I don’t mean to criticize the authors. This was the reasonable, conventional wisdom at the time. It assumed that the creation of infrastructure and a managerial class was the foundation of economic growth. In fact in China, it was the result of economic growth. The same can be said for rule of law, civil society, transparency and the other social infrastructure that emerges out of the social, financial and managerial chaos that a low-wage economy almost always manifests. Low-wage societies develop these characteristics possibly out of the capital formation that low-wage exports generates. The virtues of advanced industrial society and the advantages of pre-industrial society don’t coincide.
There is no single country that can replace China. Its size is staggering. That means that its successors will not be one country but several countries, most at roughly the same stage of development. Taken together, these countries have a total population of just over 1 billion people. We didn’t aim for that; we realized it after we selected the countries.
The point to emphasize is that identifying the PC16 is not a forecast. It is a list of countries in which we see significant movement of stage industries, particularly garment and footwear manufacturing and mobile phone assembly. In our view, the dispersal of industries that we see as markers of early-stage economic growth is already underway. In addition, there are no extreme blocks to further economic growth, although few of these countries would come to mind as having low political risk and high stability — no more than China would have come to mind in 1978-1980. I should also note that we have excluded countries growing because of energy and mineral extraction. These countries follow different paths of development. The PC16 are strictly successors to China as low wage, underdeveloped countries with opportunities to grow their manufacturing sectors dramatically.
The new activity is focused on Africa, Asia and to a lesser extent, Latin America. When you look at map, much of this new activity is focused in the Indian Ocean Basin. The most interesting pattern is in the eastern edge of Sub-Saharan Africa: Tanzania, Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Myanmar and Bangladesh are directly on the Indian Ocean. The Indochinese countries and the Philippines are not on the Indian Ocean, and even though I don’t want to overstate the centrality of the Indian Ocean, they are nearby. At the very least we can say that there are two ocean basins, the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. You might want to read my colleague Robert D. Kaplan’s book Monsoon on this region.
There are some countries in Latin America: Peru, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Mexico. A special word needs to be included on Mexico. The area north of Mexico City and south of the U.S. borderlands has been developing intensely in recent years. We normally would not include Mexico but the area in central-southern Mexico is large, populous and still relatively underdeveloped. It is in this area, which includes the states of Campeche, Veracruz, Chiapas and Yucatan, where we see the type of low-end development that fits our criteria. Mexico’s ability to develop its low-wage regions does not face the multitude of challenges China faces in doing the same with its interior.
All of this has to be placed in context. This is not the only growth process underway. It is most unlikely that all of these countries will succeed. They are not yet ready, with some exceptions, for advanced financial markets or quantitative modeling. They are entering into a process that has been underway in the world since the late 1700s: globalism and industrialism combined. It can be an agonizing process and many have tried to stop it. They have failed not because of their respective ruling classes, which would have the most to lose. It doesn’t take place because of multinational corporations. They come in later. It takes place because of profit-driven jobbers who know how to live with instability and corruption. It also takes place because of potential workers looking to escape their lives for what to them seems like a magnificent opportunity but for us seems unthinkable.
The parabola of economic development dictates that what has not yet risen will rise and eventually fall. The process unleashed in the Industrial Revolution does not seem to be stoppable. In our view, this is the next turning of the wheel.
