The Effect of the Chinese Economy to the Future Prosperity of Developing Countries

1953 Words4 Pages

Examine the significance of the effect of the Chinese economy to the

future prosperity of developed and developing countries

There is much speculation as to China's economic future, underlined of

late by their entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). There is

no doubt that China has the potential to become one of the most

economically powerful nations in the world as it has access to vast

numbers of employees in the labour pool. China's population now

exceeds the one billion mark. In fact, it is predicted by the WTO's

next director-general, Supachai Panitchpakdi, that if all goes well in

the subsequent period after China's entry into the WTO, the country

will become one of the two or three biggest economies in half a

century.

There has been a rapid rise and erratic movement on the part of the

Japanese following the Second World War, in which the Japanese economy

had to rebuild itself 'from scratch' so to speak, but generally a

fairly strong positive correlation is evident from the graph, the

Chinese line moving at a much more gradual rate, peaking in 2001 at

just over 4%.

This has unsurprisingly lead to widespread alarm, and even panic,

around the Western developed World. Some see it as an economic

disaster for them; after all, how can they possibly compete with China

with such phenomenally low costs in China as far as labour is

concerned? We need only look at the Chinese exports over the period

1948-2001 to see how the Chinese economy has changed in comparison

with that of post-war Japan.

Of course, if we were to examine the statistics of late, we would most

likely see a continual increase in the percentage of exports that

China commands, and if we were to go one step further and predict t...

... middle of paper ...

...e costs can probably double and still maintain their

competitiveness, except the consumer surplus level will be

reduced. Wage rates are on average in China now approx. 40¢ an

hour, dramatically less than the likes of Mexico, and even India.

So China can afford to let its prices rise slightly higher before

people will start buying abroad, although due to the phenomenal

size of the Chinese workforce, plus the recent 110,000 lay offs

taken place in the last few years, there needs to be significant

numbers of new businesses to absorb the superfluous labour in the

market.

* Chinese labour is unskilled as a rule, so there will rarely be a

skills mismatch in the labour-intensive sector of the market.

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[1] 'The Economist' Feb. 15th-21st '03 p.12

[2] The Economist Feb. 15th-21st '03 p.13

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