financial crisis.

Global governance – the collective management of common problems at the international level – is at a critical juncture. Although global governance institutions have racked up many successes since they were developed after the Second World War, the growing number of issues on the international agenda, and their complexity, is outpacing the ability of international organisations and national governments to cope. With the emergence of rapid globalisation, the risks to the international system have grown to the extent that formerly localised threats are no longer locally containable but are now potentially dangerous to global security and stability. At the beginning of the century, threats such as ethnic conflicts, infectious diseases, and terrorism as well as a new generation of global challenges including climate change, energy security, food and water scarcity, international migration flows and new technologies are increasingly taking centre stage.

"Megatrends" are great forces in societal development that have profound impacts on states, markets, and civil society in the now and for the years to come. They can effectively be employed as a starting point for analyzing our world. Megachange: The World in 2050 looks at these sweeping, fundamental trends that are changing the world faster than at any time in human history. Including chapters on approximately twenty of these "megatrends," each elegantly outlined by contributors from The Economist, and rich in supporting facts and graphics, the book is a compelling read as well as a valuable research and reference tool. Groups the "megatrends" that are shaping our world into several categories: People, Life and Death, Economy and Business, and Knowledge. Each trend is covered in a concise but detailed chapter written by an expert from The Economist. Packed with important information about the forces that shape our world, Megachange is a fascinating new look to the future from the experts at The Economist.

This report, edited by Álvaro de Vasconcelos, contains the findings of the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS) research project. The EUISS was commissioned to produce the ESPAS Report on Global Trends 2030 by an EU inter-institutional task force. An interim version of this report was presented to the European Union in October 2011. The report identifies several global trends that will shape the world in 2030. They include: The empowerment of the individual, which may contribute to a growing sense of belonging to a single human community; Greater stress on sustainable development against a backdrop of greater resource scarcity and persistent poverty, compounded by the consequences of climate change; The emergence of a more polycentric world characterised by a shift of power away from states, and growing governance gaps as the mechanisms for inter-state relations fail to respond adequately to global public demands.

This report presents the results from a new model for projecting growth of OECD and major non-OECD economies over the next 50 years as well as imbalances that arise. A baseline scenario assuming gradual structural reform and fiscal consolidation to stabilise government-debt-to GDP ratios is compared with variant scenarios assuming deeper policy reforms. One main finding is that growth of the non-OECD G20 countries will continue to outpace OECD countries, but the difference will narrow substantially over coming decades. In parallel, the next 50 years will see major changes in the composition of the world economy. In the absence of ambitious policy changes, global imbalances will emerge which could undermine growth. However, ambitious fiscal consolidation efforts and deep structural reforms can both raise long-run living standards and reduce the risks of major disruptions to growth by mitigating global imbalances.

Capital for the Future, the second edition of the series "Global Development Horizons", explores saving, investment, and capital flows through 2030. It finds that developing economies are fast becoming major investors in the world economy, and by 2030 will account for more than 60 cents of every dollar invested. This represents a fundamental shift with respect to historical performance: for 4 decades (through the 1990s), developing countries had been accounting for just about 20 cents for every dollar of global saving and investment. Before 2020, total investment in the developing world is expected to overtake that in high income countries. Developing countries will—for the first time in history—become major sources, destinations, and potentially also intermediaries of global gross capital flows.
Future trends in investment, saving, and capital flows will affect economic conditions from the household level to the global macroeconomic level, with implications not only for national governments but also for international institutions and policy coordination. Without timely efforts, some countries will be left behind. And, more importantly, even within otherwise successful countries, some people will be left behind. Policy makers preparing for this change will thus benefit from a better understanding of the unfolding dynamics of global capital and wealth in the future.

The world economy is projected to grow at an average rate of just over 3% per annum from 2011 to 2050, doubling in size by 2032 and nearly doubling again by 2050. China is projected to overtake the US as the largest economy by 2017 in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms and by 2027 in market exchange rate terms. India should become the third ‘global economic giant’ by 2050, a long way ahead of Brazil, which we expect to move up to 4th place ahead of Japan. Russia could overtake Germany to become the largest European economy before 2020 in PPP terms and by around 2035 at market exchange rates. Emerging economies such as Mexico and Indonesia could be larger than the UK and France by 2050, and Turkey larger than Italy. Outside the G20, Vietnam, Malaysia and Nigeria all have strong long-term growth potential, while Poland should comfortably outpace the large Western European economies for the next couple of decades. This report updates our long-term global economic growth projections, which were last published in January 2011. These are based on a PwC model that takes account of projected trends in demographics, capital investment, education levels and technological progress.

The main body of this report consists of four parts.
Part I sets out the main global trends and concentrates on a number of areas where our analysis deviates from received wisdom, namely population growth, globalisation and resource scarcity. This part is relatively technical and is meant to provide the analytical background to the remainder of the report. For the convenience of the busy reader, the other parts have been organised in such a way that they can be read independently.
Part II provides a snapshot of the global economy in 2030, documenting the likely evolution of the main trends combined with the outcome of a multi-country modelling exercise in terms of income and growth, but also in terms of affluence and poverty. This part also stresses some of the less conventional aspects that result from our analysis. The detailed description of the central scenario and an alternative scenario is available in Annex A.
Part III describes the trajectory of Europe’s transition from today’s depressed economy to 2030. The part also contains a summary of the main findings generated by an econometric modelling exercise focused on Europe. Greater details are presented in a separate Working Document presented in Annex D.
Finally, Part IV discusses the policy challenges that arise for Europe from this view of the world in 2030 and the possible emergence of game changers.