The future of the world economy according to Fareed Zakaria, the host of CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and an editor at large for Time magazine, is the ascent of all 90 plus countries into the global world market and not the falling of the United States. He puts it simply in this quote:
“If you look at the world in 1979, the number of countries that were growing at three percent a year, which is generally considered robust growth, was about 32 or 33, and that reflected the reality that the countries that were doing well in the world were a handful of countries in the North Atlantic – the United States, Canada, Western Europe, a few countries in Asia, Taiwan, South Korea.
The rest of the world was locked out of the global system, largely through bad economic policies, because of the Cold War, all kinds of things.
If you look at that world today, the number of countries growing at three percent a year is about 90. Before the financial crash, it was 124. The sea change that has taken place has been the collapse of communism, the collapse of the Soviet empire, and the joining of countries from all over the world, from Latin America, from Asia, into this one global market system.
And the result is that you have countries all over the world thriving, taking advantage of the political civility that they have achieved, the economic connection into this global market, the technological connection into this market, and we are all witnessing this phenomenon.”
Take a listen of his conversation with NPR’s Terry Gross that covers the Arab Spring, the Greece austerity measures, American political deadlock, and also why Americans have what it takes to still come out well in the end.
Christopher Manfredi, UH/GA
