CHAPTER 10
Growth and Development YOU CANNOT FEED THE HUNGRY — D A V I D L L O Y D G E O R G E , 1 90 4
ON STATISTICS.
of the global economy has made some nations rich and others destitute, with the vast majority of countries somewhere in between. Formerly wealthy and powerful economies have been driven down to near subsistence levels, as can be seen in the cases of ancient China and modern Russia. At the same time, tiny nations like Kuwait and Brunei have gone from being economic backwaters to experiencing fabulous wealth within a few generations, all because of a single commodity like petroleum. While nations rise and fall economically as well as politically, wealth is redistributed throughout the globe with little regard to need or egalitarianism. Money—like power, natural resources, or weather—has always been indifferently distributed among the world’s inhabitants. While that is unlikely to ever change, it is worth investigating how and why those disparate pockets of wealth and poverty occur.
THE EBB AND FLOW
The West and the Rest Any look at economics statistics will reveal that the majority of the globe’s wealth is found to be concentrated in western Europe, Canada and the United States. Of the members of the G7 (the world’s seven largest economies and, some say, the designers of modern wealth distribution), six are “Western-style” economies (Japan is the seventh). This would imply that the world is divided economically into the Eastern and Western hemispheres. The fact is there are many different economic zones, not just two. Some economies are a function of their geography, others of their politics, race, religion, or culture. All of these factors combine to determine how well a nation will do economically. Dominance in the international economy has been held by the Western economies for centuries. France, Germany, Italy (in the form of the Catholic Church), and Britain have all taken turns as the economic leaders of the world. At the beginning of the 20th century, the United States saw its economic star rise, partially by virtue of two destructive European wars. Gifted with a strong manufacturing base and the isolation provided by two large oceans, America found itself to be the only functioning major economy after 1945. THE OCEAN OF WEALTH
Trade had been very much based around the Atlantic Ocean during the 19th and 20th centuries, although many raw materials were shipped from Asia across the Pacific. Until the 1960s, most of the value added to products was added in the United States or in the rapidly recovering nations of post-WWII Europe.
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