Transcript
ANGUS MADDISON: I think history is really quite important if you’re looking at China because the past has quite a lot of resonance in the present and, in fact, the way the Chinese have regarded their place in the world economy is extremely different from that of the United States.
. . . What I’m projecting is that by 2030, in times of my numeraire which is 1990 Scot dollars, I expect China to have nearly $16,000 per capita income compared with nearly $46,000 in the United States. China will have surpassed the United States in total GDP, I think, around 2015 but by 2030 it will still only have a per capita income of a third of that in the United States.
. . . Now I had marked three kinds of problems which I foresaw in China. One is the extreme inequality you now have in China because a lot of the growth is taking place in urban areas and has favored a sort of new middle class…The second thing which is related to this is private property rights need to be strengthened.
The third point I had as a major problem was energy as an environmental problem because 60 percent of Chinese energy is derived from coal…Their carbon emissions, because of the dependency on coal, per capita are 29 percent of those in the United States, but their total emissions are bigger than in the United States even though their energy use is smaller.
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