''It is an unusual phenomenon, a country growing old before it grows rich, and it has consequences that go beyond retirement policy. China's rapid ageing, a consequence of the government's one-child policy, "threatens to impose a rising burden on the young, slow economic and living standard growth and become a socially destabilizing force"
Goodbye America, Hello China? Think again!
If history is any guide, there's a better than even chance that the "goodbye America, hello China" school of thought will prove as embarrassingly wrong as the 1980s assessment of the relative strengths of Japan and the United States. Long-term predictions tend to be more often wrong than right and the decline of the US is a topic of seasonal regularity. In February, a poll by the Washington Post and ABC, asked whether the 21st century would be more American or more Chinese. In terms of overall influence on world affairs, 43 percent opted for Chinese and 38 per cent for American. In a Pew poll a few months earlier, 44 per cent saw China as the world's leading economic power and just 27 per cent named the United States. That was a remarkable reversal of opinion from early 2008, when 41 per cent told Pew pollsters they thought the US was the world's top economic power and 30 percent named China. That shift probably says more about the sour mood of Americans very slowly emerging from a painful recession than about facts. LONG WAY TO CATCH UP China the world's leading economic power? Its economy is less than a third of that of the US. Its GDP per head is one fourteenth of the US, roughly half that of Kazakhstan, according to the World Bank. About a quarter of the world's economic output is produced by the United States, whose population is less than a fourth of China's 1.3 billion. So there's a very long way to catch up for a country beset by a variety of Third World problems, from lack of paved roads in many rural areas to water pollution so severe that 700 million people have to drink contaminated water every day, according to the World Bank. http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/5679729.cms