2011-10-2810: 55: 46 Source: People's Daily Online.
Japan's Yomiuri Shimbun101October 27 article title: The era when the gap between countries is gradually narrowing.
According to United Nations statistics, the world population will reach 7 billion at 365,438+0 this month. It is predicted that most countries with sustained population growth in the future will be developing countries. What is the significance of such a population growth structure to the international social structure, especially to the world economy?
The world population before 2000 was 300 million, which doubled 1600 years. After that, the growth rate of the world population was relatively slow.
The rapid population growth began in the second half of the 20th century after the Second World War. In just 40 years from 1959 to 1999, the world population has increased from 3 billion to 6 billion.
Although the population growth rate has slowed down in recent years, according to the prediction of the United Nations, the world population will exceed 9 billion in 2050 and reach 1 billion in this century.
What impact will population growth bring to the world economy? From a historical point of view, it is necessary for us to trace back to the industrial revolution that began in the second half of the18th century.
The British magazine The Economist published an interesting article last month.
The article points out that as early as 1700, the world's first economic power was India with a population of1650,000, and the second economic power was China with a population of1380,000. The GDP of the two countries together accounts for more than half of the world GDP. At that time, Britain had a population of 8.6 million, and its GDP was less than'% 1' of the world GDP.
In other words, the population size is directly related to the economic size.
The technological innovation in Europe and America, which originated from the industrial revolution, makes the equation "population = economic strength" no longer valid.
/kloc-in the 0/9th century, Britain, which led the industrial revolution, became the world economic leader. In the 20th century, the United States, a technological power, became the world's largest economic power. Since then, the production scale and income level of developed and developing countries have been expanding.
Great changes have taken place since the end of the 20th century. With the acceleration of globalization, technology, information and talents spread rapidly around the world. Developing countries also began to produce high-tech products, the technological advantages of developed countries weakened, and the gap between countries began to narrow rapidly. A few years ago, people began to use the word "great convergence" to describe this phenomenon.
Michael spence, the Nobel laureate in economics, said that the gap between developed and developing countries has narrowed for the first time in 250 years (after the industrial revolution), and we should call it "convergence".
It can be said that the European financial crisis and the American economic downturn are "great convergence" events in the world economic trend. Under the trend of globalization, developed countries gradually lose their technological advantages.
Then, will the era when population becomes the decisive factor of economic strength come again?
If so, India and China will once again dominate the world economy. Among the developed countries, the population growth rate of the United States has been maintained at a very high level, and it will continue to maintain a strong position.
However, today's world is completely different from that before the industrial revolution. The interdependence of countries has greatly deepened, and the world is facing a new problem of limited earth resources. China is facing an increasingly serious problem of population aging.
With the population approaching 654.38+00 billion, what will the world economy look like? Scholars have launched various discussions on this. Although the prospect is unpredictable, at least it is certain that mankind will enter an unknown world and the competition between countries will be more intense and complicated.