Long-Term Trends and Structural Changes in the Global Economy

Abstract

The megatrend in the global economy, at least the one that gets my attention, is the growing size and impact of the developing countries. As I argued in The Next Convergence (2011), we are just past the midpoint of a century-long journey that began after World War II. At the starting point, say 1950, about 15 percent of the world’s population lived in what we now call advanced countries. These are roughly the members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) minus a few recent arrivals. They have incomes in today’s US dollars above $20,000 per person per year. They are rich. They have lots of troubles now — and I will come back to that.